Australian Aboriginal writer and activist, Bruce Pascoe, presents his ground-breaking book, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? with University of Guelph Métis scholar, Kim Anderson. Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, Pascoe reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required - for the benefit of all Australians and Indigenous people around the world. Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Yuin and Tasmanian man born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. He is a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria and has been the director of the Australian Studies Project for the Commonwealth Schools Commission. Bruce has had a varied career as a teacher, farmer, fisherman, barman, fencing contractor, lecturer, Aboriginal language researcher, archaeological site worker and editor. His book Fog a Dox won the Young Adult category of the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His book Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year Award in 2016. The host of this episode is Dr. Kim Anderson, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships, whose work explores how “all our relations” are developed and maintained in urban environments. Anderson builds on decades-long work with Indigenous Friendship Centres in Canada to determine how women build community. Knowing that the position of men and masculinities is an underexplored area at the heart of Indigenous relationships, Anderson and her research team are also working with a growing network of Indigenous masculinities scholars to publish collective work, sponsor public dialogue, and set the stage for program and policy work for Indigenous men. She has published six books, including Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine and Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration.
Books by Bruce Pascoe
Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
The Little Red Yellow Black Book: an Introduction to Indigenous Australia
Books by Kim Anderson
A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood
Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine
Inichaag: My Soul in Story, Anishnaabe Poetics in Art and Words (with Rene Meshake)
Other Related Materials
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia
Utopia: a film by Alan Lowery and John Pilger
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
Dreamtime: Aboriginal Stories by Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Gregory McCormick: Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
*****
Bruce Pascoe (BP): It's an honour to be here. I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you about my country. And it was an honour to meet Kim two minutes ago. I'm honoured to meet people from Country. Thank you.
[background conversation]
BP: When I was here about eight or nine years ago, Chief Crane Bear gave me an abalone shell because during the smudging, the people use the abalone shell. We have the abalone shell in Australia. We also use it for exactly the same purpose, which shows how the human mind works, and that we're all brothers and sisters across the globe. I was going to give this to Kim in honour of her heritage, and so I let her touch it and smell it. It has in it some of the herbs that we use for our smoking ceremony. We also use a fungus, but I thought that might have been a bit hard to get through customs. [chuckle] As it was, I ran into a... I declared it, because I get into enough trouble anyway. And I met a customs officer who showed interest in it and let it come through. The abalone shell is eight years old, the herb is dried so there's no quarantine problem with it, but that doesn't stop officials sometimes. So I was going to give it to Kim, because I'm honoured to be interviewed by First Nation people from here. But I met my sister downstairs before... Ayesha. Ayesha could you come up? I would like to give it to you, in honour of our country. Ayesha is First Nation Australian from northern Queensland.
[applause]
BP: Sorry.
Dr. Kim Anderson (KA): No, no need to apologize. I think it's exciting that we have two of you here from so far away. And when we first met to start in the hallway here, I was saying that as I was... As I was reading Dark Emu, I was thinking about how often, as Indigenous peoples in Canada, when we read material about Indigenous peoples in Australia it's kind of the same but different, right? So it's that mirroring effect.
KA: And right now in Canada we're having this whole kind of conversation about reconciliation as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was our response and research to residential schooling, and of course the legacy of residential schooling, what needs to happen in terms of truth and reconciliation. But I wanna start at the end of the book, because I really loved the way in which you ended it looking forward to the future, and it really rang true to me when you said, "Having said we're sorry, we refuse to say thanks," which I think is a really significant point for us here in these territories and in the context of all the conversations we're having around reconciliation, having said sorry, we refuse to say thanks.
KA: And then you go on talking about how the... Really, the gift of having a conversation with Aboriginal people in Australia to be able to inform our future and how we're gonna do things like save the planet and have more sustainable economies and all that kind of stuff, which is really what a lot of the book really gives us as a gift. So, I loved how you're talking about how Indigenous peoples in Australia were sort of framed as primitive in the past and you unpack all that and you show that that's not the case. But what I really love is your thinking about futurities. Because often as Indigenous people, we kinda get historicized, and we're seen as kind of static and we didn't change and we're primitive and so on. And so in the book, with this whole concept of really, it's about launching us into the future and dealing with what we have in the present. So, maybe I can start with that and getting you to maybe talk to us a little bit about Indigenous future, futurities, from what you've learned from this and your perspective.
