Hindsight
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The Character and situation of Christina Stead
Christina Stead did not enjoy being interviewed. Yet, as one of Australia's greatest novelists she was asked to front up to the media again and again. Indeed there is so much of her in the national archives that we've been able to construct a broadcast version of Christina Stead in her own words.
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Who killed Norman Brown?
The story of the 1929 lockout of miners at Rothbury Colliery in the NSW Hunter Valley is a milestone in Australia's industrial history.
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Public Intimacies: The Royal Commission on Human...
Women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the so-called ‘permissive society' - this story charts the groundbreaking and controversial government inquiry into the social changes of the 1970s.
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Vietnam Retrospect - Patrol from Da Nang
To mark Anzac Day, a rare chance to hear an eyewitness account of the Vietnam War. In 1966, ABC reporter Tim Bowden joined a US Marine Unit, on a night patrol, out from the town of Da Nang.
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An older kind of magic*: a history of the School Magazine
The School Magazine is Australia's oldest literary magazine, and it's the oldest literary magazine for children anywhere in the world. It began in 1916 as a free publication for NSW primary school children, with the noble aim of presenting Australian writers for Australian children.
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Good Sex - The Confessions and Campaigns of W.J. Chidley
A century ago, Australian sex reformer William Chidley was locked up for speaking openly about a taboo subject, and ultimately died in Callan Park Mental Hospital in 1916. But the moral outrage he provoked was largely to do with the kind of sex he advocated. It’s also what prompted later historians to call Chidley a ‘true feminist’.
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Charity and Justice
The Early days of the Benevolent Society in Sydney
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In Defeat We'll Always Try: the death of the Fitzroy...
This is a story all about the game, and the hard-core business, of the code once known as Aussie Rules. It may have slipped from public memory, but it remains a bitter pill in the hearts of some followers of one football team. In 2011, the AFL signed a $1.25 billion television rights deal - so it's hard to imagine that, a little over a decade ago, a debt of a few million dollars was enough to send one of Australian football's foundation clubs under. But that's what happened to the Fitzroy...
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A Sister of Mercy: my aunt's story
The Sisters of Mercy is a Catholic religious order of nuns that was founded by a wealthy heiress Catherine McAuley in Dublin in 1831.
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Faust's Ghost
In 1888, Federici, the singer playing the part of Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, died on stage while descending into hell. And his ghost has haunted Melbourne's Princess Theatre ever since. So, is it foolhardy to make a bargain with the devil, or should Faust go to heaven in the end? Would that relieve the ghost of its anxious haunting?
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Inside Robbers Cave
This story takes you into the heart of one of social psychology’s most famous experiments. In 1954 in Oklahoma, Turkish-American psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought 2 groups of 11-year-old boys to a summer camp. What they didn’t know and what they were never told, was that their behaviour over the next 3 weeks would be studied, analysed, discussed and used in theories about war, inter racial conflict and prejudice for generations to come.
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Warburton stories
Warburton or Milyirrtjarra Community is in the Ngaanyatjarra lands in the Gibson Desert, and is one of the most remote places on the continent.
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Paper Trail
Sex, politics, rock’n’roll and printer’s ink. Following the paper trail through four independent papers of the 70s and 80s: Daily Planet/Planet, The Digger, Nation Review and RAM (Rock Australia Magazine).
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The Road Warriors
When it comes to stupid and potentially dangerous behaviour, nothing can match the combination of young men, cars, booze and summer heat. Three old friends, Luke, Andrew and Justin have a story they've been telling at parties and pubs for years ,about a chaotic and violent car chase they found themselves in, as they were heading home from a motocross race, outside Sydney one hot summer’s day, when they were 17 years old.
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Tit for Tat - the story of Sandra Willson
What drove a 20-year-old woman to shoot dead an innocent stranger on a remote coastal road in Sydney's south in April 1959?
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The Scott Sisters - art and nature in colonial NSW
Harriet and Helena Scott are two if Australia's most skilled natural history artists. They became the pre-eminent illustrators of flora and fauna in late 19th century Australia, and in 1868, they were awarded honorary membership to the NSW Entomological Society.- rare recognition for women in this period.
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The Spirit of Pan
Sydney Long's distinctive poetic landscapes of nymphs, naiads and pipe players are permanently on display in all major Australian Galleries. His distinctive Art Nouveau style set him apart form his contemporaries (Roberts, McCubbin and Streeton) with his pictures being strongly influenced by the European Romantic and Symbolist movements in literature and music. He presented new poetic and at times controversial depictions of the Australian landscape.
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Frank the Poet: A convict's tour to hell
August 2012 marks the 151st anniversary of the death of Francis MacNamara, better known in convict Australia as Frank the Poet. According to one of Australia's leading contemporary poets, Les Murray, MacNamara's epic work A Convict's Tour to Hell should be placed right at the beginning of English literature in Australia.
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The Tashkent Ark
In the summer of 1941, almost two years after the German invasion of Poland triggered the start of the Second World War, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This invasion in turn prompted the Soviet authorities to initiate an evacuation of their civilian population. Over the course of the months which followed, Soviet authorities transported people away from the western war fronts into the relative safety of their eastern lands. The Urals, Siberia, the Middle Volga, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan...
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Compromise and Confrontation: Senator Neville Bonner
The 1970s were a turbulent period in Australian politics and a high-point in the struggle for Indigenous rights and justice. Huge political energy pulsed through the Aboriginal movement following the success of the 1967 Referendum. But the first Indigenous person to sit in Federal Parliament didn’t come from the radical urban Aboriginal activist movement. He came from Queensland.
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The monastery and the observatory
The connection between religious thought and science wasn’t only a 17th century preoccupation. It continues to this day.
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Capturing Venus
As all eyes turn to the sky to watch the 2012 transit of Venus across the face of the sun, Hindsight takes a look at the history of this extraordinary astronomical event.
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Citizen in the republic of the arts: Lucien Henry
The story of a young Frenchman who survived the Paris Commune of 1871, and became part of the colourful political ferment in 19th century Sydney.
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Pig City
In the late 1970s Brisbane was known to the rest of Australia as a big country town, and on the surface it was a citadel of conservative rural Australian values.
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Search for the Kuda
The legend of Indonesian punk band The Kuda looms large in the history of the generation of young people during the 1970s and early `1980s, and stretched all the way from Jakarta to Brisbane. But did they really exist, or were they a figment of collective musical imagination?
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Queenie, Choi and friends: 150 years at the Melbourne Zoo
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Melbourne Zoo in its location at Royal Park, part of the green ring which surrounds the city. Australia's oldest zoo, the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens opened to the public in 1862, part of the city's boom time grandiloquence, and a mark of its growing urban cosmopolitanism.
