An Object in Time | The Ball
The Carbolic Smoke Ball was touted as a miracle cure for all kinds of illnesses that were rife in the 1890s. It never actually cured anything, but what it did do was change the law forever.
Nov 29, 2022•30 min
ABC Rewind
The History Listen is now ABC Rewind, the home of gripping narrative history series. Dive into true stories told by the people who lived through them.
Last refreshed: ⓘ
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Podcasts are better in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
Episodes
An Object in Time | The Potato
The humble potato is not just a lump of carbohydrate: it tells the story of how food, so essential to life, is also central to politics. This is the story of how the potato became a weapon.
Nov 22, 2022•30 min
An Object in Time | The Briefcase
The story of briefcase that almost killed Hitler in 1944, how it was stopped only by a misplaced table leg, and the fate of the man at the heart of the assassination plot.
Nov 15, 2022
Fitzroyalty — a short history of Brunswick Street
In the 1980s & '90s, an influx of artists and creative types changed the face of Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, in inner-city Fitzroy. What was once a humble industrial shopping strip transformed into a bustling hive of creativity, full of cafes, bars, art and music.
Nov 08, 2022
Snapshots
A chance discovery of a bag of old photographs leads two Asian-Australian artists, Mayu Kanamori and William Yang, to explore their histories.
Oct 30, 2022•30 min
No way back - the coolies of Christmas Island
In the early years of the twentieth century thousands of poor Chinese workers crossed the seas to a tiny dot in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Christmas Island was rich in phosphate, and when a British owned mine company set up on the island it needed workers. They came to seek their fortune and instead struck tragedy, as most of these men would never return home to China.
Oct 25, 2022•30 min
Hume and Hovell and the pathfinders
In 1824 Hamilton Hume and William Hovell with 6 convicts began an expedition south-west of Sydney into the unknown. Governor Brisbane wanted to find an inland route from Sydney all the way to Bass Strait. The country however was neither unknown nor uninhabited. Hamilton Hume's friendship with and assistance from local Aboriginal groups throughout the journey enabled the opening up of some of the most pristine land in New South Wales and Victoria
Oct 18, 2022
Operation Copperhead or ' I was Monty's Double'
The D-Day landings in 1944 involved a lot of planning, deception, and in one case as comedic as it was dangerous, a bloke from Perth. An outlandish wartime caper that ended up on the silver screen.
Oct 11, 2022•30 min
Impostors: If it's endangered, we want it
Ecology didn’t exist in the nineteenth century. So, when, where, and how did it first begin in Australia?
Oct 04, 2022
Impostors: If it lives, we want it
In the 1860s, a group of well-intentioned settlers introduced animals from overseas, hoping they would thrive in Australia. Many did. Too many.
Sep 27, 2022•29 min
Play your way to happiness
It was the Great Depression in Australia. People dreamt of a paradise, an escape from Nowheresville. And they found it, gathering on the beaches of coastal cities and crowding halls in country towns - to play Hawaiian steel guitar. Historian Robyn Annear discovers what drove thousands of Australians to learn this unlikely instrument?
Sep 20, 2022
The Confidence Men
What if the only tool you had to escape from a WWI Turkish prison camp was a homemade Ouija board?
Sep 13, 2022
Queen Elizabeth II and Australians
Daniel Browning presents this special tribute to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, looking at the relationship she had with Australians; from the adoration she was shown in the 1954 tour to her extensive Aboriginal art collection and the way so many Australian women saw her as a role model. Guests: Jane Connors, Historian. Juliet Rieden, Editor-at-large of The Australian Women's Weekly
Sep 09, 2022•32 min
The Loveday Trilogy Part 3 | Miyakatsu Koike
The story of a stoic, humane and wise man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sep 06, 2022
The Loveday Trilogy Part 2 | Francesco Fantin
The tragic tale of a man sent to a detention camp where he was surrounded by his political enemies.
Aug 30, 2022
The Loveday Trilogy Part 1 | Oskar Speck
The story of one man's mind-bendingly long kayak journey that lead to an Australian Detention camp in World War 2.
