The longtime Conversations host on podcasts, the lure of history and being finally able to talk about his three-month disappearance from the airwaves.
On a late Friday afternoon, after a week of wintry rain, the residents of Macleay Street in Sydney's Potts Point are walking their miniature dogs past neat piles of crunchy plane tree leaves on the footpath. People are browsing the windows of antique stores and bookshops. Old world cafes offer enticing pastries. The late afternoon sun winks through the narrow gaps between art deco apartment buildings. Elderly neighbours, tipped in leopard print (leggings/scarf), greet each other. It's a serene scene.
"All this was way grottier when I first moved here with my wife Khym years ago," says Richard Fidler, the radio host and author.
In those days, he says, it was bikers, cocaine dealers and "angry drunk dudes" who came in from the suburbs, cruising around in cars. "And if they didn't find what they wanted, they looked for someone's head to punch in - or something even more heinous."
One night, Fidler recalls, someone tried all the buzzers at the entrance to his apartment building. "You're lying in bed, thinking what's going on? Then when the buzzer went off to my apartment, the dude says, 'Where is she, mate, where is she?' I'm thinking, 'Oh, God' but I said, 'She's safe with us now.' 'Ah, ya fuckin' bastard!' he says."
Fidler, 60, an author and former punk rock comic is perhaps most familiarly known as the founding voice of Conversations, an hour-long interview show and podcast that is broadcast across Australia on ABC radio. (He now shares the hosting chair with Sarah Kanowski.) The podcast has built a colossal following over 20 years, with tens of millions of downloads each year.
Walking around the leafy streets, no one seems to recognise Fidler. They may recognise his voice though. In person, he sounds very much as he does on the radio - impeccably modulated, friendly, bemused, reassuring, occasionally incredulous.
On the show he asks people about their lives using what boils down to a mix of careful research by his team, active listening and wry humour. "I'm driven by authentic curiosity," he says. "Some people make podcasts that are just a couple of people shooting the shit. I actually hate those because there's a kind of contempt for the audience."
Choosing his words carefully, Fidler admits that he doesn't normally talk to someone for an hour in his private life - not even his wife. "It's rare to talk to someone uninterrupted for a full hour," he says. "It's eye contact, curiosity and knowing when to keep your mouth shut."
As it edges towards sunset we slip into a cafe. He orders a sparkling water and tells me he wants to talk about something he hasn't spoken of publicly before.
"I disappeared for three months late last year and I'm finally ready to talk about it," he says. With no warning or fanfare, he simply stopped appearing on Conversations from October to December.
"A lot of people thought I'd left the show because I didn't announce anything; I didn't want any fuss. But basically, my wife was diagnosed with cancer—a nasopharyngeal tumour right at the back of the nasal passage where it meets the throat."
Khym and Fidler have been together 34 years, married for 32. One morning she woke up with a "very nasty" nosebleed and went for a biopsy. "Khym is Singaporean Chinese by birth but moved to Melbourne when she was nine. I learned it's a condition that's really prevalent in south-east Asia. No one knows why. It was certainly news to me."
Fidler took carer's leave while Khym underwent 13 weeks of chemotherapy alongside seven weeks of daily radiation. It all finished up on New Year's Eve.
"It was pretty brutal," Fidler says. "It's one of those treatments that is extremely punishing but extremely effective at the same time. But the radiation left her neck very inflamed and it destroyed her taste buds - temporarily, fortunately - and caused major damage to the saliva glands.
"We had to wait three months for the heat of the chemo and radiation therapy to cool down and see how well it worked."
In March Khym’s oncologist declared her cancer-free. “‘Pristine’ was the word he used about her scan,” Fidler says, smiling. “It’s a really lovely word to hear from an oncologist. Yeah, so she’s going to take a while to fully recover but she’s going to be fine.”
The couple met in Melbourne when she was working as an actor on the TV series DAAS Kapital, a show he helped create as part of the anarchic comedy trio the Doug Anthony All Stars, alongside Paul McDermott and Tim Ferguson.
He says it was very much love at first sight, for him at least.
"I remember she came out of the ABC in Ripponlea, and she'd taken all her makeup off and was waiting for a taxi," he recalls. "It was one of those rare days where some Melbourne late-afternoon sunshine sort of hit her in the face. She put up her face to smile into it and that was it; I was gone."
She did not share the love-at-first-sight moment, he quickly adds.
"But on the first date we discovered we had watched the same Countdown episodes and read the same Penguin Classics; we had CDs and records in common. On the second date I learned she’s an amazing cook—she cooked a completely authentic French bouillabaisse which I’d never had before—and that combined with the CDs and books made me think ‘I’m going to have to marry her.’”
“Love at first sight is profoundly shocking on one hand because you know everything’s about to change but then you have this strangely comforting familiar thought ‘Oh it’s you.’”
Now at 60 he still thinks of himself and Khym as a young couple. “But we’re not young any more—the cancer has made us reflect on our mortality. Now we want to travel as much as possible.”
Over the next hour in the cafe, Fidler talks exuberantly about his great love of history and travel, twin passions that led him to write his popular nonfiction books. The first was about the 1,000-year history of Constantinople, after a trip he took with his then 14-year-old son. He has taken a deep dive on Prague, explored the history of the voyagers of the Abbasid empire and studied the bloody and mysterious Icelandic sagas. His next book will be about Mesopotamia.
"I had to get older before I could start writing books," he says. "I had to know a lot more about people before I could become a writer and I had to read more before I could think laterally about historical subjects.
"Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to know how history worked and what followed what and where my tiny little speck of a life fits into that great stream of events and people through the centuries."
Do you know where you fit in now?
"Oh yeah. I'm a very grateful speck living in a peaceful and prosperous democracy. Yes, I know there's plenty of things that's wrong with Australia. It's built on this mass dispossession and attempted genocide, and yet it's an unusually peaceful democratic prosperous nation."
The cafe is closing but Fidler is still ruminating on Australia's history and whether democracy is a natural state for humans or something to be tended like a garden.
"I think it's very hard for Australians to hold those two ideas in our heads at the same time, so we'll tend to lunge to one or other," he muses. "But I think it's essential to hold both those ideas at the same time: what we have is worth defending; it's built on this monstrous crime."
He finishes his water and thanks the cafe staff. Walking out into the early evening, his first thought is of his wife. "Hopefully I can persuade her to come out and dine with me. That would be lovely."