The Battler is a podcast about Australian politics, media, culture and bastardry.
Hosted by Patrick Marlborough and Timwintoncellectuals, it exists partly because the country’s media class is intolerable, partly because politics in this country increasingly feels like a low-budget psychological operation, and partly because complaining in private is a wasted resource.
Each week, The Battler pulls apart the news cycle, the commentariat, the national mood, and whatever fresh indignity has washed up on 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.
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 in the traditional sense. It is interested in being sharp, legible, funny, and occasionally correct in public.
If you like your political and cultural analysis with more hostility, more personality, and less starch, you’re in the right place.