Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Children's author Mem Fox grew up the daughter of missionaries in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  She attended the local school as the only white child before local authorities forced her parents to enrol her in a school for white children. After a stint at drama school in London during the swinging 1960s Mem returned to Australia where she re-trained as a teacher. Her book Possum...

In a small cell in a Poissy Central Prison, just outside Paris, is a 76-year-old man serving multiple life sentences for terrorist acts. The man is Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, one of the world's first international terrorists and perpetrator of horrific attacks carried out in the 1970s and 80s which claimed hundreds of lives. He was a tabloid star and provided a temp...

For a lot of the 20th century, a commonly cited estimate said there were around 300,000 Indigenous people living across Australia prior to invasion. But new research says the Aboriginal population was  “more likely 2–3 million” in 1788.  Another recent study on the 1789 smallpox epidemic was “catastrophic to traditional Indigenous lifeways in the southeast”.  Guests:  Dr Shane Ingrey, a researcher...

Turi King is a superstar in the world of genetics, uncovering the identity of Richard III's body and analysing the Hitler's DNA. But in her latest book she shares the human stories that reflect the important role that DNA has come to play in the world, and where it might take humanity in the future. Guest: Professor Turi King, Director of the Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath and auth...

A new exhibition at Melbourne’s National Communication Museum celebrates the personal computer, and the people who tinkered with, hacked and stretched computers and code into the everyday technology we now take for granted. ' Radical Computing ' takes us from computers entering our homes in the 1970s, through Australia’s early rave and hacker underground, to software and ideas that were once genui...

The UN marks the International Day of Democracy on 15 September every year. But you could be forgiven for missing the celebrations because, let’s face it, democracy’s having a tough time around the world.  Regional Director at Asia Centre Dr. Jamez Gomez however marked the day with an op-ed that claims that "Asia's Democracy is Being Rewired".  Guest: Dr James Gomez is Regional Director at Asia Ce...

The first parliamentary election in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in the southern Philippines took place this week.  The vote, which resulted in a hung parliament, would move the predominantly Muslim region one step closer to self-rule.   Guest: Benedicto R. Bacani is Executive Director of the Institute for Autonomy and Governance (Notre Dame University)

With tens of thousands of food d poisoning cases and accusations of corruption, Indonesia's ambitious Free Nutritious Meals Program is under scrutiny by health, economics and welfare experts across Indonesia. Guest: Dr Elan Satriawan, Associate Professor, Department of Economics,  Universitas Gadjah Mada

Can you guess this week's tweeter?

AJ 'Sandy' Mackinnon's 2002 bestseller The Unlikely Voyage of the Jack de Crow chronicled his adventures on the canals and river systems of England and Europe. And his subsequent books brought to life the same observational humour and adventurous spirit. Now his latest release, Realms of Gold, brings the story of the mirror dinghy Jack de Crow to a satisfying ending. Guest: A.J. 'Sandy' Mackinnon,...

From a backyard in Broken Hill, a former mine worker has helped make a world first planetary discovery.  Trevor Barry has spent years tracking Saturn from the backyard observatory he built himself. In July 2024, Trevor first noticed something unusual around Saturn’s south pole.  What he saw turned out to be a giant 10 sided wave known as “a decagon”,  the first structure of its kind ever seen on a...

As we come out of winter, love is giving way to puggle season.  A puggle is the name for a baby echidna, and it turns out there's a lot more to these spiky Australian animals than first meets the eye.  Echidnas can sense electric fields, have surprisingly large brains and have particularly strange mating habits. And there's still so much we don't know about them.  Guest: Danielle Clode, biologist,...

Captain Reginald Saunders was the first Indigenous military officer in Australia. For the first time, his nephew James Saunders, shares a new and personal version of his story and what it means to fight for a country that wasn't willing to acknowledge his sacrafice. Guest: James Saunders, author of Fighting for Country

The Dutch central bank  recently confirmed that 27 tonnes of gold were physically transferred from the US and Canada back to the Netherlands, and that was after selling 59 tonnes of gold in New York in order to buy it in London. The bank says the move was to strengthen “crisis preparedness” citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”. Guest: Shaokai Fan, Global Head of Central Banks at the World Gold...

Each year the Australian Institute of Physics presents the Marie Curie public lecture series. In 2026 the lectures are being presented by Dr Karelle Siellez who lectures in physics at University of Tasmania. Karelle has been crossing the country speaking about her work in a presentation called " Painting the Universe: A Visual and Musical Exploration of Space-Time " Her work forcuses on transient...

As India refuses to back away from the abeyance on the Indus Treaty, what will become of the river systems that support the livelihoods, energy generation and ecosystems of close to 300 million people across India and Pakistan? Guest: Ambika Vishwanath, Principal Research Fellow with La Trobe Centre for Global Security and Director of Kubernein Initiative

The BRICS summit is taking place in New Delhi this weekend. BRICS brings together eleven major emerging markets and developing countries: Brazil, Russia India, China and South Africa, who are now also joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.  The Iran war threatened to divide the grouping but members unanimously adopted a wide-ranging 45-page document cal...

Author Rosalie Ham's debut novel The Dressmaker was a breakout hit. Inspired by real events in her family life, the 2000 novel, went onto become the 2015 film of the same name, starring Kate Winslet.  Rosalie has since written seven books, all fiction, except for her latest, Look after your feet, a non-fiction work exploring some of the unexpected advantages of growing older. 

Samuel Beckett's German Diaries have finally been published over 30 years after their posthumous discovery. They reveal a young writer, on a pre-war tour of Germany, not yet famous, but already was using dark, wry humour as he observed the absurdity of the early Nazi regime. Guest: Professor Mark Nixon, Professor of Modern Literature and Beckett Studies at the University of Reading and editor of t...

Tibetan-Australian musician Tenzin Choegyal has performed around the world, from  New York’s Carnegie Hall, to opening for the Dalai Lama’s during his visits to Australia and New Zealand.  Now he's bringing Be The Sky to the Brisbane Festival, a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, in honour of The Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday.   Guest: Tenzin Choegyal, musician

On the first Sunday of every month, Julian Morrow is joined by International Intrigue’s Jeremy Dicker to discuss one story in international politics that you might have missed and look ahead to an emerging issue or event.   In this edition we discuss Xi Jinping's upcoming meeting with Donald Trump in the US and the last minute visit to Moscow by the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe.

Nancy Grace Roman, broke boundaries as NASA's first chief astronomer. Now she is breaking a new boundary as the namesake for NASA's latest telescope which was sent into space last week. Guest: Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Sydney University Laureate Professor and Director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy

Forensic Psychologist Helen Paterson has found that people who experience repeated abuse can remember very accurately what happened, but struggle to pin particular details to particular incidents.  And that can have serious consequences when it comes to speaking to police, and providing evidence in court.  For that research, Helen was this week awarded  the Eureka Prize for Excellence in Forensic...

Shein transformed the fashion industry with a model built on extraordinarily cheap clothes and thousands of new styles released each week.  But after a lacklustre debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the fast fashion giant's shares have fallen below their listing price, a long way from the company once valued at $100 billion.  Guest: Timothy McLaughlin , journalist and contributing writer for Th...

At just 11 years old, Anderson Taylor is already the curator of his own natural history museum.  Anderson opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Illinois when he was nine, after years spent collecting fossils and convincing his local town board to let him open the space.  The museum now holds over 1,000 pieces in its collection, including a mastodon femur, a T. Rex replica and an opalised...