A lost ship, A lost sailor, a lost identity. In November 1941 as war drew closer to Australia. the HMAS Sydney and its crew of 645 sailors disappeared off the Western Australian coast after being ambushed by a German raider. Months later the body of a sailor washed up on tiny Christmas Island and was laid to rest by locals. Half a century on this unknown sailor would help unravel the mystery of how the pride of Australia’s navy just vanished.
Jan 12, 2024•29 min
What if the only tool you had to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in WW1 was a homemade Ouija board? The story of a wild and elegant hoax concocted by two British soldier POWs to hoodwink their captors.
Jan 05, 2024•29 min
In 1768 when James Cook sailed from Tahiti looking for the great southern land, Tupaia, a traditional Polynesia navigator was on board. His knowledge proved invaluable to Cook and his sailing skills astounded the crew. What role did Tupaia actually play in the voyage and why haven't we heard heard about him?
Dec 29, 2023•29 min
March 1797. Five British sailors and 12 Indian seamen are shipwrecked off the Gippsland coast in Victoria The closest settlement is the penal colony of Port Jackson, over 700 km north - the men have no choice but to walk to Sydney. Two centuries later, historian Mark McKenna and naturalist John Blay retrace the sailors' steps, to re-imagine the journey and the cultural encounters with the original inhabitants on this country. This is one of Australia's greatest survival stories and cross cultura...
Dec 22, 2023•29 min
A young pilot. A distress call. A missing plane. What happened to Frederick Valentich in October 1978?
Dec 19, 2023•29 min
The story behind one of Australia's greatest con artists. In the late 1980s, when millions went missing from Victoria's National Safety Council, the man responsible, John Friedrich disappeared into thin air, and the media went wild.
Dec 08, 2023•29 min
Two stories about radio. In the past, radio was the most ephemeral of all media or art-forms. It's invisible, evanescent—it passes by the ear and is gone, yet radio can leave deep sound prints - memories of listening that can reverberate over decades. Plus, trying to unravel the secret behind one of the most popular radio shows of the 20th century, as a grandson tries to find out how his grandparents read people's minds. A story about magic,illusion and the creative power of radio....
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 16 min
The experiences of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who served in the Vietnam war have, until very recently, not been told. Hear the stories of two 20-year-old blokes who donned the ‘green skin’ and how it changed their lives forever.
Nov 24, 2023•25 min
With nothing to lose, Raymond Denning escapes Grafton prison in a rubbish bin. He has help from prisoner rights groups and an agenda to raise awareness about police corruption. The man-hunt for Denning turns farcical when he uses the media to make the police look foolish.
Nov 17, 2023•34 min
The story of one of Australia's most misunderstood criminals. After a traumatic childhood, Raymond Denning jumps from 'juvie' to jail. When an escape attempt goes wrong, a prison warder is critically injured and the finger is pointed at Denning.
Nov 10, 2023•29 min
Port Moresby 1942, and the story of the most extraordinary postal delivery, when hundreds of letters from Australian POWs of the Japanese fell from the sky .
Nov 04, 2023•29 min
The little known story of migrant camp that was home to over 60,000 people - single mothers and their children - in the years after World War II.
Oct 29, 2023•29 min
This is the story of - and the soundtrack to - one of the most influential instruments of the last 50 years. Meet the creators of the Fairlight, the super stars that used it and learn the tricks of the music production trade along the way.
Oct 21, 2023•32 min
Asbestos was once known as the wonder mineral. It's now banned in Australia. But before that happened, companies kept making and selling asbestos products despite mounting evidence of its deadly dust. Dusted, the human cost of mining in Australia is presented by Van Badham.
Oct 12, 2023•29 min
When a vast coal seam was found running through the escarpment around Wollongong it seemed that this beautiful place had got lucky. But had it? Van Badham heads back to her hometown and goes ‘on the coal’ with the miners. Dusted, the human cost of mining in Australia is presented by Van Badham.
