beer with Duncan by Duncan Schieb

Ruby Riethmuller: Don’t Wait Until It Feels Too Heavy

Ruby Riethmuller grew up on a farm outside Wagga Wagga, in the Riverina, with the whole place to herself for eight years until a sister turned up and she became the eldest. She came to boarding school in Sydney for her last few years. When she was flat or homesick, she didn’t go to a teacher and she didn’t ring home. She went down the corridor and sat on the end of an older girl’s bed. In this hour she takes Duncan back down that corridor, and tells him what an older girl could say that an adult couldn’t. She talks about not realising it was anxiety until she was about sixteen, the label she didn’t want, and how long she let it wait. What helped was a friend who knew all of her. “It made it so much lighter to carry.” Six years later, after a friend told her to do something about it or stop talking like she could, she started Womn-Kind. It’s a social enterprise supporting the mental health of teenage girls and gender-diverse young people, through an app and programs in schools all over Australia. A panel of young people make the decisions alongside her. [COMMISSION] She is also Deputy Commissioner at the Mental Health Commission of New South Wales. Then Duncan asks the question the hour is built on. She built the whole thing on the idea that nobody should carry it alone, so who does she go and sit with? She ends with something for a kid listening on their own who has decided theirs can wait, and for a parent who can tell something isn’t right and can’t get their daughter to talk. Her songs: Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart, Ribs by Lorde, There Will Be Time by Mumford & Sons with Baaba Maal, and Love Generation by Bob Sinclar, which plays us out. beerwithDuncan doesn’t just tell other people’s stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 12, from Saturday 24 October at 9:01am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

Sue Hines | The woman who carries everyone else

Last week Sue Heins told Duncan about the hats everyone can see: the business, the network, the refuge, and the first woman to wear the mayoral chains of the Northern Beaches. This hour is the one almost nobody sees. It starts in the chair. She talks about four years of rebuilding a council after amalgamation, the one time she sat scratching her head asking what she was doing there, and how long it took to find her own voice as Mayor. For about eight years she was the main carer for her partner, Nigel. He had cancer, then Parkinson’s, and then Lewy body dementia. For all of that time she was on council, and for the last part of it she was Mayor. Carers were in the house during the day; she dropped home whenever she could, and council, she says, was where the challenges were, at least normal ones. He died a couple of years ago, at home. She goes home now to an empty house still full of his things, and what she misses most is coming home and offloading to him. They were opposites, and she thinks they proved you don’t have to be alike to be great partners. Duncan asks what caring taught her about love that the easier years never could, how she worked out last year that what she was feeling was grief, and who carries her. Then she speaks to three people who might be listening: a carer who feels invisible, a woman who isn’t safe at home, and anyone who keeps seeing a need in their street and waiting for somebody else to do something. Her three songs in this hour: Fat Bottomed Girls, Jealous Guy, the song she and her brother leaned on growing up, and Evie, which plays us out. The hour closes with Under the Milky Way by The Church. This is part two of two. Part one is waiting wherever you found this one. beerwithDuncan doesn’t just tell other people’s stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 11, from Saturday 17 October at 9:01 am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

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Sue Heins | The woman under the hats

Sue Heins grew up on Sydney’s lower North Shore, the daughter of two Austrian parents, and she was the one in the house with the hammer, the nails and the paint. She learned to be self-reliant very quickly. She came to the Northern Beaches more than twenty-five years ago, running a gas-industry department of about forty-five tradesmen. When the company offered redundancies, to their horror, she put her hand up and started her own gas appliance repair business. It is still going. At the local chamber of commerce, she noticed that everyone was giving the highlight reel and the women were very quiet. So with a friend she met through business, she started Inspiring Women, a network where businesswomen could talk honestly about the hard parts. She started Moonlighting, so members could show each other their businesses in their own spaces. When small refuges looked like they were losing funding, she went to the local one and asked why nobody was fighting. She stayed ten years. Then she walked into local government. She is in her fourth term as a councillor, and she became the first woman to wear the Northern Beaches mayoral chains. Duncan asks her who arrived on the Beaches all those years ago, why she can’t walk past a need, where she put ten years of other people’s worst nights, and what a hard week in a small business teaches you about a council budget. Her three songs in this hour: Rock Lobster, the first concert she ever went to, Video Killed the Radio Star, and Bette Davis Eyes. This is part one of two. Part two, the hour almost nobody sees, follows a week later. beerwithDuncan doesn’t just tell other people’s stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 10, from Saturday 10 October at 9:01am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

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Gavin Fingleson: Talk About Them

Gavin Fingleson was four when he walked away from his mum at a baseball tournament, found an under-tens team, and started playing. His grandfather had played. His dad played for South Africa. His brother played. His mum had just said no more baseball. [BROTHERS] When he was a boy in South Africa, his two younger brothers died, and the family carried it, and stayed close. He credits his mum, who kept everybody talking. The family came to Australia when he was eleven, and he was playing for the Ku-ring-gai Steelers within a couple of weeks. At eighteen he left for America with three goals: a degree, professional baseball, and the Olympics for Australia. He got the first two. He missed Sydney 2000 when a new coach did not know who he was, and he decided on a bus that he had four more years. In Athens he played second base in the final, and came home with the only Olympic baseball medal this country has. Ask him about it and he tells you about the opening ceremony instead, and two camera flashes in the dark. At forty-one he went back and played for the Sydney Blue Sox, because his eldest son asked. Eleven years ago he and his brother mentored at the very first Camp Magic. Now he runs Feel the Magic, which gives Australian kids who have had a parent, a guardian, a brother or a sister die a place to go, for free. Duncan asks him what baseball taught him about failing, what actually happens to a kid on the second day of camp, and what he would say to a mum whose husband died four months ago and whose seven-year-old will not talk about it. He brings five songs: the walk-up song they gave him in America, the anthem he heard at every ballpark, the song for four halls of fame, the one he played on the bus before every game from his second year of college, and the song Feel the Magic wrote so the kids could take camp home with them. beerwithDuncan doesn’t just tell other people’s stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 9, from Saturday 3 October at 9:01am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

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You have probably never heard of Peta Garrett, and that is rather the point. She grew up in Newport, on Beaconsfield Street, went to Newport Public, and describes herself as a cheeky, happy kid who played handball at lunch and painted the banana trees behind the school in year three. Her first proper job was listening to what a whole country was saying, all day, every day, in media monitoring. She says it opens your mind to what other people are going through. Then she became a journalist on community newspapers, and two of those stories have never left her: a twelve-year-old boy whose whole life was looking after his brother, and a room full of parents in their eighties, frightened about what would happen to their adult children. Somewhere in the middle of it, she taught six- and seven-year-olds ethics at a public school and ran the communications for the Mini-Mos, one of the country's longest continuously held community fun runs. She says teaching ethics is one of the best things she has ever done. Then she stopped writing about the community and went to work inside it, as the person just behind the representative. The one who listens, solves the problem, and watches somebody else's name go on the result. Duncan asks what that seat costs her, whether she misses the byline, what she does to keep from burning out, and what she would say to everyone doing the unseen work in their own world. Her answer to that last one is the reason this hour exists. She brings five songs, and she took weeks over them. An aunt she lost. The Opera House steps. A concert a few months after Michael Hutchence died. And her dad, dancing around the room to Elvis. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 8, from Saturday 26 September at 9:01am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

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The light and the dark can live together | Sam Bloom

Sam Bloom is about as local as this show gets. Her mum and dad bought the shop at Newport in 1980, and as a teenager she worked behind a counter that came up to about her nose. In first grade, asked to draw what she wanted to be, she drew a nurse. She got there. The other childhood dream was West Africa, planted by a man from Senegal she met at fourteen and a Lonely Planet guide her grandmother bought her at Dymocks, and she got there too, at 22, on an overland truck. Cam Bloom walked into the pie shop as a customer, a photographer in ginormous red glasses, not like the other boys. Their first date ended watching The Wailers at Dee Why. In 2013, on a family holiday in Thailand, Sam leaned on a rooftop balcony rail that gave way. She fell six metres to the concrete and has not walked since. In this hour she talks about the part the world skipped: that nobody in Thailand told her she would not walk again, that the nurse who had spent years looking after people on the worst day of their lives suddenly understood how little she had understood, and that coming home meant staring at her favourite surf spot through the lounge room window, unable to get to it. The world knows what happened next as a story about a magpie. Sam's version is smaller and truer: people started coming to the house to see the bird instead of her, which she loved, and the injured chick needed feeding and holding, so the nurse got to be a nurse again. "She was like this gorgeous little time-waster," she says, the way you'd say it about a baby. Then a kayak, two weeks out of rehab, and a coach named Gaye who had never met the old Sam and treated her completely normally, no pity look, plenty of cheek. A place on the Australian team about a year after the accident, which she calls the game changer: a reason to get up, a purpose, something to aim for. Five years on, a surfboard at Palm Beach, and eventually world titles. Asked who has been winning them, given that she has said she would do anything to be herself again, she goes quiet, and then gives an answer she has never given anyone. Five songs, hers: Porcelain, for running at sunrise above Bilgola. Everybody Hurts, for a friend. Forever Young, for the night a room full of people showed up for her family. Walking on a Dream, for mountain biking at West Head. And These Days by Powderfinger to play us out, for a drive to Narrabeen with tears on her cheeks. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 7, from Saturday 19 September at 9:01 am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.

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Cathy Hockey was a bit of a rebel. She left school at the end of Year 10, walked into a bank as a junior, rang her best friend to report that she had her own paperclips, and was managing the Neutral Bay branch by twenty-five. Then kids, part-time work, no way back to a manager's job, and a swap to architectural drafting. Then another swap, to conservation and land management. And in 2008, a phone call about a pilot nobody had built yet. That pilot became Bushlink: real, paid work for people with disability, regenerating the bush right here on the Northern Beaches. In her first weeks, she watched six people put on a uniform and show up, and she has never argued about the value of work since. The one contract they had ended almost immediately, and she spent years knocking on doors, chasing grants and asking at the sideline of her kids' soccer. Almost two decades on it is still going, and some of the team have been there since the very beginning. She went on to run the Windmill program at Royal Far West in Manly, then took the chief executive's chair at an NDIS provider through the most uncertain years the scheme has had. Three days in, she caught COVID in a disability service, and her first thought was not for herself. Then she stepped out of the chair to do something quieter, and now she coaches the leaders still in it, so they can keep going without burning out. In this hour, Duncan asks where her belief in the dignity of work was born, about the first time she watched somebody stand taller because they had a job, about the real weight of the chair, and the question she asks every leader she coaches, turned back on her: who holds you? And near the end, he asks what she would say to a listener who is running on empty and carrying everyone. Her answer is the reason this show exists. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own

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The Athlete Who Became a Doctor, Then a Voice for Her Community | Dr. Sophie Scamps

Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1990. Sophie Scamps was nineteen, an 800-metre runner who was not confident out of the blocks, on a 4x400 relay team nobody expected to win. One of her teammates did not want to start. So she said she would. Australia won gold. Most people know Dr Sophie Scamps as the Member for Mackellar. This hour is about the runner, the emergency doctor, and the daughter of a GP who followed him into the job. "You have a choice in life. You can either be a spectator yelling from the sideline… or you can put yourself in the race." This Saturday on Duncan Schieb. beerwithduncan podcast Full episode: Duncan Schieb. beerwithduncan podcast is on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, Saturdays at 9:01am. Ask Alexa or Google: say "Alexa, play Radio Northern Beaches" or "Hey Google, play Radio Northern Beaches." On your phone: the free Community Radio Plus app, search Radio Northern Beaches. Online: stream live at rnb.org.au. Catch up any time: Spotify, YouTube (@abeerwithduncan), or the player at beerwithduncan.com. Radio Northern Beaches Community Radio Plus #beerwithDuncan #SophieScamps

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We're all just walking each other home | Briony Scott

You become like a… secular priest. You know, you get to the extraordinary privilege of listening to people talk about their lives." That is Dr Briony Scott on what a school principal actually carries, and it is the best description of the job I have heard. She did it for nineteen years, fourteen of them at Wenona, and she was named Principal of the Year and one of the most powerful people in Australian education. She now leads Royal Far West, the hundred-year-old charity getting healthcare to children in rural and remote Australia. Four things from the hour worth the time of anyone who leads people. On what leading a community is: conducting an orchestra. You are not there to play the instruments. You are there to get disparate instruments playing together enough to make a tune. On the thing she thinks is going wrong more broadly: "We are not comfortable with being uncomfortable." Her picture for it is a butterfly cut free of its cocoon by someone trying to help, which then cannot fly, because the wings take their strength from the pushing. On accountability, and this one is aimed at adults: young people are expected to admit a mistake, apologise and remediate, and most adults no longer do any of the three. She admires teenagers for it. And on doing work whose results you will never see: "You plant seeds that… in education won't come to fruition in my lifetime. So you have to trust that what you're doing." She is clear there is no glory in the job, and equally clear about where the meaning is, which is in the one-on-one conversations nobody watches. She also started again in a new sector at a point where everyone expected her to retire, which is its own lesson. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Full episode: beerwithduncan.com #beerwithDuncan #BrionyScott #Leadership #Education #SchoolLeadership #ForPurpose

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Tracy Hall: The Woman, Not The Crime

You may think you know Tracy Hall's story. It has been told as true crime more than once. We are not telling it. The man at the centre of it has had enough of her life, and he is not getting this hour, either. What is left when you take him out of it turns out to be far more interesting. Twenty-five years building brands for eBay, Virgin, GoDaddy and Afterpay. A father who died three weeks after a leukaemia diagnosis when she was in her twenties, which she says plainly was the hardest thing she has ever been through. A boss who handed her his credit card and told her to go home to her family. And a young woman walking around Sydney on her lunch break, crying, wishing there was a grief room. Duncan asks what shame was telling her about herself, and what it felt like at two in the morning. She answers all of it. Then she turns outward, which is where she now spends her life. Everybody is a target. There is a scam for everybody. The thing under attack is not your firewall, it is you. And the crime she most wants parents to understand is the one aimed at their kids, which moves in hours, targets boys more than girls, and is run by organised crime rather than by anyone in a basement. If your child ever tells you, she has the first words for you: this is not your fault, you have been targeted by a criminal, thank you for telling me. She brings five songs, from The Cure to The Doors, two of which belong to her dad. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Listen from Saturday 22 August at beerwithduncan.com

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A Psychologist Who Sees Beyond Screen Time | Jocelyn Brewer

Twenty years ago, Jocelyn Brewer (https://jocelynbrewer.com/digital-nutrition/)was a high school teacher of geography and drama at Sydney Boys High. Her headmaster, Dr Kim Jagger, told her the school was handing laptops to every boy in year nine, that the kids knew what to do with them and the teachers did not, and that somebody should work out what was going on with boys and games. She has never really stopped pulling that thread. She retrained as a psychologist, studied cyberpsychology, and, in 2013, coined the term Digital Nutrition: not screen time, not detoxes, but the value of what we feed our minds. She is generous about where it started. She calls Dr Jagger the guardian angel of Digital Nutrition, and she is just as honest that the work got personal when she got her own first iPhone at 32 and started waking in the night to check it. This hour is for anyone who feels the quiet erosion, a bit less present, a bit less patient, a little less themselves, and senses that both banning it and bingeing it are dead ends. Duncan asks what staying human actually means once you strip the slogan off it, whether she lives her own philosophy on a bad week, and what she would say to a parent whose kid has gone quiet behind a closed door. She gives them three sentences to try. She also gives the teenager listening something better than a lecture. Jocelyn has kindly offered a 20% off code for the Tech Use Agreement course https://offers.jocelynbrewer.com/tua-v2-checkout-page CODE: DUNCAN20 https://jocelynbrewer.com/digital-nutrition/ And she brings five songs, from Rickie Lee Jones to Kula Shaker, with a Hare Krishna story attached to the last one. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own Listen from Saturday 15 August at rnb.org.au or say 'Alexa, Play Radio Northern Beaches at 9:00 am on Saturday '. INSTA @beerwithduncan FB: https://www.facebook.com/beerwithduncan/ WEB: beerwithduncan.com

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A Teacher Who Sees the Whole Child | Orlanda Bettison

For more than ten years, Orlanda Bettison stood at a school photocopier printing off resources for parents, because the book that would teach a child about their own mind was not on any shelf. Then came her own postnatal mental health chapter, and one thought she has never forgotten:"I wish I knew this earlier." A teacher with a psychology degree, she had spent her working life around children’s feelings, and nobody had ever taught her how her own mind worked. In July 2024, she launched a Kickstarter campaign. Eighty-nine strangers backed her past her target in forty days. The My Brain Books series now runs to five titles, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in seven countries, and is used by psychologists, occupational therapists, teachers and parents everywhere, In this hour, Duncan asks about the house she grew up in and what was allowed to be felt out loud there, the postnatal chapter in her own words, the Friday afternoons at the photocopier, the night she pressed the Kickstarter button, and the seeds she hopes the books plant. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Listen from 08/08/2026 at rnb.org.au If this episode raises anything for you: PANDA (Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia) 1300 726 306. Lifeline 13 11 14. Check out the My Brain Book series here: Orlanda’s Songs: Feel it Still - Portugal. The Man Valerie- Amy Winehouse Electric Feel- MGMT Too Sweet- The Macaroons Project Ok Love you Bye- Olivia Dean To hear the songs, tune into the radio broadcast at rnb.org.au

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This is beerwithDuncan. One hour, one guest, their songs, and an honest conversation about how a life actually gets built.”

This is beerwithDuncan. One hour, one guest, their songs, and an honest conversation about how a life actually gets built.” beerwithDuncan is a one-hour conversation, recorded on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, between Duncan and a single guest. The songs, chosen by the guest, carry the hour. They belong to the guest, picked for their own reasons: perhaps the one they walk in on, perhaps the first they ever loved, perhaps the one they still cannot hear without going somewhere, perhaps the one they want the listener to leave humming. The music is the joy running through the whole thing. The conversation is personal. The hour moves through who the guest is, where they came from, and the good they have made of their life. When there is a hard chapter, we sit in it gently and only as far as the guest wants to go, and then we reach for the light, because the point is always what they carried out of it. When a guest has a whole good life honestly built, the hour lives in the warm, telling moments most interviews skip. The show is made for a simple, hopeful reason. Somewhere a person is listening, and a stranger says something honest and true, and the room gets a little warmer. They feel less alone, a little braver, and glad to share a world with people like this. Every guest is chosen because their life, honestly told, does that. Host Duncan is a country-born auctioneer who has called more than 15,000 auctions and raised over $200 million for good causes. He coaches junior footy and cricket on the Northern Beaches, mentors young people, and works in grief support. He does not sit across the table as a neutral interviewer. He is a warm fellow traveller who makes the room safe, asks the small honest question, and knows the hour belongs to the guest and to the person listening. www.beerwithduncan.com https://www.instagram.com/beerwithduncan/

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