Out of the Box

When Susan Francis was a baby, she was privately adopted from a doctor's practice in Newcastle, NSW. In her 30s Susan went on a search for her biological parents. It would take her 20 years and all around Australia. When she finally met them, they turned out to be nothing like she expected. Susan's memoir The Love That Remains is out now through Allen and Unwin. | Producers: Bre Jones and Rebecca...

Ron McCallum is the former Dean of the University of Sydney Law School, the chair the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Geneva, and a senior Australian of the year. He is also completely blind, in fact, he has never been able to see. His memoir is called 'Born At The Right Time'. | Producers: Bre Jones & Rebecca Merrick See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy i...

Joey is joined by A'isyiyah - activist, community organiser and vocalist of SMAC nominated, anti-colonial hardcore group Arafura. Before music, A'isyiyah spent their childhood fighting for their family's rights to stay in Australia. It's this context that has informed a lot of their politics, expressed through music and otherwise. Arafura have just released a self-titled EP available via Bandcamp....

Osman Faruqi is a journalist and commentator. And in that pursuit, he’s been exposed some of the most vitriolic, tactical abuse that Australia’s far right are capable of producing. Os has also had a stint as an engineer-in-training, been a political operator, and of-course has spent some time on the airwaves at FBi Radio. | Producers: Bre Jones & Rebecca Merrick See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

Jane Caro is now known best for her advocacy as a writer and public commentator but it all started in the no rules, man’s world of Australian advertising in the 1970s. Now with over 8 books behind her, including a memoir and a fiction series she has become synonymous with her advocacy around education reform and feminism. | Producers: Bre Jones & Rebecca Merrick See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

From South West Sydney, Avani is weeks away from taking over as the presenter of Triple J’s youth issues and current affairs program, Hack. Like many figures in the Australian media landscape, Avani got her chops right here at FBi Radio before she spent nearly three years as a reporter in the wild north at ABC Darwin. | Producers: Bre Jones & Rebecca Merrick See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...

Clare Bowditch has an impressive stack of achievements to her name: seven albums, an acting career, a stack of ARIA’s, and a Rolling Stone Magazine ‘Woman of the Year’ nod. But away from the public view, she’s overcome childhood grief, found a way to manage anxiety and embraced life in just about a million ways. Her memoir, 'Your Own Kind of Girl' is out now. | Producers: Bre Jones & Rebecca Merri...

Debra Keenahan is a psychologist, academic, artist and activist. Currently undertaking her second PhD, she explores themes of Dehumanisation and the Disability Aesthetic throughout her work in both academia and visual art. Debra also has dwarfism and her experience of being Othered, sometimes with extreme cruelty, looms large in her work. It also gives her a unique perspective of humanity at its b...

With an estimated 40,000 hours of music programming under her belt, Gayle Austin is Australia’s first female rock DJ. A true trailblazer, Gayle started working in Sydney radio in the late 1960s, producing for the shock jock John Laws among other icons of the airwaves. She then became an on-air icon herself, as a founding presenter of the ABC’s radical, underground youth station Double J in 1975. |...

Writer Ruby Hamad’s bread and butter is tackling big issues like identity and intersectionality. As the daughter of Syrian-Lebanese refugees, Ruby has experienced the breadth of what it means to belong to a marginalised group in Australian society. She’s resisted cultural expectations from her family, fought discrimination in the work place, and the othering that Australia often dishes out to migr...

Mornings radio star, Bridie Tanner, joins Out of the Box for our special Supporter Drive episode. From growing up in regional NSW, travelling around Australia in a protest rave as a young kid and coming to terms with the onset of her Mum’s mental illness at a young age, Bridie has brought a whole lot of life experience to the microphone. | Become an FBi Radio supporter at fbiradio.com/support | Pr...

When protest broke out on the streets of Fergusson, Missouri in opposition to police violence against African American’s and other minorities, DeRay left a comfortable job as a school administrator and took up the cause of chronicling the resistance via Twitter. Not long after he has become one of the Black Lives Matter movements most high profile activists. Traveling the world with a cautious vis...