BP: Well, I'm a grandfather of four little kids. And so if I don't have hope for the future, I condemn them to hopelessness, and they're smart little kids. They wanna have a go. When my son was 14, he said, despite the fact that he hated school, as did his father, he wanted to make a difference to the world. So I'm sure that amongst my grandkids, possibly all of them, they all wanna do the same, they wanna make a difference. They wanna improve the world, the world needs a lot of improvement and we need all the people that we can gather for that improvement. So I have a responsibility to be hopeful for my kids, but also for this great world that we're trying to save. Because we... For the first time in human history, we're on the brink of destroying the world and we should be really alarmed by the prospect of that, that we allow individuals to have such enormous power that... And we don't seem to have much control over the quality of those individuals a lot of the time. I'm thinking of just south of here. And that's a dangerous fact that we can be so calm, so relaxed in the face of being on this brink.
BP: And I think that some of the qualities of First Nation people who cared for the Earth over such a long period of time, and in a sustainable fashion, those peoples need to be listened to, for the sake of the sustainability of the planet, not just for a warm and cuddly feeling about care and equality and love. It's about survival and Australian Aboriginal people have been on that planet... On that continent for 120,000 years, which is a long time before the Out of Africa theory. That theory is being re-examined. But 120,000 is a very, very long time and we know that now because of European science. Our people, Australian Aboriginal people always say, when asked, "How long have you been here?" our people have always said, "We have always been here, always been in this place, always looking after our particular part of the earth." Ayesha's people have been looking after Taurus Street on Northern Queensland. My own people have been looking after the very south. I live on the very southern border of Yuin country and I'm enormously proud of that, but I'm more so enormously sustained by it. When I wake up in the morning, I'm able to do ceremony on my country. That is enormously important thing for me. It's also enormously important for country to hear that song for it, for mother earth.
KA: One of the things that you talk about a lot is agriculture and aquaculture. So when we're thinking about futurities and your grandchildren, and the hopes for them, do you wanna share some of those things that we can learn and I guess to think about it for us too, in this territory, obviously, what we would grow would be very different from what you're describing here. But yeah, in terms of food sovereignty, food security, going into the future.
BP: Australia is the most racist country on earth. It is a shame for me to say that about my own country. I have tried in the past to stop barracking for Australian sporting teams because of that racism, and I've failed to do it, because I can't barrack against my country. But I'd felt like it, because of some of the things that are done routinely, in Australia, some of the things that some of our people leave the country for. I'm talking First Nation people leave the country because they cannot absorb the racism any more, and that's an entirely legitimate thing to do. But what I tried to do with Dark Emu, was to show the humanity of Aboriginal people, but also the ingenuity. For some reason or other our old people decided that on that continent there would be no territorial war. They realized, those old people, and I think and dream of them a lot, they realized that their job was to control an animal, the human, with all of its graciousness, all of its generosity, all of its strength, all of its intelligence, all of its violence, all of its hatred, all of its spleen, all of its bad temper, that confused animal, the human.
BP: And so, a law was created and that law said that everybody would get a house or be housed. Everybody would get fed. Everybody would take part in the ceremony, the culture, everybody. And that when old, the old people would be looked after by the young, and that it would be absolutely intolerable for people to fight over land. And we have known this all the time. Our old people have said, "Look, I can't speak for anyone else's land, I can only speak for this corner of the land," and when I'm talking about my country, I am talking about the corner, the southeastern corner of Australia. That is my country, where I leave. That is what I talk about, that is what I care for. And so we cannot be imperial. My next novel is called Imperial Harvest, about how the greed of humanity is cutting a swathe through our resources and our earth but also us. It cuts a swathe through our spirit. So I've been working toward looking at our country again, all that old intelligence, all that old care, all that old love for our place, our own home. And I was looking for a way to convince Australians of how our old people cared. This great law, how was it done?
