Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

This week's magnificent mystery caller feeds on fruits in our east coast forests – the Wompoo Fruit-Dove.

The Shot on Shit Film Festival is a short film festival with one key eligibility criterion: the film has to be made with “a non-professional camera - the shittier, the better!”.  Shot On Shit is the brainchild of The Collective of Underground Movie Lovers, a film club dedicated to screening alternative, underground, censored cinema. Their slogan is “The Profane is Profound”. Guest: Parker Constant...

When Nicholas Brown couldn't find work as an Indian-Australian actor in the 2000s, he moved to India, the homeland his parents had rejected, and became a Bollywood star. But his success brought it's own burden, as Nicholas tried to navigate how to exist authentically as a gay man, in a country where homosexuality was illegal. Guest: Nicholas Brown, actor and musician

Right now there are between 20 to 30 trillion red blood cells coursing around your body, delivering oxygen to your organs and transporting carbon dioxide to your lungs for disposal.   All being well, your red blood cells are donut shaped, with a dimple in the centre on both sides. But a single mutation in a gene on chromosome 11, if carried by both parents, could result in, not nice bouncy donuts,...

As the US midterms approach, videos of people on the street expressing their support for candidates have appeared on social media platforms with millions of views. And while they seem authentic, they were actually distributed by internationally managed bot accounts, and funded by opaque entities. Campaigns like this are pervasive on social media, with marketing bodies, political actors and governm...

The German Reich was the colonial power in what is now Namibia from 1884 to 1915.  In 2021, the German Government officially acknowledged “atrocities … that, from today's perspective, would be called genocide”.  From 1904 to 1908, German colonial rulers waged a war of extermination against the Herero and Nama people in order to install a German settler colony.  And although in 2021, the German gov...

Tensions are high in the lead up to Israel's first national election since October 7, 2023. And some of the loudest voices are those of hostage family members, using the election to seek justice and accountability for the fate of their loved ones. Journalist Jessica Steinberg reporting on the lives of many hostage families in the months after October 7 and she joins Sunday Extra to share what host...

This week's mystery caller migrates from southeast Asia to feed over our summer wetlands – the Whiskered Tern.

Suzie Miller is one of the world’s most influential contemporary playwrights. In The Year That Made Me, Suzie publicly shares for the first time why 1995 was a year she didn't think she would survive, and why it changed the course of her life. A former lawyer who has a degree in science and grew up in a working class family in St Kilda, Suzie's theatrical works have been staged in fifty different...

FC aka Freakyclown has spent 3 decades breaking into banks and secure government locations, and he gave a keynote address at Melbourne's CyberCon 2026 on Friday. FC is an ethical hacker, who works for organisations that want him to reveal their security weaknesses to them. He's the co-founder of cyber security company  Cygenta , former Head of Offensive Cyber Research at defence contractor Raytheo...

The death of a Russian lab worker at an anti-plague research institute earlier this month has raised fresh concerns about the global implications of lab leaks.  Initial local reporting suggested that the worker died of pneumonic plague following a lab accident, but Russian health authorities deny this, and the official cause of death remains unknown. Alison Young has reported on the Russian incide...

Six weeks after flash flooding hurtled through northern Nepal, the government has concluded it's search and rescue mission for the thousands of people still missing. But as the government begins the slow process of recovery, how will it support and restore the lives of the 32,000 displaced Nepali who are mourning the loss of homes, livelihoods and loved ones? Guest: Kunda Dixit, publisher and form...

This month the African Union launched the Africa Credit Rating Agency. The continent's first ratings agency aims to level the playing field for banks, companies, sovereign wealth funds and other institutions seeking to access credit.  Africa is generally seen as a riskier lending prospect than other parts of the developing world and that means borrowers face much higher costs to access credit.  Th...

This week's mystery caller floods back to Australia from the north to enjoy our summer months – the Sacred Kingfisher.

Photojournalist Lorrie Graham was the first female photography cadet at The Sydney Morning Herald in 1975, and over the five decades since became “one of Australia’s most distinctive and influential photojournalists”. 

The Australian Museum holds an archive of photos, specimens and films taken by Harry Burrell, a vaudeville performer turned amateur naturalist, who changed the way the world understood the platypus. Harry used his vaudeville showmanship to display the quirks of the platypus in a specially built 'platypusary' which he took on travelling exhibitions around the country and even overseas.  By today's...

At the tender age of 95, Liz Hicklin keeps expanding her repetoire — from author and poet, to comedian and now star of a one-woman show about being a footnote to history, as the girlfriend who dated Ted Hughes before Sylvia Plath Guest: Liz Hicklin, writer and star of Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend , playing at the Melbourne Fringe Festival from October 15-18

100 word including guest & book

Dr. Rachael Gunn aka Raygun represented Australia in women's breaking at the Paris 2024 Olympics. While she scored no points from the Olympic judges, she instantly scored a starring role at the centre of a social media firestorm debating her Australiana inspired routine.  Recently Raygun told her side of the story in the Netflix documentary series Untold, which features endearing star turns from h...

Indonesia is home to two of the world's last surviving tropical glaciers, which are found near the top of a 4882 metre mountain in Papua Province.  The glaciers used to cover much of the Surdiman mountain range but they're disappearing rapidly and predictions for when they will finally disappear range from 2026 to 2030. Dr Donaldi Permana is a climate research scientist and has made a number of ex...

This year’s  Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine  was jointly awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work in optogenetics, a method for controlling nerve signals with light. Their research began by isolating a light-responsive cell from pond algae, and now makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain.  Gues...

This week's mystery caller towers above its fellow wetland species – the Black-necked Stork.

Anyier Yuol arrived in Australia on a humanitarian visa from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya aged 10.  Her parents, refugees from the civil war in South Sudan, had both died and she was raised in the camp by a aunt.  A talented footballer who once dreamt of playing for the Matildas, she switched to a career in academia and modelling.  Her PhD explored the cultural, social, and gendered dimensions of...

According to UNICEF, the United National Children’s Fund, there are an estimated 50 million refugee and displaced children around the world. 

This month on Sunday Intrigue, Jeremy Dicker, managing editor of International Intrigue, looks back at Switzerland's referendum on whether to enshrine a strict definition of neutrality in its constitution. And Brazil goes to the polls for the first round of the presidential election on October 4, in something of a re-run of the 2022 campaign. Incumbent president Lula da Silva is running against Fl...