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Saturday at 2pm
Summaries of programs 2005
Coming up | 2006 | 2005 | | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | Available Transcripts
When possible, the most recent programs are available with audio.
December 2005
- Infinite Reality: the Monastery and the Observatory
Saturday 24/12/2005
Producer Roz Bluett journeys to New Norcia, a Spanish monastery in the Western Australian wheat belt, to see how the monks, and the scientists of the nearby space station (established by the European Space Agency), get on. As it turns out, monks and astrophysicists get on just fine: after all, both parties are seeking the same things – the secrets of the Universe. And both groups share similar experiences: water is a problem, the landscape compelling, and they spend a lot of time by themselves thinking about fundamental questions.
An intimate and poignant portrait of men contemplating infinite reality in the
Western Australian bush.
- Let's Go Brazil
Saturday 17/12/2005
Writer Noelle Janaczewska first nurtured her passion for Brazil with guidebooks and stories about lost explorers of the Amazon. Later she discovered Brazil as a source of political and cultural ideas. And then came music, and the language. And very recently – last year in fact – she actually made it to the real Brazil.
- The Double Life of Raymond Carver
Saturday 10/12/2005
The Double Life of Raymond Carver won the Prix Italia prize for radio documentary in 2002
There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
The American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver lived from 1938 to 1988. A literary minimalist whose stories reflected the lives of ordinary people, Carver has been compared to Hemingway and Chekhov. He battled alcoholism, achieved fame as a short story writer and spent his last ten years sober. He died of lung cancer six weeks after marrying his second wife.
- The Dry vs The Moist
Saturday 03/12/2005
A mix of fiction, fantasy and fact, The Moist versus the Dry is a remarkable intercontinental collaboration between three artists: the US writer Rick Moody (best known for his novel The Ice Storm, later filmed by Ang Lee), the Australian sound artist (and Radio Eye producer) Sherre Delys, and pianist Chris Abrahams (The Necks).
November 2005
- The Language of Oil
Saturday 26/11/2005
Zoroastrians, Bolsheviks, Rockefeller and Hitler. The oil city of Baku in Azerbaijan; an oil refinery in Sydney’s western suburbs. An activist from Venezuela, a worker from the oil fields of southern Iraq. All voices telling tales and speaking the Language of Oil.
- Ammochostos: Hidden in the Sand
Saturday 19/11/2005
Ammochostos is the Greek name for the historic city of Famagusta, in Cyprus. Some say that within Famagusta is contained the whole history of Cyprus.
- What's the Deal
Saturday 12/11/2005
Over 80% of Australians gamble every year. This Radio Eye explores the relationship between gambling and performing. Through the stories of musician Tim Freedman, comedian Ciel Stowe and writer/performance poet Tug Dumbly, we experience the highs, the lows, the wins, the losses and then there’s the gambling. Place your bets with Radio Eye.
- Beyond the Cane Fence...Letters from Uganda
Saturday 05/11/2005
A program that confronts the heartbreaking realities of life and death in a developing country, and the challenges faced by volunteers of the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières.
October 2005
- Lost In Time - The Excavation of a Forgotten Saint
Saturday 29/10/2005
17th century Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno has been dubbed the founder of geology, the first man to claim that the earth’s past might be chronicled in layers of rock. Though relatively unknown, this man’s ideas eventually displaced the Bible as the sole authority on the subject – forever changing Western civilisation’s ideas of history, nature and time. His dissection skills and eye for detail led him from Copenhagen to Ferdinand Medici’s Court in Florence where he was embraced and encouraged in his scientific work.
- The Boars of Berlin
Saturday 22/10/2005
Berlin is one of Europe’s great cities, and like all such cities it is also a treasure house of Western civilisation: museums packed with great art and fragments of the ruins of ancient cities and exotic peoples. It's always been a place of great architectural style, and since Berlin resumed the role of Germany's capital, there has been a flourishing of new construction. Berlin is civilised, and Berliners (and their visitors) live life well.
- Living With Rats
Saturday 15/10/2005
Of all the animals in the wild, it’s the rat that resides closest to us - under the floorboards, in the roof - unseen, but there. Living with Rats explores a relationship that goes beyond the domestic nightmare, invoking horrors handed down through generations and frequently massaged through literature and film. And just when things are getting really nasty, there’s that weird romance - the people who’ve found a way to love rats.
- Magnificent Obsessions
Saturday 08/10/2005
Magnificent Obsessions is a memoir about narrator Linda Neil’s family and the obsessions that shaped it. This feature presents a rich evocation through stories, music and sound of growing up in suburban Brisbane in a family obsessed with music, trees, frugal living, disguises, practical jokes and brick doorstops.
