Forgotten Australia

Halloween Special! Just over 100 years ago, Australia was spooked by strange happenings at a farmhouse in northern NSW. Showers of stones! Bumps in the night! Night after night! All centred on a little girl named Minnie. Was she a portal to a poltergeist? The police, press and public wanted answers.

Check out my other podcast, Australian Murder, wherever you get your audio.

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With the Auster Archer over Sydney, and everyone freaking out, the RAAF scrambles to do something… anything… but their responses are 100% inept and 0% intercept. Luckily, a couple of other Top Guns are ready to fly into the Danger Zone...

Be sure to check out my new true crime show Australian Murder.

Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

See the TV segment on this story here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ehAQVhOL3k

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In August 1955, Sydney was suddenly under threat from a rogue plane.

Had it really taken off by itself? Would it crash into the city?

What were the RAAF doing about it?

Be sure to check out my new true crime show Australian Murder.

Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes.

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I'm launching a new true crime podcast called Australian Murder.

Here's the lowdown.

Check out Australian Murder wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow to get the first episode as soon as it's released next week!

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Who was Musquito, the Aboriginal warrior feared by colonists in Sydney and Tasmania?

Historian Naomi Parry Duncan's new book takes us behind the myths for a better understanding of this remarkable man.

But Musquito: The Real Story of a Legendary Colonial Warrior is much more than a biography – it also tells the entwined stories of Naomi's own colonial ancestors.

Booktopia Awards:

https://www.booktopia.com.au/booktopia-book-award/promo4387.html

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Pa...

Having successfully toured Australian cities with Frankenstein, Professor Hornburg invents a new machine man that uses a new energy source. But he and his creation – called Adam Iron, first man of iron – will have to share the limelight with a snake charmer and his nest of vipers. Two showmen scientists. Deadly serpents and an infernal machine. What could possibly go wrong?

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Just as the Iron Outlaw Ned Kelly is going to the gallows, Australians are astonished by a walking automaton called ‘Frankenstein - The Steam Man’. Professor Hornburg’s invention is intriguing, ingenious and imaginative. But is it really ‘the greatest piece of mechanism in the universe’? How much is science and how much is showmanship? To put it bluntly: Is Hornburg a Humbug?

Step right this way and all will be revealed!

All true and all bizarre, this is a strange parable for our own age of Gods and Monsters.

Australian Frankenstein – Part Two: Th...

In March 1912, Australia was stunned to learn that Koombana was missing in nearly identical circumstances to Yongala. In this final episode, we look at how good and bad luck again decided who lived and who died, how the Koombana story crossed over with the loss of Titanic, and how the Adelaide Steamship Company put greed over need.

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Alongside Yongala, the Adelaide Steamship Company prided itself on its luxury vessel Koombana, designed especially to work the Western Australian coast. But this was a seemingly cursed vessel, where anything that could go wrong did, from disappearing and dead passengers, to collisions, fires and a broken loaf of bread that not only triggered a national crisis but sent a handful of men to their fates.

Part Three – Beyond Human Knowledge

is available now ad-free for Apple and Patreon supporters.

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In March 1911, with the loss of the ship Waratah still fresh in memory, a big passenger liner went missing in a cyclone off northern Queensland. As a massive search began, Australia tried to believe that ‘no news is good news’. Incredibly, a year later almost to the day, the same scenario played out again – involving a ship from the same company, in the same conditions, in the same latitude. In this three-part miniseries, we look at the entangled tales of the Adelaide Steamship Company’s coastal vessels Yongala and Koombana – and how these tragedies were bookended by Waratah and Titanic.<...

I’m re-releasing this short as background for the new miniseries, Mysteries of the Sea.

In July 1909, the world wondered what had become of the SS Waratah, last seen off coast of South Africa with more than 200 souls aboard.

This grim mystery was even more sensational for featuring a double murderer, a passenger plagued by prophetic visions and a veteran sea captain with a charmed reputation. But once all hope was lost, a likely explanation for the disaster was to come from a former Waratah passenger: Australian professor William Bragg, who a few ye...

This week marks the 70th anniversary of regular television broadcasting in Australia. Channel Nine recently 'recreated' the 'Good Evening and Welcome to Television' moment in a fakes-over-facts promo generated by artificial intelligence. In this short, we look at the strange evolution of Australian TV, which started in colonial times. It’s a rich history, and one that deserves better than cheap slop that flattens understanding.

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Ap...

Blackbirding – A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade. We talk about the practices and policies that led to a staggering death toll – and how we don’t remember because our forgetting was engineered by language and laws meant to obscure and hide the true horrors.

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Dr James Patrick Murray kidnaps and kills more people, and goes mad and is nearly murdered himself, before returning to Australia to be acclaimed as a saviour during a smallpox outbreak. But the hero becomes villain overnight when the truth of the massacre is revealed. Yet the doctor – dubbed ‘the worst demon of them all’ – still has diabolical tricks to play.

