Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

This week's mystery caller is a uniquely colourful inhabitant of Western Australia's southwest – the Red-capped Parrot.

1979 was the year Captain Deborah Lawrie fought for her wings. When her application to become a commercial pilot with Ansett Airlines was unsuccessful, she knew it wasn't because she was underqualified. Deborah brought Australia’s first equal opportunity anti-discrimination case to court, thinking she would be out of there in a day. But after a year of bitter legal battles, Deborah became Australia's first female pilot of a major airline, and paved the way for the women who came after her. Deborah Lawrie's memoir Touching The Sky is out now via Harper Collins. 

After his death, Oliver Sacks left his partner Bill Hayes an unexpected gift: a library filled with his marginal notes, revealing his inner thoughts, philosophies, and intellectual struggles.

Guest: Author Bill Hayes 

When Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce was named Australia’s best novelty song, it revived an old tension: in a comedy culture steeped in racial stereotypes, where does humour end and caricature begin — and who gets to call it?

Guest:  Jess Carniel, Associate Professor in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

Thirty years ago the Internet Archive was created to digitally preserve content published on the internet. It claims to hold copies of 1 trillion web pages which are freely accessible via the Wayback Machine. Now the Wayback Machine is being threatened by media companies blocking access to their websites.

A landmark ruling in a case involving a French concrete company that operated in Syria during the height of Islamic State may clear the way for national courts to prosecute corporations for serious crimes such as terrorist financing and crimes against humanity.

40 years since the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster, a team from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine are researching the effect of nuclear radiation on rodents that live in the forested exclusion zone. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, support from Bioplatforms Australia, with funding from the Ukraine-Australia Research Fund launched by the Australian Academy of Science has helped their research continue in the midst of war.

While there has been greater recognition of the challenges faced by women during their service, women veterans report being “under-recognised, under-represented, and routinely excluded” from support organisations. 

This week's mystery caller hunts insects in Tasmanian woodland, farmland and heath – the Dusky Robin.

Yann Martel might have found fame and fortune when his novel Life of Pi won the Booker Prize in 2002, but the year that shaped his path as a writer came much earlier. After a nomadic childhood spent traversing the world, ricocheting between cultures and languages, it was in a moment of stillness in a Paris apartment that Martel found the inspiration and confidence to write the story that launched his career.

Guest: Author Yann Martel, who is visiting Australia in May to introduce his new novel, Son of Nobody. 

From ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, a new book explains why pretentious and punctilious people have always annoyed us.

“Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake” explores the history of typos across five centuries. 

Vasili Mitrokhin was sent to work in the KGB archives after failing as an intelligence operative. His disgust with the Soviet spy agency led him to steal troves of secrets and share them with the West. 

Frida Kahlo’s works are so revered in Mexico that, in 1984, they were declared “artistic monuments” — protected as national treasures by the Mexican government.

But now a major group of Kahlo self-portraits, part of the world-famous Gelman Collection, is at the centre of a dispute between Mexico’s art establishment and the Spanish bank now managing the paintings.

The fight is exposing the opaque financial deals and ownership arrangements that have surrounded the collection for decades.

Guest: Ximena Apisdorf, curator and cultural analyst based in Mexico City. 

When the billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, he was billed as its ‘saviour’, and for a while, it seemed like he was. But across his tenure, the masthead that broke the Watergate scandal has been in financial and reputational decline. In The New York Review of Books, ex-managing editor of The Post Robert G. Kaiser says that a directive from Bezos to not endorse Kamala Harris before the 2024 election was one of the factors that signalled a serious change at the masthead, and which dealt it "a great blow".

This week, Pakistan’s Prime Minister crossed the Middle East, meeting with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Türkiye about a second round of peace talks between Iran and the US. Why was regional player the United Arab Emirates left off the guest list?

This week's common, conspicuous and colourful caller inhabits the east and the south-east – the Crimson Rosella.

Queanbeyan raised, Bornean-Australian poet, visual artist, and award-winning author Omar Musa says his "hyperactive mind" keeps him looking for the next project. He has published five hip-hop records, four books of poetry, wrote and starred in a one-man play about the death of Muhammad Ali, and creates woodcut prints. 

2023 was a year that Omar describes as containing "all the highs and lows that you can experience in life... love, loss, grief, and then grief on a grand scale with the genocide in Gaza". It was the year he met his wife, the cello player Mariel Roberts Musa...

In 1951 the High Court witnessed one of Australia's most high profile legal battles: the Communist Party case. The case saw future Chief Justice of Australia, Garfield Barwick KC, argue against the then Leader of the Opposition, Bert Evatt KC, to determine the constitutionality of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950.

In her new book The Framing, lawyer Fernanda Dahlstrom unpacks her past and the crime that sent her mother to jail when she was eight years-old. 

The oldest and largest crossword event in the United States, The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is celebrating its largest attendance ever this year. It is directed by Will Shortz, who founded the tournament in 1978, and has been the editor of the New York Times crossword since 1993. Will is also the only person who holds a degree in ‘enigmatology’ or ‘the study of puzzles’. 

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has published a draft of the Children’s Online Privacy Code. It contains new rules to create better online experiences for children, including a requirement that "agencies and organisations [...] consider the best interests of children before collecting, using or disclosing their personal information."

A new UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, led by Chad, has begun its deployment into Haiti. The new force hopes to succeed where its predecessor — the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support — has failed. In pushing back the violent gangs that have taken over much of Haiti.