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Timor's Lost Generation
Children who were removed from East Timor by the Indonesian occupiers return to find their families and their identities.
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May Gibbs: Queen of the Gumnuts
In the lead-up to the centenary of the fictional characters known as the Gumnut babies, the life story of their creator, May Gibbs
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Remembrance Day: Dene Barrett Fry
Dene Barrett Fry of Lindfield, Sydney, New South Wales was born in Lewisham, Sydney, and was a demonstrator of biology at Sydney University, aged 21, when he enlisted on 14 May 1915. He embarked from Sydney on board HMAT A67 Orsova, on 14 July 1915 and served with the 3rd Battalion in France. On Remembrance Day, we present an excerpt of his letter to his mother, telling her of the death of his brother. It’s a heavy duty for him, and a deeply sad thing for a mother to read, particularly as...
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We will remember them
Even though many were denied basic freedoms and other citizenship rights it's now estimated that 800 Aboriginal men served in the First World War, from Gallipoli to the Light Horse in Egypt and even the Australian Tunnelling Company on the Western Front. A special tribute to mark Remembrance Day.
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Guilty Landscape
World War One started nearly a hundred years ago. Known as the great war, the death toll was epic: ten million soldiers dead in just four years. Over two million of them alone died on the Western Front near Ypres, and the once-lush landscape of Flanders, in what’s now Belgium, was completely devastated. Not a living tree or blade of grass survived. You’ve probably seen the iconic photos of the front lines reduced to a mess of mud and metal by years of incessant bombing and artillery fire....
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Australian Music Month: Bunna Lawrie
Bunna shares his story about their most famous song, 'Black Boy', released in 1984.
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Australian Music Month: Joan Carden
Joan Carden talks about her aria ' strano!...Ah! fors lui' from Verdi’s La Traviata (ABC recording) being used in the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
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Sunbury 1972
It was fabulous to just be wandering around with ten-thousand young people out of parental control, out of my head and over the limit.
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Elena's story: A Russian Australian love affair
Russian-born Elena Govor was a teenager in the USSR in the 1970s when a chance encounter with a collection of Australian short stories ignited a passion that changed the course of her life. A student project about Australia led to the uncovering of thousands of Russian publications about Australia—articles, reports, poems and memoirs—from the first naval visits in the 19th century to a denunciation of the Australian Labor Party by Lenin in the 20th century.
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The Cinema of Distraction: the Australian drive-in
In February 1954 the first drive-in opened in Australia, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Burwood. Within two years, drive-in cinemas had sprung up in cities and country towns all over the country, as Australians embraced this new form of leisure that combined their twin passions for the cinema and the car. This feature explores the social changes that took place in Australia in the post war decades, which provided the backdrop for the popularity of drive-in cinema, where 'the comfort lay in...
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Number 96
Number 96 made its debut on Australian television in March 1972,and was promoted by Channel 0 (the precursor for Network 10) as 'the night Australian TV lost its virginity'. Forty years later, this feature tunes back in to the television series that broke new ground—not just about how television was made but, most memorably, about what audiences in Australia could watch. Set in a fictional apartment block, Number 96 became incredibly popular, as Australian audiences, across the five-year...
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The Forest Man: EHF Swain
His was a vision of an Australia blanketed by forests which could provide all our economic, social and material needs.
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Life on the River
A sound voyage along the Brisbane River. On the way we travel with Solo Kayakers and take a ride on the River Queen II paddle-wheeler past historic Kangaroo Point and new riverside developments.
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More Foul the Tunnel's Breath
At the turn of the twentieth century, the mining industry was booming throughout Australia, and the state of Tasmania was no exception. On the island’s remote west coast, towns grew around the mines, railways were laid and port facilities built.
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Father Cares: the last of Jonestown
As part of RN's 'Perfect Worlds' special focus—a chilling and visceral portrait of utopian idealism’s dark counterpoint—dystopia.
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Message in a Bottle
The extraordinary story of Frank and Breda, an American GI and an Irish milkmaid who 'met' via a message in a bottle. After six years of letters, and with the world's press watching, they finally met in person in August 1952 and their lives would never be the same again.
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CJ Dennis, through the eyes of his wife
CJ Dennis is best known for his 1915 verse novelThe Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. It sold 66,000 copies within eighteen months of its first publication, extraordinary even by today’s standards. It made Dennis famous, and made him one of the few poets in Australia to earn a living from his craft.
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A Short History of Torture
This feature examines the history of the gruesome practice of torture and asks if it's getting more prevalent, and why?
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The Port Chicago 50
The story of the worst home front disaster of World War Two -- an ammunition explosion that killed more than 300 men -- and what happened to the 50 African-American men who refused to go back to work loading ammunition after the explosion. On July 17, 1944, two Liberty ships anchored at the Port Chicago Munitions Case near San Francisco exploded, killing 320 men and injuring 390. It was the worst home front disaster of World War II. A majority of the casualties were African-American sailors...
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Cap #4074: the Joyce Barry story
When Joyce Barry was selected as one of the first women tram driver trainees in 1956, she could hardly have imagined that it would take 19 years to make it into the driver’s cab. First, she had to overcome prejudice and male privilege before a wave of feminism finally helped propel her to the controls in 1975. At the time, she famously declared, 'I don’t need a penis to drive a bloody tram!'.
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Where the Stories Come From
On Wiradjuri country,400 kilometres west of Sydney, the settlement of Wellington was established in 1823. Since then, the history of the Wellington Valley has encompassed convicts, missionaries, farmers and gold seekers. Each group of newcomers came with new government policies and new ways of using the land- laws and activities that irrevocably changed the lives of the Aboriginal people who lived there.
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Prudes, Pervs, and Paper Tigers
It might seem strange to us now, but for more than fifty years, Australians were not able to read whatever they liked, including many great works of literature, because the government actively banned books: hundreds of works were barred, as they were considered likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’. But by the early 1970s a vocal alliance of publishers, readers, authors and radicals decided they’d had enough of being told what we could and couldn’t read, and the battle to end censorship began.
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Afterimages: Carol Jerrems through a lens
A multifaceted portrait of the young and gifted Australian photographer Carol Jerrems, whose dazzling portfolio of candid yet artfully composed portraits was emblematic of the 1970s.
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Frank the Poet: A convict's tour to hell
August 2012 marks the 151st anniversary of the death of Francis MacNamara, better known in convict Australia as Frank the Poet. According to one of Australia's leading contemporary poets, Les Murray, MacNamara's epic work A Convict's Tour to Hell should be placed right at the beginning of English literature in Australia.