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Dr James Patrick Murray takes the brig Carl to the sunny South Seas and into a heart of darkness beyond the imagination of even Joseph Conrad. In this nightmare of his creation, shooting dozens of defenceless men is only the start of the atrocities.

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Dr James Patrick Murray ranks as one of the most evil characters in Australian history.

In September 1871, he ordered the massacre of 70 men that his slavers had kidnapped from Bougainville and imprisoned aboard their ship.

In Part One, we look at Dr Murray’s background – and how he became widely hated across Australia long before he became a mass murderer.

Originally released in 2021. Re-released to accompany the new Talking History episode called Blackbirding – A Reckoning With the Australian Slave Trade

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From 1972, Paul Hogan was the Australian tobacco industry’s most formidable marketing weapon, the Winfield warrior in a new era of mandatory health warnings. When a total ban on ciggie commercials loomed, the manufacturers were to pivot and spend even more money with media companies and sporting bodies to ensure they stayed in play after that fateful day. Much later, Aussie A-list ciggie frontmen would all say the same thing: ‘But, we didn't know…’

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Fifty years ago this week – 1 September 1976 – tobacco commercials were banned on Australian television. So, it was goodbye to Paul Hogan, Stuart Wagstaff, Norman Gunston and other celebs selling ciggies and smoking to adults and kids alike via the idiot box. In this episode, we sift the dirty ashtray of recent history for a look at the powerful profiteers who put the A-list on the payroll, chronicling how multinational tobacco companies, the Australian media and government undermined medical science to make a killing.

Part Two will be available first for supporters. It will go on general release late...

Aussie writer Charles Shaw came from the school of hard knocks to create a true-blue noir antihero in a series of novels that were internationally popular and compared with the work of hardboiled master Mickey Spillane. He also wrote another bestseller that was adapted into a Hollywood classic in the 1950s. You may even have seen it!

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Sixty years ago this week, Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari led 200 Aboriginal stockmen and their families in the Wave Hill Walk-Off. They were protesting pitiful pay and conditions and demanding the return of traditional lands. The Walk-Off was the start of a brave eight-year struggle. In this episode, we also look at the brutality of the killing times at Wave Hill.

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Nearly 100 years ago, the village of Wolumla on the far south coast of NSW was shocked by its first murder. The motive for this crime was so scandalous that a wall of silence protected suspects and other victims from police and public exposure.

Available for the first time on general release, this episode was made for supporters in 2021.

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How well do you know your murderers, mobsters, armed robbers and bent coppers? How good is your memory for Aussie rock hits of the 1970s and 1980s? Test yourself with this all-new trivia quiz. 

30 questions across three rounds.

How high can you score?

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Check out my books!

They’ll Never Hold Me:

https://www.booktopia.com.au/the...

Digging into the murderer’s past and future is to find two more cold-blooded killings.

Forgotten Australia is created and hosted by Michael Adams, author of the acclaimed true crime books The Murder Squad, Hanging Ned Kelly and They'll Never Hold Me. He’s also a regular guest on ABC Nightlife, ABC Overnight and Australian True Crime.

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes.

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A shocking early result of our first national census was... murder!

In 1911, a Cloncurry census collector's investigations into an unreturned form turned up a dead man, burned to bones in the vastness of the Never Never.

But this cold-blooded crime was very likely not the killer's first murder – nor his last.

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Forgotten Australia is created and hosted by Michael Adams, author of the acclaimed true crime books The Murder Squad, Hanging Ne...

Did Abe Saffron kill Juanita Nielsen? Order the Luna Park fire? Or was so-called Mr Sin exerting a more subtle yet no less more sinister force on Australian society?

Author Stuart Coupe joins us to talk about separating fact from fiction in his new book Saffron Incorporated: The First King Of The Cross And Fifty Years Of Sex, Murder, Music And Mayhem.

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...

Even when the verdict is delivered in the Katoomba murder trial, the story is far from over – especially after the convicted man makes a startling allegation.

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes.

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Email: [email protected]

Check out my books!

They’ll Never Hold Me:

https://www.booktopia.com.au/they-ll-never-hold-me-michael-adams/book/9781923046474.html

Th...

In the wake of the gory outrage at the California, the accused faces an inquest and then his trial for murder. If he's found guilty, he'll be sentenced to death. But is he bad – or mad?

Parts 3 will be on general release soon. You can hear it now early and ad-free by supporting the podcast:

Apple - http://apple.co/forgottenaustralia

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A Katoomba hotel. A locked room. Screams in the night and a body in the morning. The mystery of what happened in Australia’s favourite resort town in autumn 1917 was like something by Agatha Christie.

Except this wasn’t a whodunit – it was a whydunit.

Parts 2 & 3 will be on general release soon. You can hear them now early and ad-free by supporting the podcast:

Apple - http://apple.co/forgottenaustralia

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/ForgottenAustralia

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Fifty years ago this month – 19 July 1976 – Australia’s first act of environmental terrorism was directed at the Bunnings-owned wood chip export facility in Bunbury. Who were the bombers? What had they hoped to achieve? What was the fallout for the growing green movement?

