Streets of Your Town

And now to another episode of my special Streets of Your Town series - The Outback Project - bringing the great characters and sounds of Australia’s bush to you. In all my years of reporting from outback Australia, one organisation has stood out to me from all others in all my travels, for having the respect and appreciation of everyone in the bush. And that’s the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The...

And now to another episode of my special Streets of Your Town series - The Outback Project - bringing the great characters and sounds of Australia’s bush to you. Today we meet a true living legend of the Australian shearing industry. Well known Morven local Les Heaydon picked up his first shearers’ handpiece at the age of 14, and just recently shore 100 sheep in one day - to celebrate his 80th bir...

And now to another episode of my special Streets of Your Town series - The Outback Project - bringing the great characters and sounds of Australia’s bush to you. Today we meet renowned Barcaldine artist, cultural champion and Indigenous advocate Suzanne Thompson. Suzanne was awarded a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering last year, in recognition of her cultur...

And now to the second episode of the special Streets of Your Town series - The Outback Project. The vast distances of the outback are daunting and hard to comprehend for many city people. Jennie Feldmeier’s patch dubbed the Cunnamulla-Burke and Wills Remote area, is a ten hour drive from top to bottom, and about eight hours from east to west. But that’s part of the joy and challenge of the job for...

And now to the first episode of the special Streets of Your Town series - The Outback Project. Fittingly I recorded this intro at the beautiful outback town of Barcaldine - hopefully you can hear those sounds of birds, outback winds, and road train trucks in the background as I gather everything into Mildred the cantankerous kombi for today’s travels. But firstly for this launch episode - we head...

It’s a dilemma faced by many people - where to go for justice when all your legal avenues are exhausted - mainly because of your financial situation. In Australia, there is a broad grassroots social movement that responds to this enduring problem - out of the belief that the legal system is inaccessible to many people, and that too often it operates without challenge or scrutiny. Caxton Community...

It’s not often we celebrate a world first feat of engineering that underpins the society surrounding it. But today on Streets of Your Town, we pay tribute to a technological triumph built four decades ago at the Gold Coast, and still going strong today, which is now being recognised as one of the most important developments in the region’s history. Before the Gold Coast Seaway was built, the notor...

Acclaimed Quandamooka artist Delvene Cockatoo-Collins has brought a beautiful insight into an ancient story from her people to the Museum of Brisbane. The artist-in-residence from Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island continues to evolve her arts practice, and this time has reimagined the Museum of Brisbane’s creative space into an interactive and immersive realm exploring the ancestral story of Warrajamb...

The story of proudly Aboriginal owned and led sustainable fashion label Magpie Goose can be summed up in its motto - `stories you wear’. The vibrant and colourful collections of this Brisbane based fashion label are featured in an exclusive exhibition until October 5 at the Museum of Brisbane, tucked inside Brisbane’s glittering City Hall. Co-owner and Kamilaroi man Troy Casey tells us on Streets...

Kris Mizzi is a troubadour and quintessentially Australian singer songwriter, who knew his calling for musical storytelling from an early age. I was lucky enough to hear him play a couple of sets of his Australian folklore at the Woodford Folk Festival, and wanted to share his talents with Streets of Your Town. It was his first Woodford Folk Festival, and while the heat of this Queensland summer w...

Danielle Caruana is an award winning singer songwriter - better known to many by her on-stage moniker of Mama Kin. This spellbinding singer and percussionist taps into the DNA of generations of creatives before her as half of the duo Mama Kin Spender - mesmerising audiences with her firebrand performances and songwriting. Mama Kin Spender’s latest album Promises was nominated for an Aria this year...

This episode of Streets of Your Town is a tribute to 30 years of friendship, and the power of the creative process in whatever form it takes. Wren Valentino is an author, playwright, actor, film producer, entrepreneur and teacher based in Sacremento California. He’s the CEO and owner of Blue Dasher Productions, helping to bring more than 100 independent movies to the screen and championing the tra...

Sometimes our lives deviate from what we expected in ways we could never have imagined. For Cairns based journalist, media trainer and author Kirsty Nancarrow, her bestselling and now award winning book Himalayan Dreams is proof that you never know what could be around the corner. As a journalist for 15 years with ABC Radio in Queensland’s far north, Kirsty had covered literally thousands of stori...

