Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

This week's mystery caller floods back to Australia from the north to enjoy our summer months – the Sacred Kingfisher.

Photojournalist Lorrie Graham was the first female photography cadet at The Sydney Morning Herald in 1975, and over the five decades since became “one of Australia’s most distinctive and influential photojournalists”. 

The Australian Museum holds an archive of photos, specimens and films taken by Harry Burrell, a vaudeville performer turned amateur naturalist, who changed the way the world understood the platypus. Harry used his vaudeville showmanship to display the quirks of the platypus in a specially built 'platypusary' which he took on travelling exhibitions around the country and even overseas.  By today's...

At the tender age of 95, Liz Hicklin keeps expanding her repetoire — from author and poet, to comedian and now star of a one-woman show about being a footnote to history, as the girlfriend who dated Ted Hughes before Sylvia Plath Guest: Liz Hicklin, writer and star of Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend , playing at the Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 15-18

100 word including guest & book

Dr. Rachael Gunn aka Raygun represented Australia in women's breaking at the Paris 2024 Olympics. While she scored no points from the Olympic judges, she instantly scored a starring role at the centre of a social media firestorm debating her Australiana inspired routine.  Recently Raygun told her side of the story in the Netflix documentary series Untold, which features endearing star turns from h...

Indonesia is home to two of the world's last surviving tropical glaciers, which are found near the top of a 4882 metre mountain in Papua Province.  The glaciers used to cover much of the Surdiman mountain range but they're disappearing rapidly and predictions for when they will finally disappear range from 2026 to 2030. Dr Donaldi Permana is a climate research scientist and has made a number of ex...

This year’s  Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine  was jointly awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work in optogenetics, a method for controlling nerve signals with light. Their research began by isolating a light-responsive cell from pond algae, and now makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain.  Gues...

This week's mystery caller towers above its fellow wetland species – the Black-necked Stork.

Anyier Yuol arrived in Australia on a humanitarian visa from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya aged 10.  Her parents, refugees from the civil war in South Sudan, had both died and she was raised in the camp by a aunt.  A talented footballer who once dreamt of playing for the Matildas, she switched to a career in academia and modelling.  Her PhD explored the cultural, social, and gendered dimensions of...

According to UNICEF, the United National Children’s Fund, there are an estimated 50 million refugee and displaced children around the world. 

This month on Sunday Intrigue, Jeremy Dicker, managing editor of International Intrigue, looks back at Switzerland's referendum on whether to enshrine a strict definition of neutrality in its constitution. And Brazil goes to the polls for the first round of the presidential election on October 4, in something of a re-run of the 2022 campaign. Incumbent president Lula da Silva is running against Fl...

Nike might be the largest sportswear brand in the world, but earlier this month, the iconic American company fell off the S&P 100 after a solid 18 year run, and a 78% drop in share price since 2021. The loss of the brand’s blue chip status indicates that its prestige is slipping along with its customer base. So, where did Nike stumble on the track, and what’s overtaken it? Guest: Hans Westerbe...

For more than 80 years it was thought that the Australian military had failed to rescue Australian prisoners of war held by the Japanese in Borneo because of a lack of political will and resources.  Almost 30 years ago, historian Lynette Ramsay Silver revealed that there had been a secret rescue mission known as Operation Kingfisher that was abandoned due to faulty intelligence.  Now she has publi...

After 27 painstaking years of painstaking and dangerous work, the HALO Trust is finally able to wrap up it's work clearing landmines and cluster bombs in Kosovo. Guest: Major General James Cowan, CEO of the HALO Trust

Stephen Hawking's celebrity status often framed him as a superhuman genius. But in a new authorised biography, Hawking: His Life and Work , author Graham Farmelo weaves a very human story of a man who was both extraordinary and deeply flawed. Guest: Graham Farmelo , author of Hawking: His Life and Work

This week's mystery woodland caller is Australia's smallest bird – the Weebill.

Despite the name, Tasmanian devils once lived across mainland Australia. Including, according to new research, the arid Pilbara region in the north west of Western Australia. Remains found at Juukan Gorge suggest that Tasmanian devils may have scavenged from human camps in the region for tens of thousands of years. While Juukan Gorge was partially destroyed by Rio Tinto in 2020, it is being carefu...

Winnie Dunn became the first Tongan-Australian to publish a novel with her 2024 debut Dirt Poor Islanders , a coming-of-age story about a Tongan-Australian girl growing up in Western Sydney. Now she has been invited to give the 2026 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, and she previews her theme of representation in publishing for Sunday Extra. Guest: Winnie Dunn, author of Dir...

It is unlikely that a political memoir published today would be described as 'frustratingly discreet', rather today’s former politicians often publish juicy tell-alls after leaving office, with shocking behind-the-scene revelations and an occasional stab at former rivals. As Josh Black explains in his new book Performance Politics: Australian politicians and the stories they tell, a century ago me...

Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to change the world’s maps. It encourages use of the Equal Earth Map rather than the Mercator, which was designed more than 450 years ago to help sailors navigate. But flattening a globe onto a map comes with distortions. On Mercator, the landmasses appear larger further from the equator, making Greenland appear comparable...

Many of the online scams that target Australians and people across the world have come from Cambodian scam centres, and the enormous scale of the illegal industry is difficult to fathom. While the Cambodian government has shut centres down, they are the tip of the iceberg of the country's "scam-state architecture", which is now "recognised as one of the world's most consequential criminal-politica...

“Will the Albanese government's faltering steps towards national leadership on housing turn into a confident stride or stagger to a halt?” That’s the question asked in a new book by Matt Lloyd-Cape titled  Our Place: How to Solve the Housing Crisis and Rebuild the Australian Dream , and it’s described as “An evidence-based guide... from a leading policy expert”. Guest: Matt Lloyd-Cape is Senior Re...

Michael Robotham grew up in small towns in regional New South Wales before securing a coveted cadetship with Fairfax Media in 1979, aged 17.  After cutting his teeth covering crime and courts for afternoon newspapers he made the jump to London's Fleet Street in the mid-1980s.  The end of the Cold War provided opportunities to access previously unavailable Russian archives and he was the first West...

This week's mystery caller inhabits a variety of wet habitats right across Australia – the White-faced Heron