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes.

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Email: [email protected]

Check out my books!

They...

In 1936, western author Zane Grey came Down Under to catch giant sharks and film his adventures. The result was White Death, a so-bad-it’s-good monster movie. Vicki Hastrich, author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, joins us to talk about his time on our shores and seas, how we reacted to and were changed by this American celebrity, and how she reckoned with disturbing revelations about him in her book.

Watch an excerpt from White Death - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ghdeDVHsE

Forgotten Australia is created and hosted by Michael Ad...

While 1950s eccentrics Bea Miles and Rosaleen Norton are well remembered, Luba Shishova was twice as wild yet she's all but forgotten.

Dubbed ‘Olga from the Volga’ and a ‘one-woman Russian Revolution’, this chaotic beauty cut a swathe through Kings Cross, earning adoring fans among the city’s reporters and outraging the cops and the judges. Now, for the first time, Luba’s story is told in detail – from her background in a war zone and her bikini court sensation to her flesh-ripping assaults and stints in jail and psych hospitals.

Forgotten Australia is created and ho...

Having bent justice to their will successfully once, Kenneth Brown and his supporters tried a new defence tactic: arguing that he’d been cursed from birth as a hereditary homicidal maniac.

If you’re in danger from domestic violence, call Triple 0.

National Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Counselling Service


Tel: 1 800 737 732


https://1800respect.org.au 

Lifeline


Tel: 131 114


https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win...

With Mary Ann Brown dead, and no doubt that Kenneth killed her, his April 1876 murder trial appeared to be an open-and-shut case. 

But he had the best defence that money could buy – and a colonial elite closing ranks to protect one of their own.

If you’re in danger from domestic violence, call Triple 0.

National Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Counselling Service


Tel: 1 800 737 732


https://1800respect.org.au 

Lifeline


Tel: 131 114


https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Support Forgotten Australia for a few buck...

In part one, we heard about Kenneth Brown.  

In this episode, we look at Mary Ann Tindall and how she became his wife and victim.

If you’re in danger from domestic violence, call Triple 0.

National Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Counselling Service

Tel: 1 800 737 732

https://1800respect.org.au 

Lifeline

Tel: 131 114

https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Support Forgotten Australia for a few bucks per month for ad-free early and exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes.

We all know Edith Cowan – first woman elected to an Australian parliament – graces out $50 note. 

But did you know she was shaped by a traumatic childhood?

In 1876, her father, the prominent colonial settler and explorer Kenneth Brown, shot her stepmother dead. 

This was a crime that shocked Western Australia – and one whose elements are all too common 150 years later.

In Part One of this new miniseries, we look at the forces that shaped Kenneth, from Frontier War violence to his tilt at the Melbourne Cup.

If you’re in dang...

In 1837, three cold-blooded killers committed a series of bloody outrages that left nine people dead. Two of these murderers were to face their own gruesome fates. But, in an ironic twist, the third would be legally untouchable despite all the victims he'd shot and axed.

Support Forgotten Australia for ad-free early episodes, exclusive bonus episodes and the chance to win prizes in the special edition trivia episodes.

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Email: [email protected]

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Ahoy, me hearties! 

William Swallow became the pirate captain of the convict ship Cyprus after he seized the vessel in Tasmania in 1829. From there, it was a case of ‘Bring me that horizon!’, with Swallow and his crew of motley misfits setting sail for freedom on the far side of the world. Author Ally Burnham joins us to explain how she researched this swashbuckling true story for Swallow, the first novel in an epic trilogy that will thrill fans of Master and Commander. It's an amazing tale of a fast-talking escape artist, of high stakes on the high...

A True Crime Classic from the Forgotten Australia archives: Just over 100 years ago, Australia suffered one of the world's first random mass shootings when a man went berserk with a rifle in Melbourne’s 1924 Botanic Gardens Massacre. The public was panicked for as long as he evaded the massive manhunt. Then came the copycat shooter... 

This episode was first released in Season One, way back in 2018. 

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This week, when we stay up (or get up) to cheer the Socceroos, we’ll be doing what Aussies first did one winter nearly a century ago. In 1930, the Ashes test cricket series was broadcast live from England via the new marvel of the age – radio! Night after night, Australians defied sleep to hear sporting history being made, with record-smashing new champion Don Bradman leading the charge. In this episode, we look at how these ingenious broadcasts were made and how they were received, from Melbourne to Mount Gambier, Bowral to Ballarat. 

Support Forgotten Australia for a few...

Who named Australia? Which former Prime Minister lost his pants in public?

Which celebrity came chasing ghosts Down Under?

What were the weirdest names suggested for Melbourne before Melbourne became Melbourne?

Welcome to the pub trivia night that plays out in your podcast player

How well do you know our weird and wonderful history?

30 Questions over 3 Rounds. What will you score out of 30?

**Original upload had erroneous bit of commentary in the otherwise correct answer to question 10;

it has since been corrected. Many...