Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Costa Constanti, who was born and bred in Melbourne - is running for parliament in Cyprus with the Volt Party, which calls itself “the first Pan-European party”.

The Nightline is an instalment work coming to the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, and the creators are calling on night owls, shift workers, insomniacs and anyone who happens to find themselves awake in the small hours for anonymous contributions. Guest: Roslyn Oades, director of The Nightline.

This week's colourful wetland caller is found across the north and down the east — the Azure Kingfisher.

Acclaimed Soviet historian Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick reflects on the experiences and historical and personal events of 1989 that shaped her life and career.

Australian author Anne Spencer Parry's debut 1976 fantasy novel The Land Behind the World was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as "weird, complex, fanciful — and intriguing". Sheila Ngọc Phạm describes Parry as someone whose “works are a testament to the life she formed from unusual, difficult and brave choices”.

Future Library is a long-term literary project based in Norway. It currently holds 11 unpublished manuscripts and a growing forest of spruce trees, planted to supply paper for books that will not be printed until 2114. No one has read the manuscripts, and they will remain sealed for almost a century.

Guest: Anne Beate Hovind, Chair and producer of Future Library, in Oslo.

A strange international scandal known as “Honduras-gate” has raised allegations of a covert disinformation campaign targeting left-wing Latin American governments. Former diplomat Jeremy Dicker unpacks the claims and the geopolitical intrigue surrounding the story. 

A bitter disagreement has emerged between Ukraine's Ministry of Defence and military leadership over the use of autonomous weapons. 

Ukraine is emerging as a world-leading drone technology producer, as a result of the Russian invasion, and the new Minister is going all in on battlefield tech capable of making lethal decisions with no human oversight. 

The Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru - which translates to the Party of Wales - is forming government for the first time after an historic electoral victory. While Plaid Cymru has stood for Welsh independence for 100 years, party leader Rhun ap Iorwerth has ruled out an independence referendum in their first term. Guest: Elliw Gwawr, Political Correspondent at BBC Wales.

Warren Entsch was the Federal member for the seat of Leichhardt in far north Queensland from 1996 to 2025 with a gap between 2010 and 2013. He was instrumental in the push for marriage equality.

Behind the Met Gala's red carpet "Fashion is Art" theme this year is a more nuanced interpretation of how fashion and art collide. The Met's Costume Institute has a new exhibit called Costume Art, which pairs nearly 400 historical and contemporary garments with paintings, sculptures and artefacts from across the museum's 5,000-year collection.

Guest: Dr Llewellyn Negrin Adjunct Senior Researcher at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Tasmania

The heroic accounts of Australian Army Nursing Sisters Margaret Anderson and Vera Torney who survived the perilous evacuation of Singapore in 1942.

In 2012, a group of writers organised a workshop in Junee Correctional Centre with funding from the South Coast Writers Centre. The collection of writing by inmates was published in a volume called Dreaming Inside: Voices from the Junee Correctional Centre. Since then, the project - now known as Ngana Barangarai (or ‘Black Wallaby’) has grown significantly, with Aunty Barbara Nicholson at the helm as project director. Guests: Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson, Wadi Wadi elder and project director, and Luke Patterson, Gamilaroi poet, educator and musician.

In her new book Being Reasonable: the case for a misunderstood virtue, Professor Krista Lawlor describes reasonableness as 'one of the essential fluids in our social machine'.

The release of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after eight months in jail has prompted debate over whether Thailand's long-dominant 'Thaksin era' has finally come to an end.

A painting looted by the Nazis has been discovered hanging in the home of a Dutch SS-Commander's descendants. Portrait of a Young Girl, a modernist painting by Dutch artist Toon Kelder was recovered thanks to the work of art detective Arthur Brand, known as the 'Indiana Jones of the art world'.

Dancing was always part of Frances Rings' childhood, helping her make sense of the world around her in a small country town. But when, at just 17, she boarded a bus to Sydney to study at NAISDA Dance College, Frances discovered dance could be more than movement — it could be a way of carrying culture, ceremony and storytelling, and a deeper connection to her identity.

