The rise of the Super Bilby
Ecologist Katherine Moseby is helping Australia's bilbies, quolls, and stick-nest rats evolve to become tougher, faster and stronger, so they can survive the looming threat of more than 2 million feral cats (R)

Ecologist Katherine Moseby is helping Australia's bilbies, quolls, and stick-nest rats evolve to become tougher, faster and stronger, so they can survive the looming threat of more than 2 million feral cats (R)
Mick O'Regan met his feisty and brilliant wife Jo for the first time on a work brigade in Nicaragua. They fell in love and had a beautiful baby boy. Then quite unexpectedly, when Jo was in her 50s, Mick became her carer
Darryl Jones on the dramatic lives of Australia's city-dwelling native birds
When David Hannan was a young man, he fled university and took a detour to the wild coral coast of WA where he became a lobster fisherman, before earning an Emmy for his underwater cinematography
Kylie Moore-Gilbert spent two years inside the Iranian prison system, secretly communicating with fellow women prisoners while she waited for news from Australia
Richard Flanagan was forever changed as a young man, when he was trapped for hours and almost drowned in an isolated stretch of river on Tasmania's wild west coast
Writer Kate Forsyth on how revisiting the story of a mythic Minotaur lurking in a labyrinth in Crete helped her realise that we all need monsters (R)
Zayd Dohrn’s parents were militant left-wing revolutionaries, and he was born while they were living underground, fugitives from the FBI (R)
Dr Merrick Ekins is Australia's leading expert in carnivorous sea sponges. Some sponges are secret killers, others are made up of glass and imprison tiny shrimp-like lovers for eternity, and others make love to themselves to reproduce
On a whim, Bruce Englefield bought a wildlife park in Tasmania and moved from across the other side of the world to make life better for Tasmanian Devils
The Danish-British author and comedian on her father's laissez faire attitude to school, and how this opened her mind and brought her to NASA's mission control room for the moon landing of 1969
From homeless teen to operatic stardom: how a job at the David Jones food hall changed the trajectory of Stephen Smith's life
In 2018, Shanelle Dawson's family were the subject of a hit true crime podcast which helped convict her father Chris Dawson of her mother's murder. Now she's reclaiming her own story and the story of her mother Lynette
Pip Williams was diagnosed with dyslexia as a teenager. She grew up to write a novel inspired by the history of the Oxford Dictionary, which soon became an international bestseller
Penny grew up consumed by catastrophic thoughts and developed habits to try to ward off impending doom. It turned out she had been living with obsessive compulsive disorder for 30 years Penny Moodie grew up consumed by catastrophic thoughts and ideas - that her parents would die in a car crash, that her mother was not really her mother, or that she had somehow contracted HIV aids. It's not unusual for children to worry about their parents and their own safety, but for Penny these anxieties went ...
Marine biologist Dr Edith Widder was inside a submersible searching for bioluminescence in the ocean depths when she saw a giant squid as big as a two story house (R)
Tony Wilson was always drawn to the world's great speeches. Then, without warning, he was called on to make the most difficult speech of his life (R)
How Jodie went from skateboarding in her home town of Albany to become a world surfing champion, frothing all the way. When Jodie Cooper was growing up the kids in her hometown of Albany in Western Australia raised money to build one of the world's first-ever skate parks. They named it the Snake Run, and a talented young Jodie shone on the track. Once she discovered surfing at the age of 16, she was hooked. By 19, she had turned Pro, and joined a host of remarkable women on the World Tour includ...
An unexpected DNA test result sent Penny Mackieson on a mission across the other side of the world, to find her real natural mother, and discover her identity
Dr Kira Westaway is a geochronologist who places modern and ancient humans in context by dating things found in caves. For Kira, how we understand ourselves now is tied up in the past (R)
Helen Pitt on how the luminous shells of the Sydney Opera House nearly didn't get off the drawing board
A chance encounter led Lovemore Ndou into his local boxing gym, and a lucky left hook became his ticket out of apartheid South Africa
Ben Gillies was a 15 year old drummer when Silverchair became a global sensation. After almost two decades of being a rock star, the band broke up, and Ben began to face his own demons
Lawyer and author David Gillespie has been on a mission to understanding psychopaths after realising he might have worked with one
Josh Niland on his mission to cook fish eyes, fish liver, and fish sperm to help revolutionise how we cook and eat fish Chef Josh Niland is devoted to changing ideas about how we cook and eat fish in the western world. He believes that rather than eating just the fillet, we should aim to eat the whole fish, as we do nose-to-tail with animals. At his restaurants he cooks with fish eyeballs, fish livers, fish heads, and milt (fish sperm). A big part of Josh's philosophy is about making fishing mor...
David Marr with the story of his great-great-grandfather Reg Uhr, who led murderous expeditions with the Native Police during Queensland’s frontier wars CW: mentions the names of Aboriginal people who have died
Diego Garcia-Bellido is a palaeontologist who specialises in soft-bodied fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago. These perfectly preserved eyes, guts and nervous systems provide a window into the beginning of our own family tree, and into life on Mars.
Robyn Davidson on her adventures high in the Himalayas, her love affair with an Indian prince, and her late in life reckoning with her own story (CW: mentions suicide)
Jessica is an orchestral conductor, organ virtuoso and also a synesthete who 'sees' colour in her mind's eye (R)
James O'Hanlon digs deep into the secret world of spiders; complex and tiny lives most of us are either unaware or afraid of