Earshot

How an imprisoned playwright helped create Australia’s most iconic internet meme. This...is democracy manifest.

Every family has its secrets, but for people from the LGBTQIA+ community the 'secret' can be their true selves. We meet three young queer Australians at different stages of coming out.

As you enter the town of Lake Bolac in southwest Victoria, you pass a sign that says 'home of aquatic sports', but historically Lake Bolac is famous for its fine quality and abundance of kuyang or short-finned eels. Eels were the most important food source for indigenous communities in this area, but the records that are left are patchworked and few. Walk eel country, following the path of the eel migration and in the footsteps of human history.

Locals were devastated when their newspaper was axed, so they set up their own. Dynamo editor cum journalist Susanna Freymark tells the stories that really matter to The Richmond River community.

Indigenous and African migrant communities collide in the Northern Territory, as Sydney-born Brian Obiri-Asare explores what it means to be black in Australia

When the Black Summer firestorm hits her street, Cath runs for her life—leaving her partner Jack, who’s hellbent on staying to defend their home. Later, among the shock and the chaos, it hits her: Oh my god, where is Jack?

Landays is a powerful and subversive form of poetry in Afghanistan, performed by women. Part of traditional folk culture, the poems are oral and improvised. And for the women who give voice to them, there's a price to pay.

It might be the most famous recipe in Australia: flour, salt, a little red wine, and don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce. Paul Kelly’s ‘How to Make Gravy’ — written as a letter from prison at Christmas time — has grown in popularity since it was first recorded 25 years ago.Using the song as a starting point, Earshot speaks with five previously incarcerated people about their experience in prison on Christmas day.

Ghezal is a journalist trapped in a safehouse in Kabul as The Taliban take over the city. Through the intimacy of voice messages she tells her story of searching for a way out of Afghanistan for her young family and the realities of becoming a refugee.

Ghezal is a journalist in Afghanistan and when her city Mazar i Sharif falls to The Taliban they come looking for her. She escapes to Kabul, joining the desperate crowds at the airport but unable to board a plane she returns to the city, her young family in tow, with nowhere to stay. She tells her story of fear and defiance through intimate voice messages recorded on her phone.

The Cat Empire’s style is impossible to pin-down. The most accurate description might be 'uniquely Melbourne'.The six-piece have earned fans worldwide through 20 years of raucous live shows and dogged touring.Before the original line-up play their final shows together the band reflect their incredible story.

Chinese-Australia singer, Rainbow Chan, returns to her mother’s village in Hong Kong. She meets some charismatic grannies who sing surprisingly subversive and feminist protest songs, known as bridal laments.

Three stories which explore brief encounters, chance meetings and the fleeting nature of life

It’s the perennial question: what's for dinner tonight?But for a rising number of Australians experiencing food insecurity during the pandemic, the question has taken on new meaning.As NSW emerges from lockdown, Earshot shares a portrait of the community group, Addi Road and discovers what we can learn from their hyperlocal response to the crisis.

It was a simple act, done in a less-than-simple way. When Johnny Danalis decided to return the “Star of Taroom”, an ancient Indigenous groove stone his father had souvenired in the 1970s, it was simply to give back what was taken. But when he decided to wheel the 160 kilogram stone 500 kilometres from Brisbane to Taroom he had no idea it had the power to teach its people’s history, draw Iman people back to country and heal old wounds.

What does your voice say about you? Not your choice of words, but all the extra information the voice carries, like our emotions, accents, even apparently our identity. Details that big tech and governments are more and more interested in each day.

Under the rule of President Erdogan Turkey has become the world’s biggest jailer of journalists.

Stella Nyanzi’s words are searing, she plans to topple a dictator with them. She was imprisoned for her poem on facebook that called the President of Uganda, Museveni, a diseased foetus that should not have been born. Her 18 months in prison have made her bolder, angrier and more determined to create change in Uganda.

Ma Thida is a major figure in the struggle for democracy in Myanmar. A surgeon and writer she was initially happy to go to prison to gain experience to write a prison memoir. However after years in solitary confinement it was only mindfulness meditation and books she had smuggled into jail that got her through. She speaks to Earshot for this special series marking the anniverary of PEN International from an undisclosed location she has fled to after the February coup in Myanmar.

In this first program in a series marking 100 years of Pen International, the organisation that advocates for prisoners of conscience around the world, we investigate the disappearance of Uyghur poets into the detention camps of Xinjiang.

Are white people being silenced by being labelled as racists? Controversial comedian Isaac Butterfield thinks so. And what about people who publicly call out racism? Are they also silenced? Sami Shah feels frustrated with all this shouting and looks for answers to cancel culture by confronting his own racism.

The idea that immigrants are taking work away from working class white people has created a perfect racist storm. Where does the idea come from and how do we counter it?

Why do people who’ve experienced racism dish it out to other racial groups? Sami Shah investigates a taboo subject that’s like a crack in the mirrorball of multicultural Australia.

Comedian and journalist Craig Quartermaine describes to Sami Shah white Australia’s reaction to Indigenous people and their place in our national narrative as “an uncomfortable truth”. So how do young Indigenous people get around that reality? Craig talks to two young people who are facing up to racism with bravery and creativity.

