How a sheltered girl who grew up on a soldier settlement farm in country New South Wales grew up to become a feminist trailblazer
May 27, 2022•52 min
Ocean racing navigator Will Oxley first learned his trade through celestial navigation, using a sextant and the stars. He then began ocean racing around the world, and in 1998, he found himself upside down in a storm-wrecked Bass Strait (R)
May 26, 2022•53 min
Briana Blackett was a journalist working in Qatar when she realised her baby son Max wasn't responding to his name. When Max was diagnosed with autism, and in time her second son Freddy was too, she left Doha to begin an entirely different life
May 25, 2022•49 min
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
May 24, 2022•50 min
Art detective Arthur Brand met neo-Nazis, billionaire collectors and underground art dealers on his hunt for the two enormous bronze horse sculptures once owned by Hitler. It was all part of his quest to find the criminal masterminds attempting to sell the artwork on the black market (R) Arthur Brand is an art sleuth based in Amsterdam. His clients ask him to find stolen works of art, and to find out whether a painting or sculpture being sold on the black market is the real thing. One day, he re...
May 23, 2022•52 min
Wendy Liu has spent many years right up close to death. As a forensic counsellor she worked with families who had lost someone to an accident or violence, and as a grief counsellor she supports people surviving all kinds of losses. Wendy says her work brings her a keener appreciation of life
May 20, 2022•51 min
The folk singer on the songs in her blood and the intergenerational conflict between professional creativity and family
May 19, 2022•50 min
Avi Loeb was Harvard's top astronomer when he became intrigued by reports of a pancake-shaped object the size of a football field hurtling through our solar system (R)
May 18, 2022•52 min
Historian Gwynne Dyer on his search to understand whether war is embedded in human nature, and why things are changing, despite the world becoming less violent over the past seven decades Is war embedded in human nature? Historian Gwynne Dyer has faced this question during a career serving in the navies of three countries: Canada, the US and the UK. He says that although war has come to Ukraine, the truth is that the world has been getting less war-like for many decades. Gwynne is the author of ...
May 17, 2022•51 min
Anita Jacoby has spent decades uncovering the truth about other people, but when she turned the lens on her own father, she was shocked Anita Jacoby has won awards for her excellence in journalism, uncovering the truth about people and places for almost 40 years from behind the television camera. But a chance encounter at a dinner party a few years ago forced her to turn the lens on her own family. What she discovered about her father, Phillip, was painful and extraordinary. And what she thought...
May 16, 2022•50 min
A donation of land and $10 was all Australian-born Gemma needed to establish The School of St Jude in Tanzania (R)
May 13, 2022•55 min
Tom Tilley was raised in a loving Pentecostal family, but as he grew up he began to question the church's teachings, especially when it came to speaking in tongues
May 12, 2022•53 min
When teacher and actor Ned Manning lost his mother when he was 12 years old, he knew little about her life. So as an adult, he set off to re-imagine the life she shared with his father through WWII
May 11, 2022•44 min
From dodgy marathon runners to table tennis stars who 'dope' their paddles, there are few sports which can claim immunity from cheating
May 10, 2022•52 min
Louisa Lim with a history of the city of Hong Kong, including the true story of Tsang Tsou Choi, the 1950s graffiti artist who became a cultural icon
May 09, 2022•55 min
He's one of the world's most acclaimed opera stars, but Teddy Tahu Rhodes did everything he could, for a very long time, to avoid his destiny on stage
May 06, 2022•51 min
Wildlife biologist Jonathan Slaght on his adventurous quest to save the rare, shaggy fish owls of Russia's Far East (R)
May 05, 2022•51 min
Maggie grew up around boys, then raised four sons of her own. Now she helps parents understand the changes teenage boys are going through as they cross the bridge from boyhood to manhood (R)
May 04, 2022•52 min
Dr Irving Finkel on the ghosts who joined the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians in their day to day lives
May 03, 2022•51 min
Jackie Huggins with the story of her father Jack, who was a surf lifesaver, a rugby league player, a soldier taken prisoner in the Fall of Singapore, and the first Indigenous Australian to work in the post office
May 02, 2022•51 min
Tony spent three decades in and out of jail for property crimes and safecracking. When he joined an unusual club inside Hobart's Risdon Prison, he found his voice for the first time. Then a few years ago, on a fishing trawler far out to sea, he began the painful process of changing his life Tony Bull grew up across the road from Hobart's Risdon Prison. As child he started running with a crowd of boys who stole money for the woodman and the milkman from people's front doorsteps. In late primary s...
Apr 29, 2022•49 min
Writer Sylvie Bigar thought her assignment was simple — cover the history of cassoulet, a French ancestral dish. What she discovered was a world of passion, disagreement and her own family's complicated tale
Apr 28, 2022•47 min
Ever since he was a boy, Paul Pritchard has been fascinated with climbing rocks. His compulsion took a terrible and beautiful turn on a matchstick of rock that sticks out of the Southern Ocean in Tasmania
Apr 27, 2022•51 min
How the Royal Australian Navy's top chaplain lost his faith
Apr 26, 2022•51 min
Tom Gilling with the story of how a Scottish-born soldier named Jock McLaren became one of Australia's greatest World War II guerrilla fighters (R)
Apr 25, 2022•51 min
Betty O'Neill's father disappeared when she was a baby. Decades later, she opened a suitcase in Poland to find a series of clues to his secret life (R)
Apr 22, 2022•53 min
The US crime novelist on his unlikely career progression, and how he uses his books as a way of showing the human stories behind the headlines of the opioid epidemic in America
Apr 21, 2022•52 min
Di Morrissey grew up in a tiny village on the water, only accessible by rowboat, with film star Chips Rafferty and poet Dorothea Mackellar as her neighbours. When she was a young woman, a tragedy on the bay altered her life (R)
Apr 20, 2022•52 min
Dr Maddy McAllister's job as a marine archaeologist involves diving into the deep to uncover the artefacts and human stories sunk in shipwrecks
Apr 19, 2022•53 min
How a former ballerina revolutionised Australia's dance landscape (R)
Apr 18, 2022•49 min