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Momento Mori
Jude Fletcher discovered that some members of her family enjoy a strange pastime—they like to take photographs of dead loved ones. As odd as this may seem, photographing the dead, ormemento mori, was popular in the 19th century.To try and understand the fondness for this faded tradition, Jude opened up the family albums, and asked her relatives—why?
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Parricide! A murder close to home
When Frank Walworth killed his abusive father in New York in 1873 the murder wasn’t just shocking. The parricide exposed the underbelly of domestic violence in respectable society and it raised concerns about the decline of patriarchal authority in Victorian America.
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The Young Ones: Bodgies and Widgies
A music-driven ride back to the years following World War Two, which saw the emergence of a distinct youth sub-culture in Australia.
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Mrs Parker
In the winter of 1954 two schoolgirls—Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme—brutally murdered Pauline’s mother on a remote walking track in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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The idealists: creating Castlecrag
The spectacular Sydney harbour-side suburb of Castlecrag was home to the early 20th century Arts and Crafts movement in Australia. Theosophists and Anthroposophists, bushwalkers and sybarites, Nazi sympathisers and Communists all rubbed shoulders, as they strove to make their beliefs flesh – or stone or brick – and live according to them.
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Madness and Modernity
In the early years of the 20th century lunatic asylums around the globe were transformed by the arrival of more modern ideas about mental health. Today we examine how these changes were played out in Australia and trace the influence of Freudian thinking in the wider community.
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A Stitch in time: dressmaking in Australia
Before the advent of cheap ready-to-wear clothing mass-produced in offshore factories, dressmaking was an essential and versatile skill in women's lives, something they could deploy to feel like a million dollars, or use to earn a dollar or two. This feature probes the role of dressmaking in the lives of Australian women across the generations, as a domestic economic strategy, a female accomplishment, an aspect of technical education, a livelihood.
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Emperor for Life: Killoran's Queensland
In the middle of the night, Aboriginal families living on the Queensland mission of Mapoon were rounded up by police. Their houses were burnt down. They were forced onto a boat and shipped to another reserve at the top of Cape York. This is not some long-ago frontier tale—this happened in November 1963.
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Country of the Mind: Voss and Leichhardt
A road journey into the North Simpson Desert in search of traces of a lost explorer, whose presence can be felt in Patrick White's novel Voss, and in the landscape of Australia's dead heart.
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The Townhouse
The Sebel Townhouse in Sydney's Elizabeth Bay was one of the world's great rock and roll hotels.
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Corporate tales
If you’re looking for a good gripping and compelling read you probably don’t head to the business section of the bookshop for a hefty corporate history. Yet often the stories behind companies—and the research that goes into them—tell us fascinating tales of intrigue, politics and history, and much about our economic and social world.
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The Gentlemen's Club
In the early 1970s, a number of key social and political movements emerged in Australia, including second-wave feminism. With more women entering paid employment, the big push, in this early period of the women's movement, was over equality and the end of gender based discrimination. These issues were at the heart of a stoush, in 1971, when a group of women journalists took on their own profession, in a symbolic fight over gender equality; which included the right to order a beer at the bar...
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Watering the West
When the Irish born engineer CY O’Connor arrived in the colonial settlement of Perth in 1891, his job description was to build ‘railways, harbours, everything’. Not long before his arrival, gold had been discovered in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, and thousands of prospectors had flocked to Western Australia. But the dry goldfields country lacked large natural rivers, which might provide a water source, and dangerously thirsty miners demanded assistance from the government. O’Connor, as...
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Compromise and Confrontation: Senator Neville Bonner
The 1970s were a turbulent period in Australian politics and a high-point in the struggle for Indigenous rights and justice. Huge political energy pulsed through the Aboriginal movement following the success of the 1967 Referendum. But the first Indigenous person to sit in Federal Parliament didn’t come from the radical urban Aboriginal activist movement. He came from Queensland.
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Occupational Hazards: the story of BCOF
The story of the men and women who are sometimes described as 'the forgotten force'.
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Witnesses to War
A history of Australian war journalism across the past century, from the Boer War to more recent conflicts. Historians Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath examine how journalists have reported the politics and practice of war, the issues of censorship and impartiality, of the impact of technological change on the nature of conflict reporting, and the shifting presence of the journalist—from behind the scenes to centre stage in a war zone.
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Women Behind Bars
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Hindsight Sunday April 8, 2012
The infamous 'hippie trail' was the overland route forged through Asia in the early 1970s by young travellers in search of something else – adventure, drugs, or spiritual enlightenment. We explore the trail through the voices and stories of those who were there – a group of rebel Australians who threw caution and suburban upbringings to the wind, packed their duffle bags with little more than maps, sarongs and sandals, and headed into the heart of Asia.
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Sarah Island
How do prisons structure our thinking about justice? Does their very architecture affect our thought processes and knowledge systems? Well, according to Foucault, prisons normalise our attitude to authority, surveillance, and invent definitions of criminality. To find out how Lyn Gallacher takes a tour of Sarah Island, that small spot in the middle of Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania's Wild West.
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Sunday 25 March 2012
A portrait of the creative life of artist Christine Johnson, whose paintings of flowers are inspired by history, memories of childhood, and the Australian environment.
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Paper Trail
Sex, politics, rock’n’roll and printer’s ink. Following the paper trail through four independent papers of the 70s and 80s: Daily Planet/Planet, The Digger, Nation Review and RAM (Rock Australia Magazine).
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Apron Strings and Missing Pieces
The Apron Strings project held by the Oaks Historical Society - stories embodied in those seemingly mundane objects inside homes on the rural outskirts of Sydney. And historian Alistair Thomson speaks to three women who migrated to Australia from England in the 1950s and 60s as 'Ten pound Poms'.
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The Tashkent Ark
In the summer of 1941, almost two years after the German invasion of Poland triggered the start of the Second World War, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This invasion in turn prompted the Soviet authorities to initiate an evacuation of their civilian population. Over the course of the months which followed, Soviet authorities transported people away from the western war fronts into the relative safety of their eastern lands. The Urals, Siberia, the Middle Volga, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan...
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A Doubtful Character
Wolf Klaphake was a respected German scientist who came to Australia in 1935 in search of new horizons. Multi-talented and inventive, Klaphake sought support for many schemes—including a huge condenser tower to be built at Cook in the Nullarbor to generate drinking water from atmospheric humidity. In 1940, Klaphake was interned along with thousands of 'enemy aliens'.
