Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Singer-songwriter Jessica Mauboy is our special guest on the Year That Made Me this NAIDOC week. She covers her early life growing up in Darwin in an Indonesian-Kuku Yalanji family as one of 5 sisters. She also talks about the role of her school choir teacher, her rise to fame on Australian Idol and starting her own music label. 

What do we do if aliens reach out? Since 1989 scientists have maintained a set of protocols that would guide the world upon the discovery of signs of extraterrestrial intelligence coming from space. This year the protocols were updated, to account for the rapid change in technology and the rise of social media. Guest: Professor Michael Garrett, the Sir Bernard Lovell Chair of Astrophysics at Manch...

A deep-dive into the incredible engineering of the football used in the 2026 men's world cup and the history of football design. 

Professor Marcia Langton explores "the challenges to distinctive Aboriginal ways of being and knowing" in advance of her inaugural Rechnitz Memorial Lecture. Guest: Marcia Langton, Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne . Professor Langton is presenting the inaugural Rechnitz Memorial Lecture for the  Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia on the 14 July.

On Tuesday July 7, a French court of appeal will decide whether Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party can run for president for a fourth time in 2027. If not, her hand-picked protégé Jordan Bardella will run in her stead. A child of Italian migrants who grew up in one of France's poorest neighbourhoods, Bardella is an unusual presidential candidate. But his ascent in the anti-immigra...

Shifra Ainomugisha grew up on a tomato farm in western Uganda and saw first hand the enormous amount of food waste that kept her family in poverty. Now she runs a social enterprise which uses centralised cold storage facilities powered by solar energy to improve farmer's yield and their profits.  Guest: Shifra Ainomugisha, founder and CEO of Solafam , and 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year...

Why do we still "have a crack", but don't "give it a burl"? 

A notebook has been discovered in the National Library of France that contains compositions part-written by Mozart. Julian speaks with one of the people who authenticated the discovery. 

Irina Berezina is one of the few women in the world in chess to become an International Master. She started out as a child chess prodigy in the former Soviet Union, and after moving to Australia she went on to represent the country at 8 Chess Olympiads. But it was an international chess competition in 1997 that nearly ended her life, and changed the way she played the game forever. Guest: Irina Be...

In 2025, the Republic of the Marshall Islands rolled out the world’s first nationwide universal basic income scheme. 

When the US captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and backed his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, Trump promised a new era of prosperity was ahead for the people of Venezuela. Six months on, despite Venezuelan oil prices finally catching up with the world market, and the influx of investment, the Venezuelan bolívar has plummeted and the promised era of prosperity for Venezuelans is yet to ma...

$90 million worth of flight credits with Virgin Australia are set to expire on June 30. The credits date back to the COVID period, but the equivalent credits with Qantas or Jetstar do not have an expiry date.

While attention focuses on saving the bees, what is happening to the wider insect world that underpins global ecosystems? Entomologist Jonathan Finch explores the gaps in current research on insect decline, and the new innovations that may still help turn the tide. Guest: Jonathan Finch, entomologist at the Tasmania Institute of Agriculture , part of the University of Tasmania.

In 1988 Anna Funder was a student in Berlin, unaware that the East German dissidents she had befriended were about to have their lives changed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Years later these events would change her own life, inspiring her to pen her award winning book Stasiland . 

For the small communities of scientists, researchers and support staff who live in Antarctica, Midwinter means a day spent in almost total darkness, and, in temperatures hovering around -20 degrees, a dip in the Antarctic waters. It also when the Australian Antarctic Medal is awarded, which recognises “those who have rendered outstanding service in scientific research or exploration in connection...

A lesser known artistic project of Arthur Boyd is on display at the National Gallery of Australia. Arthur Boyd: Tapestries The 20 tapestries, commissioned by Boyd, were part of his extensive artistic exploration of the life of Saint Francis, from the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, Portugal. Guest: Elspeth Pitt, Senior Curator, Australian Art, at the National Gallery of Australia

It's “perhaps the most polarised choice of any election in the world in recent memory”. Increasing gang violence related to the cocaine trade is front of mind for voters, who are split between “bookish” philosopher and ex-Communist Iván Cepeda, and Abelardo de la Espriella, a populist, hard-right lawyer with no political experience who dubs himself “El Tigre”. Guest: Laura Lizarazo, Associate Dire...

Former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham is about to be sworn in as an MP for Makerfield at Westminster, but the biggest question in UK politics now is how long until he’s sworn in as Labour’s new Prime Minister? Guest: Emily Maitlis, journ­al­ist, broad­caster and co-host of the pod­cast ‘The News Agents’

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, and its English translation by Lin King has been awarded the 2026 International Booker Prize. It is the first time the award has been given to a Taiwanese writer, or to a work translated from Mandarin Chinese.

Sophie Cape was forced to give up a promising career as an elite athlete, first as a downhill skier, and then as a track cyclist, after a series of catastrophic physical injuries left her unable to continue. From a place of deep personal crisis, Sophie found a new passion as an artist, and has taken her creative outlet to the same physical extremes that marked her time as a sportswoman. Guest: Awa...

Archaeologists in Egypt were amazed to find a fragment of Homer's epic poem the Iliad stuffed inside a 1,600 year-old mummy. The discovery prompted questions as to how and why the papyrus sheet written in ancient Greek came to be there. 

Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer has won the prestigious BBC World Service International Audio Drama Competition for an audio play about four teenagers in an Irish cemetery.  

Research commissioned by the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds shows a tenfold increase in birding by Gen Zs since 2018, within a 47% rise in birdwatching by people of all ages over that time. And at home, BirdLife Australia’s annual Aussie Bird Count survey recorded a record-breaking 5 million birds counted by nearly 64,000 people across Australia in 2025. Guest: Louise Williams,  Pr...

Brooklyn Rivera spent his life fighting for the rights of the Indigenous Miskito people of Nicaragua's resource-rich Caribbean coast. He died in state custody this month, where he was arbitrarily detained by the Nicaraguan government in 2023. The UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua say Mr Rivera's death highlights the human rights abuses occurring under the regime of President Daniel Ort...

There is a developing bilateral relationship between Russia and the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan. The two nations recently signed an as-yet undisclosed military cooperation agreement in what the Afghan defence minister described as “an expansion of the bilateral relations between the two countries.”