No One Saw It Coming

When you combine Russian ballet, French aristocracy, and a little bit of Walt Disney you get a recipe for a riot and one of the most important musical moments in history. Host of Radio National’s The Music Show, Andrew Ford, sits down at the piano and tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) about why Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was so confronting that it caused a riot in 1913 and how it w...

As the Second World War raged in the Pacific, there was a team of codebreakers in Australia working around the clock intercepting and deciphering Japanese messages.  It was Australia’s own Bletchley Park, but the team were young, female and worked in a shed. And they called themselves The Garage Girls. Author Alli Sinclair tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) the story of these codebreaker...

From moons to mind bending maths and revolutions, the story of how we got the modern calendar is messy.  Matthew Champion, Associate Professor in History at the University of Melbourne, takes Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) through time to understand the many iterations of calendars and why the one we use today can still be improved. Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the...

You see it on Christmas cards, in shop windows and at your local church. The nativity scene is everywhere at this time of year.  But the scene you know of Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus in the manger, with some animals around is actually thanks to some mistranslations and a popular saint in the Middle Ages who wanted to imprint the story of the birth of Christ into people’s memory.  Art historian Mary M...

There’s one man you can thank - or curse - for your hand cramp after writing all your Christmas cards. Sir Henry Cole was a ‘dumpy’ Englishman who had too many jobs and not enough time to write back to his friends and family so he created the first Christmas card in 1843. It caused quite the stir, and not exactly in the way he expected.  Author and all-things-Christmas expert Ace Collins tells Mar...

It started as a deadly toxin and became a billion-dollar beauty secret. So how exactly did a poison become the world’s most popular cosmetic fix?  It’s all to do with one man who took a plunge and used it to treat eye spasms, and another who saw its potential in the pursuit of perfection.  Author and former ophthalmologist Dr Eugene Helveston tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) the story...

Over a hundred years ago, some divers jumped into the Mediterranean to look for sponges. Instead, they found ancient treasures. Artefacts, statues, jewellery. And a corroded piece of bronze. Little did they know that lump of metal would be the most valuable of the lot.  Ancient Greek cultural historian Dr Tatiana Bur from the Australian National University tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Sto...

She entered the royal palace as a concubine and became the first and only female emperor of China. She was power hungry, a total operator and if you asked her enemies, a blood thirsty murderer. And her secret weapon to legitimise her rule wasn't just an unwavering belief in herself, but in Buddha.  Historian and author William Dalrymple (Empire, The Golden Road) tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the Briti...

It was a colour once reserved for emperors and the elite. But a lab mishap soon changed purple forever.  Cultural historian and author of the book The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of how a London teenager’s failed experiment transformed how fabric dyes were made, how we dressed and how power was perceived. Binge all the episodes of...

There’s that phrase a picture says a thousand words... but what does a picture of child labour say?  Curator, educator, and photo-historian Beth Saunders (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) sits down with Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) to tell the story of photographer Lewis Hine and his photographs of children working in places like factories, coal mines and cotton mills in the ear...

It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and it’s saved countless lives. The asthma puffer has had a long journey, stretching back thousands of years to various treatments including asthma cigarettes.  But the asthma puffer as we know it today is all thanks to a young girl’s throwaway comment over breakfast in the 1950s.  Dr Daniel Duke from Monash University tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British S...

London, 1854. A mysterious and deadly illness is sweeping through Soho, and people are dropping like flies. The leading theory? “Bad air.” But one doctor isn’t convinced. John Snow begins to trace the outbreak — not through symptoms, but through streets.  Journalist and author Sandra Hempel tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of how a hand-drawn map, a pub, and a pump sparked th...

A Changi prisoner of war. A fridge full of urine. A handful of dead guinea pigs. And one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. Greg de Moore, Associate Professor of Psychiatry based at Sydney's Westmead Hospital, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the story of Australian doctor John Cade and his pioneering work in bipolar treatment.  From the horrors of a...

One of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line, known as “HeLa”. It enabled significant medical breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines. But for decades no one knew that the name 'HeLa' stood for Henrietta Lacks, an African American mother who died of an aggressive cervica...

He soared into the sky in a balloon to prove a scientific theory and landed in the world of espionage.  This is a story about a man with a fabulous moustache who called himself Professor, who was accused of being the devil in the American Civil War and ended up becoming a spy in a big balloon, triggering the creation of the US Air Force. Yes, really.  Matt Bevan from ABC's If You’re Listening tell...

It’s one of the greatest museum heists in Australian history - a theft whose repercussions are still being felt today. And yet, no one really knows about it. Journalist and author Walter Marsh sits down with Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) and shares the story of a mysterious British gentleman who duped Australian museums and stole thousands of butterflies right under their noses.  Binge al...

Yes, Adolf Hitler - the guy who was apparently so 'pure' that he never even drank coffee - was secretly a drug addict.  Norman Ohler, author of the bestselling book Blitzed, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) how a strange celebrity wellness doctor named Theodor Morell became Hitler's personal physician and used Hitler as a guinea pig for his experimental drugs. By the end of WW2, the Na...

This is the story of a gadget lover from Australia who wanted to pirate music and instead created one of the greatest life saving devices in the history of air travel.  Janice Witham, journalist and author, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the creation of the black box. It’s now ubiquitous in aviation but at the time, its creator David Warren fought against scepticism and bureauc...

28 June 1969 was a regular Saturday night at the Stonewall Inn. Until it wasn’t.  “The bar lights blinked on and off. I'd never seen that happen before so I asked my friend what's going on, and my friend said, oh, just another raid. Well, it turned out not to be just the kind of raid that they were used to.” While Mark Segal had spent many nights at the unlicensed gay bar, none were like the one t...

If you had a premature baby in America in the 1900s, chances were they would not survive. That is, until Martin Couney came along... In a bizarre attraction in Coney Island, 'Dr Couney' took the children that medicine deemed 'not worth saving' and displayed them to the public in rows of cutting-edge incubators. Over the years, he saved thousands of babies' lives. But the strangest thing was, Marti...

It's the event that's seen as the trigger for World War One, but it didn't happen quite the way the history books let on...  Australian author Paul Ham tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) what really happened on the 28th of June 1914, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo.  Far from a metic...

When you picture someone wearing high heels, what do you imagine? I'm guessing it's not horseriding archers on a Persian battlefield...  But it turns out the high heel was indeed invented for men, as a brutally effective tool of war. And it was only because of colonialism, and later capitalism, that this iconic footwear made it to Europe and became embedded in women's fashion.  Shoe historian Eliz...

It was the most glamorous job girls could get during WW1... until it turned fatal.  In an emotional episode of No One Saw It Coming, author Kate Moore tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the harrowing true story of the Radium Girls, a group of dial painters who had no idea the job they loved was slowly killing them. When the world turned their back on the Radium Girls, they fo...

Today trade unions are an integral part of the political landscape, at least in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. But this hasn’t always been the case…  In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a real fear that the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution might be replicated in England and as a result trade unions or ‘friendly societies’...

If you thought reality TV began in the ‘90s or early 2000s with MTV’s The Real World or Big Brother, think again…  According to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, the genre actually pre-dates television altogether, beginning with audience participation shows on radio in the 1940’s. But she tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) that it’...