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The Fire Myth
This feature explores the history of how European Australians have understood bushfire, or more accurately, how it has been misunderstood. To be able to fully understand bushfire we need to take a step back and look at the landscape in which those fires regularly take place. We need to understand that we live in the most fire adapted island in the world.
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Empire State: Ernest Fisk and the World Wide Wireless
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Poetry Militant: Walt Whitman and Bernard O'Dowd
One of the most treasured objects in the State Library of Victoria is the Whitman Cabinet, a special box, purpose built by the Australian man of letters Bernard O’Dowd to house his personal correspondence with Walt Whitman. Today we take a peak inside that cabinet.
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Listening to Ghosts
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 soundprints—memories of listening which can reverberate over decades.
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The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting
Oral history has been part and parcel of the democratisation of history since the Second World War. Through interviews with historians from many different countries, and archival material from seminal oral history projects, we chart the international oral history movement, paying special attention to the role of oral history in Aboriginal historiography, and in post-Apartheid South Africa.
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Do That Dance! Australian Post Punk 1977-1983
Part two of the series explores the evolution of post punk in Melbourne.
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Do That Dance! Australian Post Punk, 1977-1983
The years 1977 to 1983 saw an explosion of musical creativity in inner city Sydney and Melbourne. Following the do-it-yourself revolution of punk, young Australians were inspired to make challenging music without boundaries, to form bands, start independent labels, and to run live music venues, all outside the commercially driven confines of the mainstream industry. This groundbreaking activity laid the foundation for contemporary music in Australia. The vital output from Australian post...
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Hearing the past
Historians are starting to listen, tuning their ears to the sounds of the past to gain a new understanding of times gone by.
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The Trials of Thomas Muir
In 1794, a young Scottish lawyer became the first political prisoner transported to Australia. His trial became one of the most celebrated of its day, and he went on to have an impact on both sides of the globe.
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A Contrary Woman
Born in 1906, Ruth Blatt was 'a woman of the twentieth century'. She made her own choices on all its big issues: religion, sex and politics - abandoning Judaism at 16, marrying and divorcing whom she chose, and joining the resistance against Hitler.
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Apology for duplicate podcasts
We have just upgraded to a new website, and the move has caused some podcast subscribers to download duplicate mp3s. We apologise for this issue and hope you continue to listen to Radio National podcasts in the future.
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Hindsight 2011-11-27
In 1932, at the behest of the Murdoch and Packer newspapers, a journalist, a photographer, and a geologist travelled into central Australia, to a then remote area known as the Granites, to gather news of a supposed gold rush that had opened up along the Tanami Track. Their reports were published in the main newspapers of the day,and syndicated all around Australia. But the gold rush turned out to be a failure, and dreams of sudden wealth on the frontier quickly faded, leaving the road once...
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Hindsight 2011-11-20
What drove a 20-year-old woman to shoot dead an innocent stranger on a remote coastal road in Sydney's south in April 1959? At Sandra Willson's trial for the murder of taxi driver Rodney Woodgate, she was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and sentenced to an indeterminate period at the Governor's Pleasure. She would serve 18 years for her crime, becoming, at the time, the longest serving female prisoner in New South Wales. Even though the prison authorities declared her sane after...
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Hindsight 2011-11-13
A story about music, movement, and a method for combining them which became a cause celebre in Australia in the 1920s. The method known as eurhythmics might have had its heyday in the early decades of the 20th century, but through an extraordinary combination of events, agendas, influence and networking, it ended up being part of the lives of hundreds of school children into the 1940s and 50s. The eurhythmics movement originated in Switzerland, and became the basis for 20 years of schools...
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Hindsight 2011-11-06
In late 1939, as the Germans occupied Warsaw, the city zoo became a sanctuary for hundreds of Polish Jews, who were hidden in the lions' cages by Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the keepers of the zoo. Most of those who were hidden were ultimately smuggled out of the country to freedom. But there's a dark parallel tale within this story: while the Zabinskis were helping to save a race of people from extermination, Germanys eminent zoologist, Lutz Heck, had commandeered the Warsaw zoo in order to...
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Hindsight 2011-10-30
People love to hate him, but when historian Alison Bashford stumbled across the 1803 edition of Malthus's `Essay on the Principle of Population', an updated version of the first publication in 1798, she saw the British parson and political economist in a whole new light. The 1803 edition contained extra chapters, one of which examined population through the experience of the young colony of NSW. Alison Bashford began to realise that there was a great deal more in Malthus's thesis than had...
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Hindsight 2011-10-23
The story of Canada's 'home children' is a piece of Canadian history that many would prefer to forget. From the mid 19th century to the 1930s several hundred thousand children were sent to Canada from Britain, most of them to work on farms. Aaron Brindle interviewed several surviving 'home children' and compiled a composite and moving portrait of this chapter of Canadian history which, by today's standards, seems unfeeling, unethical, even cruel. Produced for CBC Radio by Aaron Brindle and...
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Hindsight 2011-10-16
In 1952 artist Ian Fairweather built a raft from post-war rubble he found on Darwin's Dinah beach. Three aircraft drop tanks gave his alarming contraption just enough buoyancy to make it across the Timor Sea. It was a completely bizarre journey that captured the imagination of a generation and marked Darwin forever. In this feature Lyn Gallacher takes herself along the commemorative Ian Fairweather walk outside the Northern Territorys Museum and Art Gallery and discovers that many Darwin...
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Hindsight 2011-10-09
Fasten your seatbelt, plug in your headset and settle in for the in-flight entertainment as we soar through the history of Australian flight attendants, from the 1930s to 9/11 and beyond. Until 1983, Australian flight attendants were known as air hostesses and flight stewards. Their duties and career prospects were strictly divided along gender lines -- they even had separate unions. In the early days there were no limitations on their flying hours. For the women, grooming and body-shape...
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Hindsight 2011-10-02
Captain Robert Falcon Scott -- the name conjures up the image of an English hero, walking to his death in the Antarctic after having reached the South Pole just a month after the famed Norwegian, Roald Amundsen. The public focus on the death of Scott and his Polar Party in 1912 -- during one of the worst Antarctic winters on record -- overshadowed another remarkable story from the same expedition: the amazing survival of Scotts Northern Party. The story of the six men of the Northern Party...
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Hindsight 2011-09-25
In the wake of the Victorian goldrushes in the mid 19th century, the city of Melbourne boomed,and was transformed from a small town into a bustling metropolis, with all the attractions and excesses that a city can offer. The city also, at this time, became the site for a struggle over morality, sex and power. This program explores this moral panic which emerged in 19th century Melbourne through the stories of two well-known women of the period - the 'entertainer' known as Lola Montez [Irish...
