ABC Rewind

The 1970s was a decade which saw social change, that helped foster new ideas and understandings about sex, gender and identity. And much of this change was brought about by trans activists.

In the last few decades, there has been a huge social transformation in the way people express and talk about gender. But right across time, and here in Australia, there’ve always been people who existed outside the binary definition of male and female. Compelling history from Australia and around the world.

In 2002, after a decade of giddy expansion, the bubble burst for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. With debts mounting and creditors circling, Mardi Gras went into voluntary administration. In the new millennium, had Mardi Gras lost its relevance?

To mark 2023 World Pride, the  origin story of Sydney Mardi Gras. How did a one-off street protest on a chilly winter's night more than 40 years ago transform into the massive annual summer celebration we now know?

A journey back to the mean streets of Brisbane in the 1920s with clever and feisty private detective – Mrs Kate Condon.

When India was divided to create Pakistan more than a million people lost their lives. People who were there remember the chaos, violence and moments of kindness of Partition.

The story behind the 1980 Australian film Manganinne, set during the infamous Black Line violence of colonial Tasmania, and the extraordinary Yolngu actor, Mawuyul Yanthalawuy. who plays the film's central character.

Were you at the Wanda gig in 1982? It's forty years since Triple J hosted a free outdoor concert on Sydney's Wanda Beach, when a massive crowd turned up to see the bands whose music defined an era, and who changed the sound of Australian rock forever

It was the Great Depression in Australia. People dreamt of a paradise, an escape from Nowheresville. And they found it, gathering on the beaches of coastal cities and crowding halls in country towns - to play Hawaiian steel guitar.  Historian Robyn Annear discovers what drove thousands of Australians to learn this unlikely instrument?

We travel to the west coast of Tasmania, to meet the mining communities who carry on a rich cultural tradition of storytelling in poetry and song.

The Australian instrument that shaped the sound of the 1980s and forever changed how popular music was made. This documentary won the 2023 Prix Italia in the Radio & Podcast Music category.

In 1899 two thousand people attended the funeral of an African-American banjo player in Sydney.  Who was he? How did he come to be in Australia and why was he so loved? Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe tells the story of Hosea Easton, along with the history of minstrel music and the banjo, in Australia and the United States.

The story of one of history’s most mysterious flags - the Jolly Roger. It’s the pirate flag that defined one of the world’s greatest criminal enterprises and it helps us to understand how the high seas transformed from lawlessness to order

The story of the  diamond so infused with underhand deeds and deadly acts that it was thought to curse any male ruler who wore it..

The Carbolic Smoke Ball was touted as a miracle cure for all kinds of illnesses that were rife in the 1890s. It never actually cured anything, but what it did do was change the law forever.

The humble potato is not just a lump of carbohydrate: it tells the story of how food, so essential to life, is also central to politics. This is the story of how the potato became a weapon.

The story of briefcase that almost killed Hitler in 1944, how it was stopped only by a misplaced table leg, and the fate of the man at the heart of the assassination plot. 

In the 1980s & '90s, an influx of artists and creative types changed the face of Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, in inner-city Fitzroy. What was once a humble industrial shopping strip transformed into a bustling hive of creativity, full of cafes, bars, art and music.

A chance discovery of a bag of old photographs leads two Asian-Australian artists, Mayu Kanamori and William Yang, to explore their histories.

In the early years of the twentieth century thousands of poor Chinese workers crossed the seas to a tiny dot in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Christmas Island was rich in phosphate, and when a British owned mine company set up on the island it needed workers. They came to seek their fortune and instead struck tragedy, as most of these men would never return home to China.

In 1824 Hamilton Hume and William Hovell with 6 convicts began an expedition south-west of Sydney into the unknown. Governor Brisbane wanted to find an inland route from Sydney all the way to Bass Strait. The country however was neither unknown nor uninhabited. Hamilton Hume's friendship with and assistance from local Aboriginal groups throughout the journey enabled the opening up of some of the m...

The D-Day landings in 1944 involved a lot of planning, deception, and in one case as comedic as it was dangerous, a bloke from Perth. An outlandish wartime caper that ended up on the silver screen.

Ecology didn’t exist in the nineteenth century. So, when, where, and how did it first begin in Australia?

In the 1860s, a group of well-intentioned settlers introduced animals from overseas, hoping they would thrive in Australia. Many did. Too many.

It was the Great Depression in Australia. People dreamt of a paradise, an escape from Nowheresville. And they found it, gathering on the beaches of coastal cities and crowding halls in country towns - to play Hawaiian steel guitar.  Historian Robyn Annear discovers what drove thousands of Australians to learn this unlikely instrument?