Jess O'Callaghan is one of the Features Executive Producers of All the Best. She makes radio at SYN and 3AW in Melbourne and FBi in Sydney, and also produces the Meanjin Podcast. She also writes for Right Now, Junkee and Something You Said, usually about politics or podcasts.
The theme of IWD in 2014 is Inspiring Change - tell us about one woman you think has inspired change in the world. Martha Gellhorn. She changed the way women were allowed to report on important things. She was a kick arse correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. She made Hemingway go to China during WW2 for their honeymoon, because she felt left out of war reporting. When he started to be a dick and became obsessed with taking his boat out to hunt for submarines she got her own tiny boat and set off around the Caribbean looking for subs to write about.
She wrote incredibly about poverty and conflict and sometimes when she was short on money she would go somewhere warm and write fluffy novels for weeks on end in the sun without wearing any clothes. She's inspired awesome women reporters for almost a century now. Marie Colvin used to read her leads before going to sleep at night ('War started at nine o'clock promptly') and this still makes me feel a little bad when I'm scrolling through Twitter just before bed.