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Hindsight 2011-09-18
A portrait of the German artist Walter Spies, who left Europe in the early 1920s for Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies. Spies settled on the island of Bali, in the hill town of Ubud, where his home and painting studio attracted a stream of visitors; including old friends - the writers Vicki Baum and Jane Belo were regular guests - and acquaintances, such as the English composer Noel Coward. After the outbreak of the Second World War, and the German occupation of the Netherlands in...
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Hindsight 2011-09-11
Each month since 1910 a small group of women calling themselves The Catalysts has been meeting in Melbourne for a meal and a discussion paper. It was and is a simple formula for sharing each others company and ideas. And why wouldn't you, particularly when you know that members of the group are some of Australia's most extraordinary women? Over the years this private women's club has included Australias first female lawyer, doctors, scientists, artists, architects and chemists. It has also...
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Hindsight 2011-09-04
Ten years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as part of WNYC's 'Decade 9/11' coverage, this special explores New Yorkers' most visceral and immediate emotional reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center, and how the legacies of this event continue to bear upon people's lives. Fear and shock, grief and guilt, anger, gratitude and solidarity -- these emotions overwhelmed many New Yorkers, along with the billowing cloud of smoke and debris after the Towers collapsed....
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Hindsight 2011-08-28
Tracing family history can be a deeply emotional experience, one that is illuminating, painful, and which may raise as many questions as it answers. The story of one family has recently been recovered from the archives, and restored to descendants, as a result of the careful detective work of researchers at the Public Records Office of Victoria. The lives of Lucy and Percy Pepper, who were trying to raise a family in country Victoria at the turn of the century, have been vividly and...
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Hindsight 2011-08-21
Cole's Book Arcade was a massive three-storey bookstore in the heart of Melbourne that opened on Cup day in 1883. But this was a bookshop with a difference. It had a fernery, a wonderland with funny mirrors, a music department, a lolly shop, a lending library...there were secondhand books for sale, a Chinese tea salon, even a live monkey display! The arcade was the embodiment of one mans vision and humanitarian ideals: Edward William Cole. For visitors to the city in the 1880s, the journey...
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Hindsight 2011-08-14
Ever think about the stories embodied in those seemingly mundane objects inside our homes? This was the thought behind the Apron Strings project held by the Oaks Historical Society on the rural outskirts of Sydney. For the organisers of this event, which was part of Senior Citizens Week, aprons are much more than simple domestic garments; they represent the working lives of people over many generations, and are a testament to disappearing jobs, crafts, skills, and social attitudes. The...
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Hindsight 2011-08-07
Over 200 years since the British settlement of Australia, many consider that its time to look back and consider the variety of influences that has shaped the European understanding of this continent. One pivotal sea journey largely overlooked at the time -- and since -- was the scientific voyage of French Captain Nicolas Baudin in 1801. Ground-breaking observations in the fields of anthropology and zoology were hallmarks of this expedition. And of course the famous encounter with Matthew...
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Hindsight 2011-07-31
In 1848 William Cuffay, the son of a freed slave, was arrested and transported to Van Diemen's Land by a government fearful of revolution that was sweeping through Europe. Aged 60 Cuffay, a tailor and leader of the London Chartists, was campaigning for the right to vote as part of the first mass working class movement in the world. His transportation to Australia didn't end his political activity. He continued to organise and agitate for democratic rights in Tasmania for another 20 years...
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Hindsight 2011-07-24
An entire species of tree was wiped out on the NSW coast in the first 100 years of settlement. Red cedar was, and still is highly sought after for its rich deep lustre and the ease of working with it. But how did the tree disappear from our coastal rivers? We meet those who felled some of the last of the millable trees the 1950s and 1960s, and journey back to the 1800s with surveyor Clement Hodgkinson, to trace the history of the tree. Readings by Tony Osbourne, Russell Stapleton, Jason Di...
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Hindsight 2011-07-17
Hello, is anybody out there? Umm ... are we on the air yet? This program is part of Radio National's Marshall McLuhan Project. Can you hear me okay? Today, the life and ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the effect of those ideas on 1960s Canada. Meet his son, Eric, his biographer, Terrence Gordon, and fellow Canadian philosopher, John Ralston Saul, all of whom in their own way try to explain the man and his message, or should that be the man and his massage? First though, we...
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Hindsight 2011-07-10
Just two generations ago, before the term multiculturalism became the norm, Australian society was polarised between two main groups: Protestants and Catholics. Religion was code for identity, with tensions fuelled by historical grievances that dated back long before the First Fleet. 'Catholic' meant Irish, and to an English Protestant Establishment, that meant trouble. Until the 1960s, job vacancy advertisements might include the stipulation that 'Catholics Need Not Apply'. Irish Catholics...
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Hindsight 2011-07-03
Just two generations ago, before the term multiculturalism became the norm, Australian society was polarised between two main groups: Protestants and Catholics. Religion was code for identity, with tensions fuelled by historical grievances that dated back long before the First Fleet. `Catholic meant Irish, and to an English Protestant Establishment, that meant trouble. Until the 1960s, job vacancy advertisements might include the stipulation that `Catholics Need Not Apply. Irish Catholics...
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Hindsight 2011-06-26
Meet Nancy Keesing: poet, prose writer, anthologist, reviewer and, among other things, chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council during a revolutionary period of Australian writing. During her life (1923-1993) Nancy Keesing and her circle were able to achieve real change in the literary life of Australia. Then the issues were stark and the gains tangible. For instance Nancy Keesing saw the iradication of censorship in Australia, the introduction of the Miles Franklin Literary...
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Hindsight 2011-06-19
With the football season in full swing, this is a story all about the game, and the business, of Aussie Rules. It may have slipped from public memory, but it remains a bitter pill in the hearts of some followers of one football team. In the wake of the AFL's recent $1.25 billion television rights deal, it's hard to imagine that only 15 years ago, a debt of a few million dollars was enough to send one of Australian football's foundation clubs under. But that's what happened to the Fitzroy...
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Hindsight 2011-06-12
Carl Holm uncovers the story of German emigration to South Australia in the early 19th century. The Barossa Valley wasn't the only area in Australia where German speaking Lutherans settled, but it does represent a unique concentration of emigrants, and the Barossa community has retained strong cultural identity, despite the ravages of time, politics and the human aptitude for forgetting. Australia has been constantly shaped and reshaped by different waves of immigration from across the...
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Hindsight 2011-06-05
During the 19th century science took an increasing interest in the body, developing knowledge of anatomy, surgery and phrenology. As the 'old' world increasingly came into contact with the 'new' one, so grew the interest in the bodies of the natives of the colonies. By the time Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, theories abounded about where Aborigines 'sat' on the scale of evolution. Science believed the study of Aboriginal bones to be essential and so began...