BP: And I started talking, writing essays in Australia, I'd be surprised if you haven't read them, about how our old people were growing food, and using Australian plants. Because despite the enormous intelligence of Australians, which, our scientists created a bionic ear. We were in the forefront of heart surgery, and all of those incredible things, those... People use the word brain surgery loosely, but it is an incredible thing. It's very fine. It comes from a powerful tradition of medical science, all of those things. But the most powerful thing, above all of that, would be to have a world without war. Who invented that? They're the people I'm interested in.
BP: And so I started talking about our Aboriginal agriculture in Australia, and I was cautioned by some academics at Australia's national university that I should not lie to their students. This is the indelible racism in Australia, that they thought what I was saying was a lie. I realized then I would have to talk to them and their students through a vehicle that they would trust. And the Australian explorers... I've just sent my granddaughter a postcard with a Canadian mountie on the front. The Australian explorers were deemed to be the unassailable voices of truth in Australia. That's the record of what the country was like. But within that record, and sometimes edited out of that record today, are reports that Australian explorers saw vegetable fields that stretched to the horizon. One explorer couldn't walk across a field that also stretched to the horizon in both directions because it had been so deeply tilled.
BP: I'm a graduate of university in Australia. I never, ever saw that word "tilled" in reference to my people in all those years of study, and I studied History. The word, "tilled", it alarmed me so much when I saw it. I cried because I was so ashamed of my intelligence, so ashamed of the puny nature of my intelligence, that I would have swallowed the version of history that I'd been told by the master race. So, I tried to reform my intelligence. I tried to speak to my countrymen and women, and I did that by reading the explorers' diaries so that I would have a channel into the minds of Australia, and the minds of those old explorers who saw crops that stretched to the horizon, stooks of grass that had been left to dry, so that seed could be collected, so that it could be converted into flour, so that our people could make bread 80,000 years ago. And when I... This is my shame, I Googled the origins of bread in the world, and I came up with the Egyptians, 7,000-8,000 years ago. My own people, my own women of my country, invented bread, that enormous chemistry, that enormous industry, that science, that engineering that was required for it, 80,000 years ago. I was deeply shamed. And this is what propaganda is. This is the propaganda that was forced down our throats. That was an enormously long answer, but it was a deep question.
KA: Well, and I'm interested... It leads me to wonder about what the uptake has been in Australia because you've alluded to some of the racism, there's stories about that in the book as well. So I was curious when I was reading it. What's the uptake been?
BP: The uptake has been incredible. The book has been reprinted in Australia 22 times. It sold an enormous number of books, I'm an overnight success in that country, after having written 33 books, and having started when I was 20. [chuckle] So, instant success. But I always say, and I mean it, I'm old enough to be modest, because there's too much else I've got to do without worrying about anything else. The story comes out about land, and our relationship with the soil. It's an absolute fluke that I wrote it, and I blame my great-grandmother and my grandmother, and my mother for it, because they are the people who taught me to read. They taught me to love books. It was their influence on each other, and then on me and my sister, that I was in a position to read and write and suddenly, in looking for my family, because we didn't know a lot of branches of our family, so I had to look for that family. The elders then challenged my understanding of Australian history, which was abominable. And in doing that, of course, I wasn't just looking for my family, I was looking for the family, the family of humans, and deeply shocked as I was, it put me in this situation to tell the story. So, that's the fluke part of it. The fundamental part of it, is that the story comes out of the land.
KA: There's one story in here that's kind of an anchor story about the harvesting of a whale or The Old Man and the Whale, and I'm wondering if you could share that with us as a bit of a teaser and talk about how it shows a really particular cosmology and way of being in the world and what that means? 'Cause you bring it up a couple of times in the book.