For proud Darumbal and Wulli-Wulli man Garret Lyon, singing and connecting with his audience has been integral to his existence since he was a small child when he would sing show tunes to his family. But just when he thought his talents were all coming to fruition, it was cruelly turned around in a way he didn’t expect. However on reflection, he’s realised now that experience was a gift, and that...

In a culture swamped by AI and technological change, it can become easy to dismiss our creative urges and tell ourselves that we missed our opportunity to shine. However multi-instrumentalist, choir leader, singer and performer Kate Barzdo shows that creativity can burst forth at any time in our life, but only if we heed it and listen to it. Kate has emerged from the recording studio again and rel...

This week on Streets of Your Town, we’re going to Adelaide to celebrate one of the great founders of Australian rock music. Bunna Lawrie is the frontman and founding member of the band Coloured Stone, whose song Black Boy released in 1984 is still an anthem for First Nations people. He most recently performed at the Sydney Opera House in Generations and Dynasties, alongside his children, sharing s...

Danielle Aquilina has forged a path from slam poetry to devising her own award winning play, taking on the taboo topic of women’s bodies with fearless abandon. Fat Girl may sound like a confronting title for a one woman show, but as Danielle tells us on Streets of Your Town - it’s an apt moniker for her  unapologetic take on body dysmorphia, societal norms, and inner demons. She’s fresh from...

There are not many foods that have almost universal appeal, but bacon would have to be one of them. So much so that the Queensland country region famed for producing bacon in many different varieties celebrates this feat with an annual Baconfest Festival. Kingaroy in the South Burnett will become the hub for all things bacon related over the weekend of August 15 to 16, bringing with it a variety o...

Imagine for a moment, that it is 1788 and you are watching a mysterious fleet amassing on the harbour.  This is the premise for the play The Visitors about the monumental events of 1788 from an Aboriginal perspective, giving audiences a unique opportunity to see these events from a viewpoint not covered by the history books. The play first debuted in 2020 and has evolved since. Overseeing the...

Sometimes just as local history seems about to be forgotten, a bold project comes along to bring it back to life. So it is for the new production from Brisbane indie arts company PiP Theatre, with its bold reimagining of the classic play Accidental Death of an Anarchist. This adaptation of Dario Fo’s timeless political farce is relocated to 1980s Brisbane in the tense years leading up to the Fitzg...

The pitoval First Nations celebration that is NAIDOC Week is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year - and continues until Sunday 13 July. The 2025 theme— The Next Generation: Strength, Vision and Legacy —looks firmly to the future while celebrating the achievements of the past.  And that theme has inspired this episode of Streets of Your Town. Renowned Torres Strait Islander artist Ken Th...

Three hours drive from Cairns in the vast wilderness of Cape York in far-north Queensland, is a little town called Laura.  And for 128 years, this little town that is not much more than a roadhouse and a pub has hosted the annual Laura Amateur Turf Club Race meeting, attracting jockeys, horses and racegoers from all over the state. Fans and competitors alike come from hundreds of kilometres a...

There are some conversations that take you to places you never expected, and this one on the banks of the Brisbane River in Brisbane’s cultural precinct was certainly one of them. This chat with Kate Baggerson I hope will inspire you to be more creative in your everyday life, as it did for me. The executive director of Everybody Now is celebrating the tenth year of this unique arts organisation wh...

There’s a little patch of paradise in Queensland’s south-east corner - in some ways not far away from the big city lights of Brisbane, but when you get there, you feel like you could be at the end of the earth. The Scenic Rim spans more than four thousand kilometres with landscapes ranging from lush rainforests to rolling paddocks and serene lakes, with stunning views and an increasingly world ren...

Recently I spent a gloriously rare fine day in Glasgow for Streets of Your Town, wandering around the city’s renowned concert halls and gig venues with music journo Fiona Shepherd - who’s also the co-founder and lead guide of Glasgow Music City Tours. She’s been taking tourists back stage around Glasgow’s renowned live scene for ten years now, sharing many stories from decades past right up to the...