Earshot

In the early noughties the Australian band Rocket Science was being touted as the ‘next big thing’. But that all changed when the band's lead singer Roman Tucker had a serious accident, and lost his memory. This is Roman's music-fuelled journey to try and remember himself.

Memory can be a trickster, a balm, or sharp claws scratching at your heart. In this next season of Earshot we're telling tales of remembering and forgetting.

When Kabul fell to the Taliban Samira and Fahim were in grave danger, they went into hiding and could see no way out of Afghanistan.  Then a text from a stranger in Australia asking for their help changed everything.  Vanessa sent them on a dangerous mission and in exchange she guided them across a perilous border to safety.

When Claire Ashman followed her husband into a gated community on the NSW South Coast, she never imagined she would spend the next decade hoarding food and covering her windows to prepare for the apocalypse.

Erin follows her partner and Deathmatch wrestler Callen Butcher to ringside. While he battles his opponents in choreographed displays of gory competition, she is fighting to feel alive, as a disabled person living with chronic illness. Can they find harmony in their minds and bodies, together?

The only thing that would quell Clare’s anxiety about her disintegrating marriage was a drink. It started with just one or two a night, it took the edge off. And so she kept following that feeling, the numbness, until she was drinking herself into oblivion.

Sarah and Miles took a strict approach to internet use with their 13 year old daughter Ruby. And when Miles suspected she was being groomed on Pinterest, they cracked down harder. But Ruby pushed back – she hacked the controls, secretly spent nights and class time on socials. Their relationship with Ruby took a hit and she shut down. When Sarah realised she was losing her daughter she decided to f...

It was supposed to be a hiking adventure, but it ended in an unforeseeable accident that would change Warren and Geert's futures forever.   When he was sitting around a campfire on a remote island in Far North Queensland, Warren Macdonald made a life-changing decision. He’d sparked up a conversation with a Dutch hiker named Geert van Keulen, and he decided to follow Geert up a mountain the followi...

Introducing our next season, Follow Me. Seven confessional stories of following.

An exploration into language, accents, love and life, featuring the Eurythmics.

William Cuffay, transported from London in 1848 for allegedly planning an uprising, became the unlikely face of Australia's trade unionists.

Eight years ago, residents of the Sydney beach-side suburb of Coogee were spellbound by a vision of the Virgin Mary that appeared in a shadow cast by the sun upon a fence post. But what was it really?

Meet the Greenocks. They fostered their first child seven years ago oblivious to the joy, the grief, the chaos, the worry and the love it would bring to their home.

Margaret Clement was a wealthy Victorian heiress whose life fell into ruin. She finished her days living alone in a swamp in Gippsland in her decaying mansion Tullaree surrounded by waist-deep water. Margaret Clement became known to locals as "the lady of the swamp", then in 1952 she disappeared without trace

A young man is trapped in a dead end job in a meat factory and the monotony of process line slaughter is unbearable. Music keeps him going, specifically those songs that get stuck in your head, which he calls ear worms. This program was originally broadcast on RTE in Ireland.

If a friend sent you a farewell text, saying she was planning to end her life, what would you do? Jennie’s response was to go and sing with Nia and promise to tell her story. Nia has scleroderma, her skin and lungs have hardened over the last 20 years, the pain and discomfort has now become unbearable. But thanks to the Voluntary Assisted Dying laws that Nia helped establish she will have the deat...

Charlotte was a deeply religious teenager -  she prayed, served, and saved herself for marriage. Marriage, she was promised, would bring fireworks, fulfilment. After 5 years of dating, Charlotte married Casey. But as she got older, Charlotte began to question those promises made to her about marriage and happy-ever-after.

Full of hope, botox and impossible dreams, beauty queens are judged on their beauty, sincerity and smarts. They promise world peace in exchange for fame, fortune and adoration. That’s the pact contestants make with the faceless owners of glittering pageants.

Oscar Berry is 24 and has a rare genetic disorder, speech disability, epilepsy and cerebral palsy. He might have a “dodgy chromosome” as his mum Kim says, but he’s gregarious, lives for the gym and his weekend activities, and is dying to move in with his mates. But when Oscar got his new NDIS plan in April, those dreams blew apart. 

Imagine facing death with no next of kin and no funds to pay for your funeral.  In Victoria you’ll end up in the care of Alan Barr at the Old Ballan Cemetery. He’s made a promise to people like this, who often become State Trustees, to provide a dignified end to their lives. When Miyuki Jokiranta finally finds her friend, Monika, a State Trustee who died during the pandemic, she meets Alan, the ke...

Promise me you won’t walk out of our restaurant, quit on our kids, run from our poverty, ignore our autism, ADHD or alopecia, or be defeated by our pandemic-induced loss of home and income. If author Naomi Hart had known the marriage vows that had tripped off her tongue so easily 14 years ago would come to mean all this, would she ever have said them in the first place? You will laugh, cringe and...

Susan Lester inadvertently entered a world of political and corporate corruption when she was made the promise of a lifetime by one of Tasmania’s most powerful businessmen. When she signed a contract with Edmund Rouse to paint 200 watercolours of birds she had no idea it would be a decision that would overwhelm her and her artistic career.

Jess made a promise to a woman she would never meet, the mother of her daughter Noelle. Baby Noelle was found in the arms of her dead birth mother on the streets of Kinshasa in The Congo, she lived in an orphanage until she was four. Now, she’s 16 and living in Melbourne with Jess and her sisters, but she’s never known another Congolese person. Will a trip to Shepparton to meet the Congolese commu...

Earshot is back doing what we do best – telling intimate, personal stories…and we're going seasonal. Our first season is called Promise Me. How easy is it to make a promise? What happens when you don't deliver? In Earshot's new eight-part series, promises are made, broken, kept and stretched. From a vow to love, honour and obey to a pledge to save the world, from the intimate to the highly public,...

Take a stroll up Elizabeth Street from the colonial era docks, past the Empire Hotel with its notorious bullet holes to beyond “the flannelette curtain”.  Local artist Kate Kelly is our guide to the hidden histories of Hobart and tales of the original Palawa custodians, gentrification and the art that ate Hobart.