BP: Well, thank you for raising that because it gives me a chance to talk about a story that involves everyone in the room, because the whale visits all continents and we share whale stories. I grew up reading Jack London and I grew up reading whale stories because I've always lived on salt water. In our country we say, "We are salt water or we are fresh water." In my country, there's a salt water turtle and a freshwater turtle. They meet each other at some time in the past and decide to turn away from each other, one going to the fresh, one going to the salt. And so we're either fresh or we're salt water. I'm salt water. So while I was reading all these stories about whaling operations, the incredibly brutal industry, of the whaling industry, which we have in Australia and we did it as brutally as anyone in the world, but I was in love with the sea. I was in love with those stories, the great storytellers of the world... Thank you to my grandmother. And only two-and-a-half years ago, I walked a mountain with my uncle. This is not just an uncle, this is blood uncle, but this is also spirit uncle because when he was 11 years old, and he's now 83, he's a really old man, he was told at 11 that he had to remember a shape that was drawn in the sand for him. It was a symbolic shape.
BP: And his elders asked him to look very carefully at it, and they said, "Have you understood this drawing? Can you remember it? Are you able to remember that?" And of course, he's 11 years old and full of himself as little boys are, and he said, "Of course. Yeah, I can remember that." And so the old man just went, "Whew," and wiped it away. He said, "Well now you have to find it." And he looked all over the place because he was from the Snowy River region in Victoria, a mountainous region separated from Tasmania by a body of water called Bass Strait, and he looked on mainland Australia. When he was 83, he was called to meet a woman in Tasmania across that strait and it was she who had been looking after the drawing. So those old men who had never been to Tasmania had been telling a story which was at least 15,000 years old because that's the age of the border dividing the two lands. And that old lady didn't know the story, she just knew the drawing, and she knew in her heart, in her bones, her job in her life was to look after that drawing. So she looked after it for him. They didn't know each other, but we all climbed the mountain together, and there it was, the whale.
BP: And the thing about the whale is that when the sea levels rose in Australia and covered so much of our land, the whale came to save them and said, "If you follow me," and this is what this drawing is about, "You follow me, I will take you to dry land." But the whale said to them, "When you reach that land, you will meet your cousins from a long time ago. They are people you don't know but they are your relatives and you will be asking them to share their land with you. So you have to be modest and you must not fight because you are imposing on them. So I will show you the land but you have to promise me that you will be modest in your demands on that land."
BP: This is the whole ethos of Aboriginal land care and I meet it everywhere I go all around the world. And so the whale story, we followed it. I went to Western Australia, the very other side of the continent from where I live. I'm sorry, this is another long story, and an old man, I'd been doing a thing like this, so working in libraries and talking to people who were interested in the book Dark Emu, and an old man had driven all night from a place called Albany in Southern Western Australia. He drove through the night and he came up to me after the session. He wasn't in the session. He didn't want to hear me talk. He wanted to talk to me and he said, "I want you to meet my son." So the next morning, I followed him and we went to the bank of a river, and his son began to sing a song. As I got out of the car on the bank of this river, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I realized I was going to understand what he was singing. He was singing in his own language, but that story that he was singing was shared by my own people on the other side of the continent. And that was done by transfer, through the song lines on our country connecting us all together.
BP: And it just doesn't go east to west, it goes north to the south, it goes diagonally across the country. It's a web across the whole landmass, this beautiful web, and he was telling me the same story in song and in dance, and I'd love to dance it for you, but it's a hard form and it requires me to fling myself headlong and I'm very careful where I do that, but it's about the whale and how the whale is caring for people, how the whale was once a land mammal and goes to sea and becomes a sea mammal and the people grieve for the whale. "How will you survive in the ocean?" because they were friends. And the whale reassures them that it will find food in the sea and it rises up from the bottom and shows them a mouthful of seagrass to reassure them, and it turns like this to show all the people that it will survive.
BP: And I found that in the north of Australia, I found it in Ayesha's country and the Northeast of Australia. I found it on the very eastern coast. I found it in Tasmania with that old man, I found it everywhere. And the thing about the whale story is it is bigger than anybody, you know? You hear a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit there and it's bigger than us. We are just accidental and incidental in the story. It is no great triumph to hear the story. It is just good fortune, and this story embraces the whole earth. But what it also does, is embraces the world because the whale has left the earth to look after the sea and to follow the law of the sea, and so it connects us with you.