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Hindsight 2011-05-29
A multifaceted portrait of the young and gifted Australian photographer Carol Jerrems, whose dazzling portfolio of candid yet artfully composed portraits was emblematic of the 1970s. She photographed her peers -- liberated young women and men who were trailblazing in the arts and counterculture, along with women of all ages, Indigenous Australians, suburban youths in the Sharpie sub-culture -- and frequently herself, the beautiful girl in the mirror. Carol Jerrems died in 1980, at the age of...
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Hindsight 2011-05-26
Until the early 19th century the great `southern continent had aroused very little interest – scientifically or in paint. Many saw it as `wanting in relation to the beauty and excitement of Europe. This `colonial attitude began to shift in the early 19th century with the arrival of an English clergyman-geologist WB Clarke and the Austrian-born painter Eugene von Gurard. Both men were captivated by the new science of geology and the uniqueness of the Australian landscape. New Earth is a short...
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Hindsight 2011-05-15
A retrospective portrait of the writer Ruth Park, whose many novels, including Poor Man's Orange and The Harp in the South, as well as her children's books, have captured the hearts and minds of generations of Australian readers. This program features interviews with Ruth Park, from the ABC's archives. The life and work of Ruth Park will also be featured as part of this year's Sydney Writer's Festival. More information is available from the Sydney Writer's Festival website. ABC Radio...
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Hindsight 2011-05-08
In the spring and summer of 1981, 10 Republican prisoners in the H Block section of the Maze Prison outside Belfast undertook a hunger strike to the death, with the aim of achieving `special category status for those convicted under Northern Irelands extensive anti terrorist and emergency laws. They were led by Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the Provisional IRA prisoners. The British government insisted they were criminals, they saw themselves as prisoners of war. This program features...
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Hindsight 2011-05-01
Historians and heritage specialists are at odds over which colonial building in NSW is the oldest intact house in Australia: Experiment Farm Cottage, or Elizabeth Farm House. This feature explores the dispute, the detective work which has cast new light on the established interpretation of Australia's colonial built heritage, and the difficulties inherent in trying to understand the past through extant sources such as images and buildings. It's also the story of the man behind the building...
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Hindsight 2011-04-24
The First World War had a major presence on the Australian stage, particularly in vaudeville theatre, before and after 1918; and following the Armistice, many variety shows were performed by diggers themselves. The extent of their popularity surprised historians, who have been investigating the phenomenon since a bequest to the Melbourne Arts Centre in 2001 brought to light a collection of original comedy scripts from one of the leading companies, Pat Hanna's Famous Diggers. Vaudeville was...
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Hindsight 2011-04-17
The Northbridge area of inner-city Perth has come to deserve its reputation as being on 'the wrong side of the tracks' in the last few years. But an ambitious historical undertaking—the Northbridge History Project—that celebrates the area's rich migrant past may well prove to be the counterpoint. The Project has spent the last five years gathering the stories and images of the area, and placing them in an extensive electronic archive that brings to life the experiences of waves of migrants...
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Hindsight 2011-04-10
The Eveleigh railway workshops in Redfern, Sydney, started in 1887. They lasted over a hundred years. In the 1950s nearly 5,000 workers made scores of steam locomotives and railway carriages every year—and repaired many hundreds more. Their proud tradition might have ended when the NSW state government decided to close them down in 1989. However, the site is not derelict—its been preserved and transformed into the Australian Technology Park—and two of the old 19th century brick `bays are...
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Hindsight 2011-04-03
The name Bennelong is etched into the minds of most Australians - even if it only reminds you of that iconic strip of land beneath the Sydney Opera House. But how much do we really know about this Wangal man and his turbulent life, or his extraordinary journey to England and back? And how much remains to be told? In the past few months, there have been some extraordinary discoveries about Bennelong. One historian has uncovered a song Bennelong sang for his English hosts in 1793. You'll hear...
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Hindsight 2011-03-27
Adoption was widely accepted in Australia throughout the 1950s and 60s — by families, government and welfare authorities — but over the course of the 1970s, adoption, from policy to practice, was transformed. This second program in the series uncovers the change in thinking and its consequences for parents, children and professionals. The changes were the result of political leadership and grassroots campaigning, as groups formed round Australia debating the need for reform to adoption law....
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Hindsight 2011-03-20
Post-war Australia was a time of large families and happy mothers, when contraception was limited and single parents invisible. In the first of two programs exploring the history of adoption in Australia, parents and children from the 1950s tell the stories of family secrets while social workers and midwives explain their part in a process which is coming under the renewed scrutiny of historians. Adoption has a lengthy history, but it was only in the 1920s that legislation for adoption was...
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Hindsight 2011-03-13
During the two-year war between the United States and Mexico which began in 1846, a large contingent of conscripted soldiers, most of them Irish Catholic, deserted the American army to fight alongside the Mexicans. Known as the St Patrick's Battalion, or Los San Patricios, the story of this rebel group, and their battle against the more powerful forces of the US army, has become part of national folklore in both Mexico and Ireland. Writer and producer Colm McNaughton follows in the footsteps...
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Hindsight 2011-03-06
The story of the men and women who are sometimes described as 'the forgotten force'. Less than six months after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the Allies, led by the United States, had set up an occupation force on the ground in Japan, a country in ruins, and it's surviving people starving. From 1945 to 1952, more than 16,000 Australians spent time in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF). While the American occupation forces,...
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Hindsight 2011-02-27
The story of innovative Melbourne furniture design firm Fler, and the influence of modernism upon the changing landscape of the Australian home,in the decades following the Second World War. The Fler company began making furniture in a two-horse stable in Richmond, Melbourne, in 1946. Its founders were two young European Jewish migrants, Fred Lowen and Ernest Rodeck. Both men had fled Nazi Europe, arriving in Australia in September 1940 via the Dunera. They met at Tatura Internment Camp in...
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Hindsight 2011-02-20
Her subject was the lives of women at a time when women were hungry for stories and images examining their own realities. In Barbara Hanrahan's home town of Adelaide, the place she fled for many years, describing it as the most class ridden on earth, her images of women -- fierce, disturbing, mysterious, sweet, nurturing... contradictory and confronting, continue to inhabit the walls and minds of the people who experienced her art. But it wasn't only women; it was ordinary people who...
