The First Dismissal – Part One: The Last Days of Jack Lang

In March 1912, Australia was stunned to learn that Koombana was missing in nearly identical circumstances to Yongala. In this final episode, we look at how good and bad luck again decided who lived an...

29 Sep 57min

Alongside Yongala, the Adelaide Steamship Company prided itself on its luxury vessel Koombana, designed especially to work the Western Australian coast. But this was a seemingly cursed vessel, where a...

27 Sep 1h 4min

In March 1911, with the loss of the ship Waratah still fresh in memory, a big passenger liner went missing in a cyclone off northern Queensland. As a massive search began, Australia tried to believe t...

24 Sep 48min

I’m re-releasing this short as background for the new miniseries, Mysteries of the Sea.In July 1909, the world wondered what had become of the SS Waratah, last seen off coast of South Africa with more...

24 Sep 21min

This week marks the 70th anniversary of regular television broadcasting in Australia. Channel Nine recently 'recreated' the 'Good Evening and Welcome to Television' moment in a fakes-over-facts promo ...

15 Sep 19min

Blackbirding – A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade. We talk about the practices and policies that led to a staggering death toll – and how we don’t remember because our forgetting was engineer...

7 Sep 49min

Dr James Patrick Murray kidnaps and kills more people, and goes mad and is nearly murdered himself, before returning to Australia to be acclaimed as a saviour during a smallpox outbreak. But the hero ...

7 Sep 1h 5min

Dr James Patrick Murray takes the brig Carl to the sunny South Seas and into a heart of darkness beyond the imagination of even Joseph Conrad. In this nightmare of his creation, shooting dozens of def...

6 Sep 52min