Guest: Diego Da Rin, Haiti Analyst at the International Crisis Group

A constitutional brouhaha is brewing in Canada as the Supreme Court weighs legal arguments presented in a landmark case known as English Montreal School Board v. Quebec.

The Most Reverend Kanishka Raffel is the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. Kanishka was born into the Buddhist faith, but a chance conversation with a Christian friend while he was studying law at the University of Sydney inspired a spiritual journey that led him to Christianity and, ultimately, to the priesthood.

This week's mystery caller likes woodland and open country right across mainland Australia — the Jacky Winter.

For over 30 years, the Snuff Puppets have brought all manner of giant puppets to streets and communities of Melbourne and beyond. 

But a recent funding cut means the Snuff Puppets are now in danger of becoming Snuffed Puppets. Indeed, Snuff Puppets is just one of a number of Melbourne cultural institutions who either missed out or were scaled back in the latest round of the Victorian governments Creative Enterprises Program. 

Co-artistic directors of Snuff Puppets Andy Freer and Nick Wilson join the program to explain what these cuts mean for their company, how it's part of a...

In March, Time Out magazine released its list of the The 100 greatest cinemas in the world right now, and 6 Australian cinemas made the cut.

Sun Pictures in Broome, The Regal Theatre in Adelaide, Melbourne’s Sun and Astor Theatres, and Sydney’s Golden Age Cinema and Bar all made the list, but the highest ranking Australian cinema is the art deco Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace in Sydney, coming in at number 30.

The General Manager of the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace, Alex Temesvari joins the program to share what makes the Orpheum so special, and what it's...

Hungarians will go to the polls on April 12 in what is shaping up to be a historic election.

Incumbent president, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most right wing populist, and an ally of US president Donald Trump, is being challenged by Peter Magyar, a young centre-right candidate who originally hailed from Orbán’s Fidesz party.

Held every Easter long weekend at Exhibition Park in Canberra, the National Folk Festival is still going strong for it's 60th year running. To mark the anniversary, festival co-artistic director Holly Downes joins the show to speak about the history of the festival, and the strengths of folk culture today. 

Featuring the song Waterfall Way by The Double Dole Stringband.  

Guest: Holly Downes, one of the artistic directors of the National Folk Festival.

For more than 700 years, the upper house of British parliament, House of Lords, was largely made up of hereditary peers. Seats in the House of Lords were passed down through generations of Lords and Viscounts along with their titles.

But that all changed last month, when the last of the hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords, replaced with Life Peers, nominated by the Prime Minister.

Does the change mark the end of political nepotism, or the beginning of the end for the House of Lords?

Guest: Ralph Matthew Palmer, 12th...

North Korean workers in Russia work up to 16 hours a day with no day off and earn as little as 10 USD per month, according to a report titled A Day in the Life of a DPRK State-sponsored Labourer.

Adelaide's O-Bahn was the second guided bus railway in the world, and is now one of only four on the planet. But it has been an enormous success, and remains the most used public transport option in Adelaide. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Adelaide's O-Bahn, and the Bus Preservation Association of South Australia organised an informative tour to mark the occasion.

Guest: Michael Pretty - committee member of the Bus Preservation Association of South Australia, who organised the 40th anniversary O-Bahn tour, and is the proud owner of two O-Bahn buses.

This week's mystery caller occupies wooded habitats across the south and up the east – the Golden Whistler.

Emily Strasser was in her late teens before she began to realise the depth of her family's secret. Her grandfather, George, whom she had never met, had been a scientist at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, during the development of the atomic bomb that was eventually dropped on Hiroshima. This was the start of Emily's journey to uncover the truth about her grandfather's role and to come to terms with her family's past and the guilt she has inherited.

Guest: Emily Strasser, Professor in the Department of English at Tufts University in Boston and author of Half Life...

Much has been written about Errol Flynn, whose extraordinary life took him from Hobart, to Papua New Guinea, to Hollywood's Golden Age where he became an icon of the screen. But drawing from new sources including Flynn's own letters, Patricia A. O'Brien has written "the first complete account" of his life, which reveals the extent of Flynn's involvement in slavery, in more than one form.

Guest: Patricia A. O'Brien, Author of Errol Flynn - The true story of Australia's Hollywood icon, Adjunct Professor in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and Honorary Associate Professor in ANU's Department of...

Is the longevity of Australians in the 21st century actually a curse for future generations? Government spending on the elderly is predicted to grow significantly in the next 30 years, and the proportion of taxpayers will decline. So what are the burdens future generations will face if we all keep going on and on?

Guest: Lucinda Holdforth, speechwriter and author of Going On and On

As the negative effects of long-term alcohol use become clearer, it's a question that worries most modern parents: Is it OK to drink in front of your kids? Senior research fellow, Sergey Alexeev, has taken the question to task and joins Sunday Extra to talk about the findings of his new study Intergenerational Transmission of Alcohol Use.

Guest: Sergey Alexeev, Senior research fellow at University of Sydney, and Senior research associate at University of NSW

With the rise of popularity of One Nation with rural and regional Australians, what is the effect on refugees who have settled in regional areas? Do they feel welcomed and supported in  their communities? 

Our guest,Associate Professor Natascha Klocker, shares insights from her multi-year study “Settling Well investigates the impacts of refugee settlement in regional Australia”.

Guest: Natascha Klocker, social geographer, study lead and Interim Head of School, Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong

Type 5 diabetes is fast becoming a significant public health issue in parts of sub-saharan Africa, rivalling infectious diseases like Malaria and HIV.