BP: What is this great connection that First Nation Canadian people have with First Nations Australian people? What is the connection? The connection is the whale and it connects all of humanity, this great beast. And so, the whale story, I think... I have hope that it will bind our own people in Australia because we all share it and I hope that the travels of the whale elsewhere will provide a bond with other peoples so that we as a world feel connected to each other through this animal, which is so gracious and so gentle and does no harm.
KA: That's beautiful and very, totally new for me. So thank you for that. That's wonderful. So, sorry, did you wanna say something?
BP: I was just going to say that it doesn't come from me. Once again, this comes from the earth and it comes from the ocean. I was just passing it by.
KA: And thank you for sharing it, here and in print. So that's... You've got us out in the sea and the land. Now I'm thinking skyward. And of course, I have to ask about the title of the book and the spirit emu 'cause I read it and then at the end, I'm like, "Hey, how come he called it Dark Emu?" And then I looked at the very first page and went, "Oh, okay," but I'd like to hear more of that if you're able to share anything about that.
BP: The night sky has been a fascination for people, all people over all time. We all look at the Moon and perhaps a little too much sometimes, but the Dark Emu... The emu is a large flightless bird in Australia which is a grain eater, and most of the book is about food, about our old people's food and how we're connected to the Earth through it. The emu walks around the country looking for grain, and so it's a symbol of the book, but everything on Earth is reflected in the sky, absolutely everything, that's what our people believe. And the emu on the ground is also found in the sky, and I'm not so familiar with Canadian skies, but in the south, at this time of the year, near Scorpio, you will see not stars, but the absence of stars near the Milky Way, and it is a dark shape, and that's the shape of the emu, and the emu moves during the season. As the shape of the sky changes, it brings its legs up beneath it because the male emu looks after the eggs. And so when the bird in the sky brings its legs up, that is the time when the male bird is sitting on eggs. And there are so many things about it that are so encouraging for us. You know, the bird is in the sky and on the Earth but also that the bird is looking after children.
KA: That's another really inspiring story in terms of thinking about the future and hope and all that as well. Can you share a little bit about the process of revival, cultural revival, language revival, that you've been involved in? And in particular, I'm wondering about some of the food, the food revival that you're talking about in the book.
BP: I was reminded, as I'm reminded most days in my life that I'm not very Black, and... It's true. I can look in the mirror. But because we have... I share blood with Cornish people and English people, but we always say, "Well, which part of our blood? Which part of us is Black and which part of us is white? What is Black, our heart, our brain, our nose? Which part?" It's all parts. So, I'm Cornish, I'm Bunurong, I'm Yuin, but I live in Australia. I went to Cornwall, I found all my relatives in Cornwall. Fortunately, most of them owned hotels. It was very handy, but I felt nothing for the land. I felt nothing at all for the land apart from just general... I saw puffins there for the first time, which fascinated me. So the land came to me and I appreciated that, but it wasn't my responsibility. My responsibility is where I actually live now. And so when we're looking at the earth, and you can tell I've forgotten what the question was, kind of.
KA: Just about revival, 'cause it sounds like you're really engaged in both language and land-based cultural practices, food, plant-based economies.
BP: Yeah. But you know I have to talk about my color because people want to know, and I think people have a right to know, but I have to explain it in Australian terms, the confusion of our hereditary. Part of our family fornicated their way from the south of the continent to the north. There is a Pascoe River in Northern Queensland which is where part of our family stopped fornicating and left their last children there.
BP: And so, you know people will say, "Why are you so deeply involved in your culture?" Well, the real answer to that is, "How could I not be involved?" But the thing about it is that there is so much wrong with the world, and our culture, Australian Aboriginal culture, Yuin culture in particular, is so gentle and so conservative. You know there's a big mismatch in the world today. The Right think that the Left are the radicals. In fact, the Left are the conservatives. The Left are trying to care for stuff and the Right are trying to destroy it. The Left are the true conservatives. And in Yuin culture, if you climb Mount Gulaga, and I really hope you get the opportunity to climb Mount Gulaga in southern New South Wales, which is the heart of my country, and if you go there, I wish you would give me a call and I will walk that mountain with you, which we will have to do in total silence.