Comedian and journalist Sami Shah had never experienced racism until he moved to Australia from Pakistan. It makes him the best person to prise open the lid on this difficult conversation about what racism means, who experiences it and the impact it’s having on the whole country.

As you enter the town of Lake Bolac in southwest Victoria, you pass a sign that says 'home of aquatic sports', but historically Lake Bolac is famous for its fine quality and abundance of kuyang or short-finned eels. Eels were the most important food source for indigenous communities in this area, but the records that are left are patchworked and few. Walk eel country, following the path of the eel migration and in the footsteps of human history.

Bev Francis found out by accident she was the strongest woman in the world. It was the late 1970s, and the sport of women’s weightlifting was still new. When international records were compared, no one was as strong as Bev: she could defy gravity, lifting more than three times her bodyweight. Meet this forgotten champion of women’s muscle sports, who’s a firm believer that rules are meant to be broken.

In July last year, after a surge in Covid outbreaks, 3000 residents in nine public housing towers in Melbourne were forced into hard lockdown. Police surrounded the buildings and no one was allowed in or out. The controversial lockdown drew a lot of criticism. Residents struggled to get hold of essential supplies and the heavy police presence made people feel like prisoners in their homes. One year on, we speak with some of those people who were locked down and locked in.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following program contains the voice of a person who has died.The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia’s most pristine and unregulated river systems. But now the pressure is on to take its water for irrigation. Pastoralists watch the water flowing through their stations and see wasted opportunity. Traditional owners see life and say not one drop is wasted.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of our most pristine river systems. But it’s fast becoming one of Australia’s most contested spaces; for the oil, gas and land around it, and for the water in it.

How can you represent your country at the Olympics if you don’t have one? This was the challenge facing refugee athletes until 2016 when an Olympic team made up of asylum seekers was brought together to represent 80 million displaced people. In the run up to the 2021 Tokyo games, Earshot follows two Australian-based refugee athletes hoping to be selected for the highly competitive Refugee Olympic team.

From the Aboriginal mission to the steelworks to the sex workers, there’s many a tale etched into the bitumen of Wentworth Street. Local artist Anne-Louise Rentell takes us on a tour of a suburb with a colourful past, in search of a new identity.

Migrants, artists, drug users and The Western Bulldogs have brought fame and infamy to Footscray. Writer and local Alice Pung introduces us to the people that make this Melbourne suburb feisty and full of heart.

The firestorm of 2019 has left a lingering shadow over this town. Local radio DJ Don Ashby shows us the other side of Mallacoota – the abalone divers, the museum in a war bunker and the traditional owners who had to hide their Aboriginality to survive.

There’s so much more to this town than Priscilla and Mad Max. Writer Jack Marx takes us to the hidden corners of Broken Hill and its history; from the cross that used to light up the main street every time someone died to staring down the six o’clock swill.

The town of Nederland in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains has an unusual mascot: an old, dead Norwegian man, whose body is preserved in a backyard cryogenics chamber. Behind it all - his grandson keeps the dream of his return alive.

In 2003, journalist Andrew Gray was embedded with a US tank battalion during the Iraq invasion. In this documentary he returns to an event from that time which has haunted him for nearly 20 years.

He emerged of Sydney's gay party scene of 1980s, a time of creative and sexual freedom. But where is he today?

The unlikely story of two half-sisters who connected late in life, a birth mother turned adoptive mother, and what can happen when biological relatives turn up out of the blue.

Australian forces took part in the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Three soldiers share their experiences of those wars and returning home to face a battle of a different kind.

When a young American took up a position with the US Antarctic Program in the late '90s he imagined incredible adventures within a pristine landscape, but he found something completely different.

Every family has its secrets, but for people from the LGBTQIA+ community the 'secret' can be their true selves. We meet three young queer Australians at different stages of coming out.

What happens when you no longer believe in God, but still experience a God-shaped hole in your life?

Locals were devastated when their newspaper was axed, so they set up their own. Dynamo editor cum journalist Susanna Freymark tells the stories that really matter to The Richmond River community.

Noelle Martin was an 18-year-old law student when she found hundreds of explicit images online with her face photoshopped onto the naked bodies of porn actresses.

In 2018 more than 20,000 Australians decided to ‘upsize their cup size', and if the numbers are anything to go by, the desire for bigger breasts isn’t decreasing. Breast augmentation is currently the most popular cosmetic procedure worldwide.

When the Black Summer firestorm hits her street, Cath runs for her life—leaving her partner Jack, who’s hellbent on staying to defend their home. Later, among the shock and the chaos, it hits her: Oh my god, where is Jack?

Natural temperate grasslands once spread from the Melbourne to the South Australian border, but only 1% remain. So how can we learn to see the landscape anew and protect the remaining grasslands?

Indigenous and African migrant communities collide in the Northern Territory, as Sydney-born Brian Obiri-Asare explores what it means to be black in Australia

What's it like to be waiting for an organ transplant waiting for the gift that could save your life, knowing that you're waiting for someone to die, but that you could also die waiting? This is 30 year old Matt's story