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Hindsight 2011-02-13
Why are we so attached to 'Waltzing Matilda'? Across the past century, Australians have come to invest the song with ideas and meanings which may well be at odds with the events that gave rise to it. Featuring the last recorded interview with legendary folk historian Richard Magoffin, plus a host of 'Matilda' aficionados, some of whom contest Magoffin's thesis about the song. And a rich smorgasbord of recordings of the song itself, from Harry Belafonte, through 80s Spandex, to a version...
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Hindsight 2011-02-10
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the series Playing the 20th Century] Nineteenth century English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was a close confidant of Charles Darwin and a pallbearer at his funeral. During his journey through the Malay Archipelago, Wallace independently proposed his own theories of natural selection, and is said by many to have hastened the publishing of Darwins On the Origin of Species. 150 years later, Australian artist...
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Hindsight 2011-02-03
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the series Playing the 20th Century] The story of the extraordinary international career of the Aboriginal rights activist Anthony Martin Fernando, who is slowly emerging from the shadows 60 years after his death. He was an Aboriginal man who pinned toy skeletons to his overcoat and picketed Australia House in London in the 1920s. He tried to petition the Pope and was accused of being a German spy. Fernando...
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Hindsight 2011-01-27
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the series Playing the 20th Century] During the 19th century science took an increasing interest in the body, developing knowledge of anatomy, surgery and phrenology. As the 'old' world increasingly came into contact with the 'new' one, so grew the interest in the bodies of the natives of the colonies. By the time Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, theories abounded about where Aborigines...
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Hindsight 2011-01-20
In October 2008, in Mexico City, thousands of people marched through the streets to mark the 40th anniversary of a brazen and brutal repression of student protesters, carried out by the state on the eve of the Mexico City Olympic Games. The Tlatelolco massacre, as it became known, spilt yet more blood upon one of Mexico City's most significant historical and archaeological sites. In Hindsight we explore the rich layers of history at Tlatelolco. The late Mexican poet Octavio Paz described the...
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Hindsight 2011-01-13
(Granuaile, 16th century Irish pirate queen) From 5th century Artemesia to Madame Jung Ee Sow hundreds of years later, women have always taken to the sea for profit and for pleasure. This feature uncovers the hidden history of women and piracy, the unofficial maritime economy which reached its zenith in the late 18th century,when hordes of pirates ships trawled the Caribbean and Atlantic seas for booty. Among all the men who took up the 'sweet trade' were a number of women, including...
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Hindsight 2011-01-06
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the series Playing the 20th Century] Over the centuries many searches for legendary cities of gold have been transformed into solid history as a result of archeological findings. This story is about a legendary personality, Percy H Fawcett, a colonel in the British army, who was also an explorer and an adventurer, who harboured a passionate belief that he could find the lost city of El Dorado in the Amazon...
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Hindsight 2010-12-30
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the series Playing the 20th Century] In 1883 an exploration party of four travelled from North Queensland to Port Darwin. This was the first time a European woman had been part of such an expedition. Emily Caroline Creaghe was 22 years old—and kept a personal diary of the journey. One hundred and twenty-four years later, Australian landscape artist Gemma Lynch Memory retraced the 1883 expedition. Using Emily's...
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Hindsight 2010-12-23
[Please note that the first Sunday broadcast of Hindsight is currently featuring the Australian theatre history series Playing the 20th Century] Today we set sail with the first great Antarctic explorer, Captain James Cook. Its not well known that the first major scientific expedition to the Antarctic was led by Cook, 230 years ago. Its even less well known that that voyage was recorded by a young German writer and natural historian who sailed with Cook—Georg Forster. Georg Forsters A...
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Hindsight 2010-12-12
The infamous 'hippie trail' was the overland route forged through Asia in the early 1970s by young travellers in search of something else – adventure, drugs, or spiritual enlightenment. We explore the trail through the voices and stories of those who were there – a group of rebel Australians who threw caution and suburban upbringings to the wind, packed their duffle bags with little more than maps, sarongs and sandals, and headed into the heart of Asia. There were fashionable precedents...
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Hindsight 2010-12-05
Central Australia, the Red Centre, has loomed large in our history, and in our psyche. The desert has often been considered a place to be feared, but it has also attracted curious travellers. Across one decade from 1950 to 1960, suburban Australians first began to venture inland, along dirt tracks into the toughest desert country. From a school party in 1950, bringing city teenagers into contact with nomadic Aborigines, there was the all-women 'Petticoat Safari' to Central Australia in...
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Hindsight 2010-11-28
Relatives and friends of Janet Frame reflect on the writer's life and work. This program includes extracts from interviews with Janet Frame, and recordings of her reading from her novels and verse. The writer Janet Frame was born in 1924, on the South Island of New Zealand. After an attempted suicide in 1945, she spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals. Her first collection of short stories, The Lagoon, was published in 1951, and in 1957 her first novel, Owls Do Cry, was published....
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Hindsight 2010-11-21
A journey into Australian history on the back of those creatures which came to be known as the ships of the desert. Camels were part of some of the important colonial expeditions into the Australian interior, and they carried the railway sleepers and telegraph poles that connected the vast continent and eventually opened it up to the rest of the world. Australias first camel, 'Harry', wasnt a fine example of his species; eventually being 'executed' for the part he played in the death of...
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Hindsight 2010-11-14
This feature takes us back to 17th Century Europe, a time when religion and science were at loggerheads, this time battling to explain the age of the earth. One man, Nicolaus Steno, scurrilously suggested that the earths past might be chronicled in layers of rock. Very few people have heard of Nicolaus Steno, the man hailed by many as the Father of Modern Geology. His discoveries and thought challenged the Bible as the sole authority on the age of the earth. He is revered today not only...
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Hindsight 2010-09-12
The School Magazine is Australias oldest literary magazine, and its the oldest literary magazine for children anywhere in the world. It began in 1916 as a free publication for NSW primary school children, with the noble aim of presenting Australian writers for Australian children. Generations of school children from the city to the bush received this little gem, every month filled with poetry, prose, plays and pictures. They read it walking home, in bed, up a tree, on the bus, on the...
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Hindsight 2010-09-05
From 1907 until 1959 there was a Lazaret -- a Leprosarium -- on Peel Island, in Moreton Bay, just off Brisbane. There were lazarets all around the country, in every state, following a public health policy of exclusion...and fear. The stories from these places are not as well known as they might be, because anxiety, mythology, and misinformation haunts this history. Family members often suppress this 'shameful' story, and a convention has developed whereby names of leprosy patients are not...
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Hindsight 2010-08-29
A visual arts exhibition to commemorate the bicentennial of Lachlan Macquarie's term as governer of NSW. Artist Tim Miller became fascinated with the expansion of settlement to the west of Sydney during Macquarie's tenure, and how this might have been perceived by the local Indigenous peoples. This year is the 70th anniversary of the voyage of the HMT Dunera, a ship that sailed between England and Australia during WWII and which was to become infamous for the mistreatment of its human cargo...