BP: So even though you've come all the way from Canada, I won't be able to talk to you while we're climbing the mountain, but I won't need to talk to you and you won't need to talk to me because you'll follow through the heart of Yuin culture which is a series of stones which are probably eroded by the wind, but in our culture, they are the dolphin, they are the whale, they are the shark, and they are the rainbow serpent. Many countries have a giant snake as one of the creator spirits and that is one of ours. And I always say to people because we get... Because of the way the world is, we've got a lot of young men who do incredible harm, most of it to themselves, quite often to other people. And we take them up there, we take them through the lore. We lost one of those young men last week, terribly sad, but I remember him and his friends being taken through that lore.
BP: And you have to look at Ng’ardi who is the first woman and Tunku was the first man. And Tunku is a small person, Ng'ardi is a big elegant person. And you have to follow Ng'ardi as she becomes pregnant and you walk past Ng'ardi and you are asked in the lore, you can't pass her without touching her pregnant belly. And we watched the young men very closely, because a lot of them have never touched a woman like that. And it is hard for them because that is not their relationship with women. We are trying to make that their relationship with women.
BP: And you follow Ng’ardi through, you see the baby on her shoulders. And I've seen two children born and it's an incredible experience to see your own child born like that. But if you look up at that child's eye, is it a stone? Well, it's in the shape of a child. If you look at that child's eye and you are not moved, then you are a stone. And we follow that, those group of stones. We see the whale, we see the shark, we see the dolphin, we see the dugong, and people... Europeans in Australia go, "Oh, dugong. You don't have dugong this far south." And we say, "No, we don't because you destroyed the seagrass. We don't have dugong now, but we used to have dugong when there was no dredging for scallops." Now, the most delicate flesh in the world for me is scallop, but I cannot eat it because of the damage that our fishery does to scallop. We used to have dugong before there was scallop, when the scallop was a... Anyway, coming through all of that, those whole group of stones and we exit and we have to be clapped out with clapsticks.
[vocalization]
BP: One stroke for every person who comes off the mountain, comes under the mountain and the lyrebird there counts us, in time. The lyrebird can repeat that, because that lyrebird, which is a mimicking fowl, it remembers everything we say. We've had such a long association with it. Its own call is "cluck". Did we learn clapsticks from it, or did it learn its call from us? We don't know the answer to that, surprisingly. But the thing is, when we're all clapped out of there you will not have seen a weapon. Not a weapon. I've seen world culture all over the place. I've been lucky to travel around the world, and I go to museums where I see great armies slaughtering each other. I've been into churches where there are severed babies’ heads, and what religion is this? It was a Muslim who cut off that baby's head, was it? Well, in their church it is a Christian because that is the fact of history. This great war between these two groups of ideas, they're just ideas, have been reshaping the world's society for a long time, and unfortunately it's just done it... Several times in the last week.
BP: But why I say to our young boys, and I know that my sisters are saying it to the young women, is look at this. Look at this idea cause here is an idea, a human idea, where there are no weapons. The only artifacts that people collect in Australia are Aboriginal spears, and Aboriginal clubs, and Aboriginal boomerang. They never collect the women's digging stick. They never collect the grinding dish. They never collect the sewing needle because what the archeologist wanted was weapons. And I think it's a really significant thing that on Mount Gulaga you will not see a weapon. I think that is an incredibly subtle philosophy.
****
Gregory: On the Live Mic episode page, livemic.ca, you will find biographies of featured writers, guests and hosts, as well as links to TPL’s collections or other episode-related materials. For all of TPL’s podcast series go to tpl.ca/podcasts.
Toronto Public Library is one of the world's busiest urban public library systems. Every year, more than 20 million people visit our 100 branches in neighbourhoods across the city and borrow more than 32 million items.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations is produced by the Toronto Public Library. Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and me, Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. And marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by Worst Pop Band Ever also known as WPBE.
I’m Gregory McCormick, Manager of Cultural and Special Event Programming at Toronto Public Library. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for another episode of Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations.