About The Battler

The Battler is a weekly podcast about Australian politics, media, culture and bastardry.

Hosted by Patrick Marlborough and Timwintoncellectuals, it exists partly because the country’s media class is a conga-line of suckholes, partly because politics in this country feels like being flogged by a warm lettuce, and partly because hating in private is wasteful.

Each week, The Battler pulls apart the news cycle, the commentariat, the national mood, and whatever fresh indignity has Taman Shudded onto the shores of the island continent. Sometimes that means strike waves, elections, and empire. Sometimes it means literature, loser critics, cultural fraudulence, or the general condition of Australian public life. Usually it means all of them at once from every direction.

The Battler is the only good Australian podcast, and has the best guests of any Australian podcast. We’ve yarned with Evelyn Araluen, Michael Winkler, Amy Remeikis, Steve Toltz, Alex McKinnon and a whole retinue of the most important thinkers and writers in the country today. Our conversations aren’t puff pieces nor Good Weekend fluff: we get into the guts of books and ideas and try to solve old problems while making new ones. 

This is a longform show for people who want something better than infographic politics, prestige-media piety, and the dead language of respectable commentary. It is not balanced, calming, or especially interested in sounding professional or respecting defamation laws.

If you like your political and cultural analysis with more hostility, more personality, and less starch, you’re in the right place.

Pat Marlborough is a writer and comedian from Fremantle, WA. Their first novel, Nock Loose, is out with Fremantle Press.

Timwintoncellectuals is a meme page administrator in his 30s.

Catch the latest here.

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