Nas Campanella was six months old when she lost her sight. She fell in love with the radio and audio books as a child, growing up to become one of Australia's most well-known TV and radio journalists (R)
Dr Aaron Camens studies the fossilised skeletons, footprints and soft tissue left behind by strange, alien-like behemoths, to work out how they lived, and what, or who, killed them
Artist Michael Kelly's younger sister was born with intellectual disabilities in the 1950s, and went into care. The family lost touch with her until Michael decided it was time to find her again. Michael Kelly has been an artist all his life. When he was a young boy living in Brisbane, his younger sister was born with intellectual disabilities. She was institutionalised and the family eventually lost contact with her. That severed connection was a wound for the whole family, and followed Michael...
Janty Blair is a Butchulla, Mununjhali and Woppaburra woman who, after a lifetime of nursing and midwifery, discovered her funny bone in her late 50s, after a serendipitous Bumble date
Dr John Paterson grew up in a tin hut in rural Darwin. He helped hold it down during Cyclone Tracy and has taken care of it so it still stands today. John learnt many lessons in that tin hut, which have followed him through life
When his elders named him Bindi, David Hudson had no idea his future would involve performing with his didgeridoo at the Taj Mahal, or a role in a film starring Marlin Brando (Content warning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners: this episode contains the name of someone who has died.) Western Yalanji and Ewamian man David Bindi Hudson is a performing artist and musician. His parents were born on Mona Mona mission, near Cairns. David's mother didn't like being told what to do, and...
Yuwaalaraay writer, storyteller and performer, Nardi Simpson of the Stiff Gins talks about her life, art and the meaning of country (R)
Ken Wyatt was born at Roelands Mission in outback WA, where his mother had been taken as a small girl, after she was stolen from her family. More than 60 years later, he became Australia's first Indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt was born at Roelands Mission in outback WA, where his mother had been taken as a small girl, after she was stolen from her family. More than 60 years later, he became Australia's first Indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt has Ya...
Paula Quintela was seven years old when she witnessed Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile. She broke up the darkness by becoming her country's champion ocean swimmer and an artist
Playwright Alana Valentine on the story of the radical minister, Ted Noffs, who married thousands of couples who weren’t accepted anywhere else, including Alana’s own mum
Since she was a child, Michelle Johnston has tried to satisfy her insatiable curiosity about the world and the people in it. Most recently, her questions took her to a mysterious part of Russia called Dagestan, where mountains claw at the sky and time stands still
Mark Pitts needed to find peace after a hard life in the rugby and boxing worlds. So he went back to the airstrip that his aviator grandfather made famous when he flew home from England for love, breaking a world record in the process
For more than 20 years, Dominic Gordon cycled through the same self-destructive behaviours - stealing, risky sexual encounters, vandalism and drug-use -until he took the biggest risk of all to get his life back
When there's a plane crash, a bomb blast, a flood or a pandemic, Lucy Easthope's phone starts ringing. This is how she stays cheerful and trusts her gut in the face of never-ending disasters
Ben Lee was a teen rock prodigy by the time he was 14. He then began decades of making music, Hollywood fame, and a journey into alternative spirituality, including the world of ayahuasca Ben Lee grew up in Bondi in the 1980s when it was a place of bikie gangs, Yiddish-speaking grandmas and tribes of kids living next to one of the world's most beautiful beaches. He was educated at a local Jewish school where he confounded his Rabbi by asking some surprising questions about Moses. Ben was always ...
After Richard Gosling's young daughter survived horrific injuries and open heart surgery, he became a funeral director, leaning into the emotional intensity of that space between life and death
John Lyons, the ABC's Global Affairs Editor, reflects on the Israel-Gaza war, drawing on his background as former Middle East correspondent for The Australian
A change of heart and a great romance drove Dr Paul Hardisty to walk away from the oil industry and the influence of his brilliant but violent father, and into the world of water
Tim Jarvis takes you on his adventures, following in the footsteps of explorer Ernest Shackleton, who tried valiantly to cross Antarctica from sea to sea, from 1914-17 (R)
Leila Jeffreys was a young photographer when she built a tiny studio specifically for birds. She then began taking heart-stopping images of budgies, owls, eagles and cockatoos
Avani Dias was working as the South Asia Correspondent for the ABC when she was forced out of India after her reporting fell foul of the Indian government
Neurosurgeon Brindha Shivalingam says it is a privilege to go into someone’s brain and repair the body's most vital organ. She didn’t expect to become the patient in 2019
Michael Theo found unexpected fame on 'Love on the Spectrum'. Now he's realised a childhood dream: to become an actor
Phil Roope with a true crime saga from 1930s Sydney involving a tiger shark, a severed arm, a Gladstone bag, smuggled cocaine, and a wronged man (CW: graphic descriptions) On Anzac Day in 1935, a tiger shark vomited up a tattooed human arm inside a Sydney aquarium. When Phil Roope looked into the cold case he found an astounding true tale of Sydney's fascination and horror around sharks in the 1930s, a severed arm emblazed with boxing tattoos, a homicide, police corruption, a Gladstone Bag, and ...
Juliana Nkrumah survived ill treatment at the hands of her stepmother, growing up in Ghana, and got away with a warning from the Mugabe regime when she was teaching in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. And she is still the same girl who was too shy to look her husband in the eyes the first time they met
Why do we all feel "funny" about zoos? And should we? Dr Jenny Gray is the CEO of Zoos Victoria, and an ethicist fascinated by concepts like liberty and free will in the animal kingdom
The late Michael Mosley on his investigations into the complicated and fascinating world of our gut health and the human microbiome (R)
For a thousand years, Colditz Castle has sat on the edge of a cliff in eastern Germany. It has been a royal hunting lodge, a madhouse, and most famously an inescapable prisoner of war camp (R)
Thriller writer Louise Doughty on spycraft, trench coats and her Romany roots
When Kerstin Pilz discovered that her charming husband Gianni had been cheating on her while he was dying, she had to decide what to do next When Kerstin Pilz was in her 40s, she fell madly in love with a charismatic Italian man named Gianni. The two married and began travelling the world together. Then Gianni suddenly fell ill. As he was in the hospital undergoing surgery for life-threatening cancer, Kerstin discovered her husband was not the man she thought he was. Further information Loving m...