Oct 06, 2023•29 min
Gold may have made Australia rich, but historians are now digging up evidence of the devastating consequences of the silica dust that surfaced with it. Dusted, the human cost of mining in Australia is presented by Van Badham.
Sep 29, 2023•29 min
Hidden for nearly a century, two chests of mail found under a Sydney home was declared to be one of the most important hauls in Australia’s postal history. Why the secrecy? And why has a Sydney family been so shocked by their revelations?
Sep 19, 2023•29 min
When journalist Annika Blau learnt of the discovery of two tea chests of very valuable mail under the floorboards of an old Sydney home, she uncovered secrets, silences and shame from a chapter of Australia's history some would prefer to forget.
Sep 15, 2023•29 min
The story of how the traditional custodians of Ooldea got their sacred water soak back and the healing of the land.
Sep 08, 2023•29 min
North west of Ooldea in South Australia's Great Victoria Desert is Maralinga where the British exploded seven nuclear bombs. This episode explores the Cold War politics behind the bomb tests and their ongoing impact on the traditional owners of the land, the Maralinga Tjarutja people..
Sep 01, 2023•32 min
Ooldea's most famous resident was Daisy Bates, also known as "Kabbarli" or grandmother. She lived at Ooldea for sixteen years in a tent, helping to feed and clothe Aboriginal people, but these days her reputation is very mixed.
Aug 25, 2023•42 min
On the edge of the Nullabor, Ooldea, with its ancient water soak "Yuldi Kapi", is one of the most important Aboriginal sites in Australia. Trading routes and dreaming stories crossed here for thousands of years, but then the transnational railway arrived in 1917.
Aug 18, 2023•32 min
Producer David Schulman has been on a quest – he’s been trying to find a single tree. David’s a violinist. And for him, violins aren’t just boxes made of wood – they’re magical objects. With voices and spirits that can seem almost human. Old violins even work as a sort of ‘time machine’ – by the sound they make and by their stories, they carry us back into the past.And it turns out there’s solid science behind this method of time travel.
Aug 11, 2023•28 min
Magdalene Laundries for "fallen women" date back to 12th century Europe. These were Catholic run institutions to reform "wayward" women known as Magdalens, through strict religious observance and hard work..
Aug 08, 2023•36 min
The achievements of Sidney Jeffryes, a radio operator on the 1911 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, have been notably missing from the polar records. In an era that celebrated physical heroism, vulnerability was not tolerated.
Aug 01, 2023•30 min
What if the most remarkable of all your ancestors was the one left off the family tree? Historian Kacey Sinclair and two of Fanny Finch’s direct descendants reconstruct and reflect on the life and legacy of a goldfields trailblazer, a woman of colour whose story was hidden for generations.
Jul 25, 2023•29 min
Millie Skoko had never really thought much about her Mum’s side of the family, who are Chinese Timorese, and who came to live in Australia in the early 1970s. Until one day, when she was online, Millie discovered her Grandfather’s former home and building, Toko Lay, in stories about the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, in December 1975. This discovery leads Millie, in tandem with her mum Lorraine, on a quest to uncover the hidden history of the Chinese-Timorese community in Timor-Leste and hea...
Jul 14, 2023•29 min
Growing up in the 1990s, Alan Weedon always wondered why he was one of many kids born to an Australian father and Filipina mother. It was a pattern replicated in the various backyard barbecues and play dates of his youth — where Filipino men were far and few between. Following the tragic death of his mother Jesusita in 2022, Alan, in his grief, decided to trace his Mum's story of coming to Australia. In doing so, he unravelled a great southern migration, where tens of thousands of Filipinas migr...
Jul 10, 2023•29 min
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 04, 2023•29 min
In 1945, Adolf Semler, a German World War One hero, was sent to a slave labour camp for refusing to denounce his Jewish wife Laya. In 2022, their great-grandchildren return to Germany to discover a town finally wrestling with the extent of its role in the Nazi regime.
Jun 23, 2023•29 min
