Truth Be Told Podcast - 3 Brothers Production

In 1790, a young Bidjigal man was shot through the back by colonial soldiers and survived, the wound earning him a permanent limp and, within his own community, a reputation as someone who carried supernatural power. Over the next twelve years, Pemulwuy became the most persistent and effective resistance leader the British colony in New South Wales ever faced, leading raids the colony's own office...

In the early hours of 17 April 1816, British soldiers acting on written orders from Governor Lachlan Macquarie himself drove a camp of Dharawal people toward the edge of the Cataract Gorge, south west of Sydney. At least fourteen people were killed, their bodies decapitated and displayed in trees as a deliberate warning, with their heads carried back to Sydney for a colonial bounty of thirty shill...

On the morning of 19 November 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, known to his community as Mulrunji, was arrested on Palm Island for allegedly swearing at a passing police car. Forty four minutes later, he was dead in a cell, with internal injuries doctors compared to a high speed car crash. The autopsy findings, made public a week later, set off one of the most significant instances of civil unrest involvi...

In the 1820s, a girl named Truganini lost her mother to whalers, her uncle to soldiers, and her sister to sealers, all before she'd finished growing up. It was the world the Black War created on the island now called Tasmania, lutruwita, a conflict that killed an estimated sixty percent of the entire Aboriginal population within less than a decade and remains one of the most intense, sustained col...

On 10 June 1838, a group of armed men rode onto a station in northern New South Wales and killed at least twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, men, women, and children, then burned the bodies two days later to destroy the evidence. What happened next set this massacre apart from hundreds of others across colonial Australia: a station manager reported it, a Governor ordered an investigation, and seven...

In August 1928, a dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed near a waterhole called Yurrkuru in the Tanami Desert, after breaking Warlpiri marriage law. What followed was ten weeks of killing carried out by a police constable and his posse, sweeping across Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye Country with no real attempt to distinguish the people involved in Brooks's death from anyone who simply ha...

On 1 May 1946, around 800 Aboriginal workers walked off more than twenty stations across the Pilbara, using calendars made from jam tin labels to coordinate a strike across thousands of kilometres with no phones and no radios. It became the longest strike in Australian history, running for three years against arrests, chains, and starvation tactics, two decades before the more widely known Wave Hi...

In August 1931, three Aboriginal girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, were taken from their families and sent to a government settlement over 1,500km from home. Two nights later, they walked out and followed the rabbit-proof fence for nine weeks to get back to Country. Most people know this as the story behind Rabbit-Proof Fence. Few know what happened to Molly only a few years later, and that part of...

This episode looks at six Aboriginal men who have disappeared from the Pilbara and Kimberley since 2021: Jeremiah "Jayo" Rivers, Wesley Lockyer, Clinton Lockyer, Wylie Oscar, Zane Stevens, and Brenton Shar. Some vanished within days of each other, none of their cases has been resolved, and police maintain there's nothing connecting them. Their families see it differently, and they've taken that fi...

Episode 1 of Truth Be Told starts with Ms Dhu, a 22 year old woman who died in a South Hedland police cell in 2014 after being locked up over unpaid fines, and dismissed twice when she said she was in pain. From there we go back to 1834, to the Pinjarra Massacre south of Perth, which took almost 200 years to get an official apology. We trace the Stolen Generations, the death of John Pat in Roebour...

Before we get into the stories, we wanted to introduce ourselves. We are Jake, Sebastian, and Chris, three Aboriginal brothers from Gundungurra Country, raised on Ngarigo Country in New South Wales. Between us we work across ICT, investigative journalism, and advocacy. But the thing that connects all three of us more than anything else is growing up around people who carried this history quietly,...