On this day 16 years ago, Stuart Buchanan was one of the many midwives and midhusbands who helped birth FBi Radio. In the early 2000’s, he was at the frontier carving out the relationship between music and the internet at inception. Once the General Manager of FBi, Stuart is now Head of Digital Programming at The Sydney Opera House where he continues to dedicate his life to the weird and wonderful...

Glenn is a photographer and photojournalist with a purpose. For 25 years Glenn has carried the flag of human rights and environmental activism through his camera. It’s a passion and a mission that has quite literally taken him all around the world, from South Africa to central Australia, Botswana to Tahiti, and most recently through the Arctic waters where he was a photographer on the Sea Shepherd...

For 20 years Murray graced Australian televisions as the Red Wiggle. He played everywhere from regional NSW to New York’s Maddison Square Garden and became a much loved part of millions of childhoods. Since wrapping up with The Wiggles, he’s been busy playing with the DZ Deathrays, recording in the US with his band The Soul Movers and advocating for Australian music. | Producers: Bre Jones and Nic...

Hazem Shammas last year won a Logie for his role in TV show Safe Harbour, a drama which follows the story of five Australians who set out on a sailing holiday and encounter an overcrowded fishing boat of desperate asylum seekers. But it was a long trip to the podium one that goes right back to his Palestinian parents’ migration from a small village in northern Israel in the 1970s to an insurmounta...

Michael Mohammed Ahmad came of age as a young Muslim man in Western Sydney in the notoriously violent world of Punchbowl Boys High. This became the setting for his award-winning book a work of autobiographical fiction called The Lebs. He is also the founder and director of Sweatshop, a literacy movement in Western Sydney devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities throu...

Emelda’s grandfather was kidnapped on a beach in Vanuatu and brought to Australia as a 12 year old boy to work in unspeakably harsh conditions on the sugar plantations of Northern Queensland. It’s a story that makes her a direct descendent of blackbirding - Australia’s forgotten slave trade. Her own life has been defined by identity, community and a healthy dose of black power. Emelda Davis is the...

Bri Lee was a District Court Judge's Associate in Queensland where she was exposed to some of the worst rape cases in the country. It was dealing with these traumatic stories that spurred Bri to confront her own history of sexual abuse and take the man that assaulted her to court. Her book is Eggshell Skull, its examination of the toll that our justice system takes on women and all survivors of ab...

Today Joey chats with bass player Ray Ahn of Australia’s thumping 80s pub rock bands, controversially titled, The Hard-Ons. Ray acts as a chronicler of the wild Australian DIY scene of the 80s and 90s through his blog and, of course, his writing is full of stories about his own bands. In 2017 he released a book of his art titled, “The Art of Ray Ahn – What I Did During My School Holidays” and Ray...

Rick Morton is a social affairs journalist and writer, but Rick’s own story is a social affairs scoop like no other. When Rick was little growing up in the extremely remote and dusty Qld outback a terrible accident was followed by the break-up of his family. His mum and siblings were driven out of the family home into a poverty they never quite managed to escape. | Producers: Bre Jones and N...

  As a young boy, Dor Akech Achiek spent 9 years in a refugee camp in Kenya, after escaping war-torn South Sudan. Once Australia accepted his family as refugees, as a teenager, Dor was educated at one of Sydney's most prestigious private schools. He's recently represented Australia at the UNHCR and the Global Youth Refugee Youth Conference in Geneva.   See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

Steve Bunbajee Hodder Watt is a radio maker but you won’t hear him stuck in traffic in the city. As the Senior News & Current Affairs presenter at Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association he broadcasts from Alice Springs into the desert, his audience hailing from some of the most remote parts of Australia, and some of that have been hit hardest by poor government policy. He’...

Mahmood Fazal was once the sergeant-of-arms of the Mongols, one of Australia’s largest outlaw motorcycle clubs. He was in an environment shrouded in addiction, violence and often death. Now this is the world and subculture he writes about for Vice Australia. Producers: Bre Jones and Nicole De Palo See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nina Oyama, has been a bong smoker, a party goer, and done a dash working the counter at Supré but she is nothing short of a chronic overachiever. Just out of uni she was picked up to play a recurring role in the hit comedy  Utopia , she was a comedy writer and performer on  Tonightly  with Tom Ballard, and her self-written three part series  The Angus Project  was...