Aug 23, 2022
Maiden's Eucalypts
This story is set on Worimi and Biripi country in the year 1894 The avid colonial botanist Joseph Maiden is making a trip through the forests around the NSW towns of Stroud and Gloucester, recording every tree, leaf, and plant he encounters in meticulous detail in his journal. 130 years later historian Jodi Frawley re-traces Maiden's journey, using his original records as a guide.
Aug 16, 2022
Inexpressible Island
The little known story of perhaps the greatest endurance feat in Antarctic history. The survival of Robert Falcon Scott's Northern Party in the winter of 1912.
Aug 09, 2022•28 min
The man with the wooden shotgun
Britta Jorgensen grew up hearing many tales about her great Uncle Keith Byson, whose life sounded like something out of a children's story book - that he was a hermit who lived in a shack on a deserted island in the Great Barrier Reef, warding off strangers with a wooden shotgun, and who got around in his underwear. Years after his death Britta heads to her uncle's island home, to try and sort out the truth from the tall tales
Aug 02, 2022•26 min
Finding Harry Valentine
Hidden family truths are discovered as two sisters follow the trail of their late fathers' secret life.
Jul 26, 2022•29 min
First port of asylum
On the night Dai Le was elected to Federal Parliament as an Independent she was remembering being a frightened 10 years old, out in the open sea, escaping Vietnam in a boat. For The History Listen Dai returns to the place she first landed, Hong Kong, looking for traces of the refugee camp where she lived, worked in factories and like so many thousands, waited for a visa to The West.
Jul 19, 2022•29 min
Fanny Smith: Icon
In 1899, twenty-three years after her people were declared ‘extinct’, Fanny Smith made a revolutionary recording where she announced to the world that she was The Last Tasmanian. Far from ‘extinct’, she was a proud Aboriginal woman raising her eleven children and publicly singing and speaking her Pakana language. This is her extraordinary story.
Jul 12, 2022•29 min
The Friendship Spitfire: Jack Dawson Green's WW2 story
A story of swagger, bravery, skill and ultimately, friendship, set on the frontline of war
Jul 05, 2022•29 min
Acting on a High Wire - a short history of television drama
From the very first night that ABC television beamed into loungerooms around Australia, it offered audiences live drama, initially plays and then serials. The story of the generation of pioneers who helped to create a new art form, shake off the cultural shackles of England, and pave the way for the Australian television which went on to conquer the world.
Jun 28, 2022•29 min
Too Old To Run - the Drug Grannies ep 2
In the summer of 1978, Australian narcotics agents intercepted a campervan being unloaded on the Melbourne docks. What they discovered inside the van turned out to be the largest haul of an illicit substance, black hashish, to land on Australian soil at the time. The campervan belonged to two elderly American women tourists, whose overseas holiday odyssey quickly spiralled into a hellish nightmare.
Jun 21, 2022•29 min
Too Old To Run - the Drug Grannies ep 2
In the summer of 1978, Australian narcotics agents intercepted a campervan being unloaded on the Melbourne docks. What they discovered inside the van turned out to be the largest haul of an illicit substance, black hashish, to land on Australian soil at the time. The campervan belonged to two elderly American women tourists, whose overseas holiday odyssey quickly spiralled into a hellish nightmare.
Jun 21, 2022•29 min
Too Old To Run - the Drug Grannies ep 1
In the summer of 1978, narcotics agents discovered the largest ever haul of illicit drugs to land in Australia, stashed inside a campervan belonging to two elderly American women tourists. But were these women truly drug smugglers or naive puppets in an elaborate plot masterminded by someone else?
Jun 14, 2022•29 min
A Day at the Beach - Wanda 1982
Were you at the Wanda gig in 1982? It's forty years since Triple J hosted a free outdoor concert on Sydney's Wanda Beach, where a massive crowd turned up to see the bands whose music defined an era, and who changed the sound of Australian rock forever
Jun 07, 2022•29 min
Rottnest Island: White playground
How did the largest deaths in custody site in Australia become a tourist mecca?
May 31, 2022•29 min
Rottnest Island: Black prison
The dark history of Western Australia’s idyllic holiday playground.
May 24, 2022•29 min
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android