Australian History: Brilliant stories from Australia's past.
We’re going to look at the female convicts who passed through the Cascades Female Factory, in Hobart, Tasmania, and reflect on the different experience the women convicts may have had, to those of the male convicts. There are both harrowing and hilarious stories to be told about the institution and...
Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition concluded, and the last of the expeditioners arrived back in Adelaide in February, 1914. A lot had happened, both on the frozen continent and across the world, in the years they had been away. We wrap up the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” in this...
Douglas Mawson’s expedition was well underway, and the teams from the Cape Denison base had returned after completing their various research programs. All except Mawson and his team. They had undertaken the most ambitious and distant trek, and were now overdue. We turn our attention to the trek Mawson, Ninnis...
Part 4 of Mawson’s story is due out on Friday, but for those who have already listened to the Kelly Gang series, here’s a fun little tour of Kelly country, just to celebrate our birthday this month! Best used on a computer – Tourbuilder is a Google Beta product and...
After returning from Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition and rejecting any idea of returning to Antarctica, the trauma of his polar trekking faded and Douglas Mawson began to consider all the exploration & discovery that still lay waiting there. He set about planning the “Australasian Antarctic Expedition”, to undertake an ambitious scientific...
Douglas Mawson, who would later become the leader of Australia’s first Antarctic expedition, undertook his first trip to Antarctica as part of Ernest Shackleton’s “Nimrod Expedition”, 1908. Though he was young and this was his first foray in to the icy territory, his obvious intelligence, robust constitution and leadership skills,...
Australia’s first formal expedition to Antarctica in 1911, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was led by Douglas Mawson, a geologist from Adelaide University. This episode we’ll look at what brought Mawson to the Antarctic, and at the earlier British expeditions that helped scaffold Mawson’s later venture. The following episodes will focus...
The iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge: After a surprisingly long gestation, it’s path to construction threads through the history, of growth & colonial settlement in Sydney, including the political machinations at state, federal and even international levels. And that’s before we even consider the working of more than 6 million...
We’re retelling the story of the first encounters of the new British arrivals, in Australia in the 1780s onwards, with our wonderful Platypus, the kerfuffle caused when Platypus specimens were sent back to Europe, and we’ll be reminded of the Platypuses’ place in the development of Darwin’s theory, and of...
Ned Kelly, the only surviving member of the Kelly Gang was tried and found guilty of murdering the police at Stringybark Creek. His young life draws to a close and we look at the aftermath of the Kelly Outbreak for the people of Victoria, the Kellys and some of the...