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Hindsight 2010-08-22
Born in 1900, Marie Byles was a child of the twentieth century, but her ideas and practices were progressive even by todays standards. As the first woman to practice law in New South Wales, she fought to improve womens legal status in the 1920s. A keen bushwalker and climber, she was a pioneer in the Australian conservation movement in the 1930s. From the time of her first solo adventure around the world by cargo boat at the age of 27, through her later expeditions to Asia, she set the...
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Hindsight 2010-08-15
Before the establishment of the Family Court in 1975, and the law reforms that went with it, getting a divorce in Australia was a difficult, risky, and expensive undertaking. Private lives were exposed to public scrutiny, with newspapers, and later television, able to report on cases that ended up in the divorce courts. Prior to the overhaul of the laws, couples had to prove that one party was guilty of marital 'fault' against the other. Grounds for divorce ranged from adultery to abuse and...
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Hindsight 2010-08-08
'What is it about Australia? A country whose ration of literary hoaxes to genuine literary successes is so high must surely be guarding a fascinating cultural secret. Or is the Antipodean profusion of writerly tricks merely the result of a publishing scene desperate for a short-cut to established literary identity?' So asks British writer Melissa Katsoulis, whose recent book Telling Tales is one of many exploring the reasons why we are susceptible to a hoax. Ern Malley, Nino Culotta, Wanda...
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Hindsight 2010-08-01
On August 14th, 1980, workers at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk laid down their tools, in protest over the dismissal of crane driver Anna Walentinowicz. Their protest, initially over wage claims, triggered a series of strikes on other industrial sites in the country, in what became the turning point in the Polish peoples struggle for political and social freedom. Within a month of the strike, in late September 1980, Solidarity [Solidarnosc] was formed; the workers first independent trade...
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Hindsight 2010-07-25
Part two of the series explores the evolution of post punk in Melbourne. The years 1977 to 1983 saw an explosion of musical creativity in inner city Sydney and Melbourne. Following the do-it-yourself revolution of punk, young Australians were inspired to make challenging music without boundaries, to form bands, start independent labels, and to run live music venues, all outside the commercially driven confines of the mainstream industry. This groundbreaking activity laid the foundation for...
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Hindsight 2010-07-18
The years 1977 to 1983 saw an explosion of musical creativity in inner city Sydney and Melbourne. Following the do-it-yourself revolution of punk, young Australians were inspired to make challenging music without boundaries, to form bands, start independent labels, and to run live music venues, all outside the commercially driven confines of the mainstream industry. This groundbreaking activity laid the foundation for contemporary music in Australia. The vital output from Australian post...
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Hindsight 2010-07-11
David Unaipon smiles out at us from the fifty dollar note, immortalised on our currency for his fierce intelligence and achievements. Who was David Unaipon, and why do we still know so little about him? David Unaipon was born on the Murray River in Ngarrindjeri country in 1872, and brought up in his own culture. His lifetime spanned the first phase of colonial contact between his people and the Europeans -- in fact he died only months before the 1967 referendum which would have afforded him...
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Hindsight 2010-07-04 - UPDATED
It was no holds barred for ASIO when they went after the Aarons family -- Australias most prominent communists. The security service amassed 32,000 pages of files, tapped their phone, bugged their house and followed their every move. It was by far the largest and longest surveillance of anyone in Australias history. Now the files have been released, and they offer a remarkable insight into a radical family's political and personal history. Download interview between Laurie Aarons and Wally...
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Hindsight 2010-06-27
Literary historians investigate the thinking behind a spate of 1890s adventure novels all based on the same idea: the discovery of a lost civilisation in the centre of Australia. On the eve of Federation, the settler population of Australia was given to pondering the future of their new nation. Given a widely held view of history in which empires rose and fell, debate was rife whether Australia had greatness before it, or a sad decline. Pertinent to the argument were anxieties about the...
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Hindsight 2010-06-20
Sydney Harbour is renowned the world over as a stunningly beautiful waterway. Its intricate, and intimate coves, deep inlets and tiny beaches, headlands and islands are still lushly vegetated. Its period of industrial use was relatively short lived, and industrial sites are now being reclaimed as reserves, or for residential development. In this program we take five Harbour icons as a means to explore the Harbour's history as living, breathing entity, a waterway that people have always been...
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Hindsight 2010-06-13
In 1883 an exploration party of four travelled from North Queensland to Port Darwin. This was the first time a European woman had been part of such an expedition. Emily Caroline Creaghe was 22 years old - and kept a personal diary of the journey. One hundred and twenty-four years later, Australian landscape artist Gemma Lynch Memory retraced the 1883 expedition. Using Emily's diary extracts as a guide, Gemma painted what she felt Emily experienced.
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Hindsight 2010-05-30
The Kimberley has long been known for its million-acre cattle stations and big Brahman bulls. But before the arrival of cattle, sheep dominated the vast region of north west Western Australia. The first European settlers to the region introduced sheep onto their land holdings and for the following century developed a large pastoral industry based on them, the remains of which can be seen in the few extant shearing sheds which still dot the landscape across the Kimberley. Matt Brann, an ABC...
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Hindsight 2010-05-23
A five part series featuring three generations, born between the 1930s and the 1970s, who reflect on everyday life in Australia across the last half of the 20th century. Episode four is all about family - from parental relationships and sibiling rivalries, to the experience of becoming a parent oneself.
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Hindsight 2010-03-14
The remarkable life story of Reginald Fleming Johnston, one of the few foreigners to make his way into the inner court of the Qing Dynasty. 1n 1919, in the final turbulent years of British Colonial rule, after the 1911 revolution which saw the abdication of the monarchy, Johnston was appointed tutor to the last Emperor of China, 13-year-old Pu Yi, who was virtually a captive, inside the Forbidden City. Johnston's record of his time as tutor, and of the curious friendship which developed...
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Hindsight 2010-02-14
Why are we so attached to 'Waltzing Matilda'? Across the past century, Australians have come to invest the song with ideas and meanings which may well be at odds with the events that gave rise to it. Featuring the last recorded interview with legendary folk historian Richard Magoffin, plus a host of 'Matilda' aficionados, some of whom contest Magoffin's thesis about the song. And a rich smorgasbord of recordings of the song itself, from Harry Belafonte, through 80s Spandex, to a version...
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- History, Public Radio
- ABC (Australia)
- English
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Hindsight
ABC Radio National
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