Guest: Frances Rings, Artistic Director and co-CEO of Bangarra Dance Theatre

A growing body of research suggests that experiencing awe has positive effects for our sense of wellbeing - an idea that might make intuitive sense, but which is being increasingly supported by empirical research in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Guest: Dr Nikki-Anne Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the UNSW Australian Ageing Futures Institute and Conjoint Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia. 

How did the formative experiences, personality traits, world views and leadership styles of Australia's last seven Prime Ministers influence the instability of Australian politics in the last quarter century? Guest: Paul Strangio, author of The Alchemy of Leadership: Seven Australian Prime Ministers in a Turbulent Twenty-First Century, emeritus professor of politics at Monash University.

Proponents of direct action say it’s part of democratic life. It’s detractors say it's a threat to safety, a violation of majority rule and rule of law. What can the history of direct action tell us about its place in our democracy today? Guest: Sean Scalmer, professor of history at the University of Melbourne

Approximately 9,000 educational institutions and 275 million of their students have been affected by a data breach involving the 'learning management system' Canvas Criminal hacking group ShinyHunters has claimed credit for the hack and is demanding a ransom from the US tech company Instructure which runs Canvas. Guest: Abu Barkat Ullah, Associate Professor of Cyber Security at the University of Canberra.

The major human rights conference RightsCon was due to convene in Zambia this week but was cancelled at the last minute, with some suggestion the government was under pressure from China to do so. Guest: Linda Kasonde, Zambian lawyer and civil society activist.

ABC election analyst Casey Briggs not only called the seat for One Nation at 8pm, he also called Farrer as now a safe seat for One Nation.

The Human Rights Legal Centre and the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom have intervened in a case being heard in the High Court to raise what they describe as 'public interest concerns relating to whistleblowing and press freedom'. 

Can you guess this week's tweeter?

Kon Karapanagiotidis struggled to belong as a Greek-Australian kid in a town of Smiths and Jones. It wasn’t until he began volunteering as a young adult that he found acceptance - among people who had been pushed to the margins.

Years later, after his father’s death, that sense of purpose deepened. Out of grief, Kon founded the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre - building a place for people seeking safety, and a legacy that honours his parents’ journey to Australia.

Guest: Kon Karapanagiotidis, Founder and CEO of Asylum Seeker Resource Centre

There is a new form of cultural event appearing at writers festivals and literary gatherings: the translation slam. The quiet mental task of translating a text from one language to another is brought to the stage and the nuances of meanings and mood unpicked for an audience. 

Saplings is a play highlighting the experience of the youth justice system, based on conversations with young indigenous people who have been through the cycle of courtrooms, detention and rehabilitation. It has been hailed as "a delicate story of challenge and possibility" and "moving, upsetting, and perhaps unexpectedly, strikingly funny. Saplings will be touring nationally with Australian Theatre for Young People from May 13.

Guest: Hannah Belanszky, actor, screenwriter, and playwright, and author of Saplings.

Includes original music created for Saplings' soundtrack

It is a well known fact that chimpanzees can be aggressive and even violent, but a new research article published in Science Journal last month has documented a very rare occurrence: a Chimp Civil war, seen in a previously harmonious society of Ngogo Chimps in West Uganda.

Guest: Aaron Sandel, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at University of Texas at Austin and Co-Director of Ngogo Chimpanzee Project

On May 1, China halted all exports of sulphuric acid, a rarely discussed but critical chemical, used in industrial processes in mining, agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

The controversial American software and data analytics company Palantir is becoming an increasingly consequential fixture in governments and companies across the globe. What makes it so indispensable, and why did its CEO release a manifesto calling for compulsory military service? Julian Morrow speaks with Michael Steinberger, author of The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State - a book that demystifies Palantir and its unusual CEO, Alex Karp.

May 3 is World Press Freedom Day, the date harks back to a gathering of 63 people from 38 African countries in 1991 in Windhoek, capital of the newly independent state of Namibia. In 2026, UNESCO is marking World Press Freedom day with another conference in Lusaka Zambia. 

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.