- A Shack at the Edge of the World
Saturday 01/10/2005
Scattered on the bays and inlets of Tasmania's west coast sit hundreds of more or less improvised shacks. Some are little than a kind of iron tent, offering shelter and a fireplace to families that visit on weekends and holidays. Others are more or less permanent homes, some of them built up, added to, over several generations. Many of these shacks started out as cheap DIY holiday houses for miners working in Mt Lyell and the other west coast mines. Still others are seasonal homes to fishermen and their families, or permanent homes for retirees. Over the years, communities have formed: everyone knows everyone else, and they party together, fish together. Their kids grew up together, and now they bring their children back to the same shacks for weekends and holidays.
September 2005
- The Oyster Farmers
Saturday 24/09/2005
They move their black stick bundles
Across the river, put stakes
Aside for fresh water, making racks,
To drench in tar; oyster-farmers
Who strive for an order
of their own… (from 'Farming the Oysters' by Robert Adamson)
- Bridge ....Only a Game /More Than a Game
Saturday 17/09/2005
Bridge is a card game played by millions of people around the world. It's claimed by aficionados as being an activity that can keep the brain young and alert for a lifetime, and those who frequent bridge clubs become part of a fascinating subculture where people’s true natures are revealed.
- What Is This?
Saturday 10/09/2005
In the coming weeks TV and radio will be saturated with voices - and images - reliving, recounting and re-assessing the events of September 11, 2001. 'What Is This?' is a story that might be useful in framing this media outpouring of grief, anger and analysis. In this radio feature, Ellen Stuebe explores the nature of peace from a very particular perspective - that of a practising Zen Buddhist. On September 11 last year, Stuebe was in the mountains to the east of San Francisco, taking part in a meditation retreat in the famous Tassajara Zen monastery.
- Rampage
Saturday 03/09/2005
Over the last few years Australian war artist George Gittoes has been documenting the war in Iraq through the music of the conflict – the sounds being listened to and made by US troops in Iraq. Now he’s travelled home with the soldiers and found himself in a whole new war zone – America.
August 2005
- A Place In the Sun
Saturday 27/08/2005
Part of the Mediterranean package tour trail that spans Turkey, Spain and Greece, Faliraki on the Greek island of Rhodes has seen better days. Offering British football, chip butties and rented sun-chairs, Faliraki was once the place to go for British holidaymakers. And then reality came to Faliraki – British reality TV that is – showing a side of Faliraki that may or may not have really existed.
- Ann and Del at Throsby Park
Saturday 20/08/2005
A playful and affectionate feature celebrating a gift of music and the friendship between Australian composer Ann Carr-Boyd and ‘colourful horse riding identity’ Del Throsby, who lives in a grand old family home in the Southern Highlands district of NSW. The program gallops along, tracing the development of two musical works presented to Del by Ann Carr-Boyd at her studio in Mittagong.
- Pacific Footsteps : Part 4 : Holiday Islands
Saturday 13/08/2005
a four part series
- Pacific Footsteps: Part 3 : Uncertain Archipelago
Saturday 06/08/2005
a four part series
July 2005
- Pacific Footsteps : Part 2 : Big Island
Saturday 30/07/2005
a four part series
- Pacific Footsteps : Part 1 : Wisdom of the Solomons
Saturday 23/07/2005
a four part series
- The Cheese Room
Saturday 16/07/2005
Why is it that the French are 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys' when it's really the Americans (and the rest of us) who consume the yellow stuff by the ton?
- Locked Gate, Loaded Gun
Saturday 09/07/2005
Is the wilderness still wild, when the urban din intrudes?
- Two Journeys
Saturday 02/07/2005
Based on two nineteenth-century accounts of travel through the New South Wales Blue Mountains, Martin Thomas's radio feature explores moments of encounter between human subjects and the environment. It's an acoustic journey across time, also tracing moments of 'first contact' and settlement, as well as ideas and ideals of landscape.
June 2005
- Returning to Wales
Saturday 25/06/2005
The recollections of memory and the telling of history don't always agree; at certain points what we remember as individuals and as a community part company with the story of familiar places told by historians. In Australia, the relationship between memory and history has frequently become contested territory: one invoked to silence the other in debates about development, the ownership of land and Indigenous rights.
- Gone Fishing
Saturday 18/06/2005
This week Radio Eye throws on an old pullover and a greasy pair of jeans and heads off for an afternoon of fishing – or not fishing as the case may be!
- Sniper
Saturday 11/06/2005
This prize-winning documentary takes listeners into the intense and lonely world of snipers working their deadly craft on both (all?) sides of the war in Bosnia in 1992.
- Heart of Conflict
Saturday 04/06/2005
Australia is a peaceful country. Yet in the midst of this relative peace, strains and echoes of historical conflicts wind through the lives of individuals and communities.
May 2005
- Toby Guthrie Coils The Spring
Saturday 28/05/2005
This fly-on-the-wall documentary follows a day in the life of Toby Guthrie, a 29-year-old ambulance paramedic working in Melbourne. In an observational style, we follow the ebb and flow of a typical 12-hour shift on the road; once the truck is checked and prepared it’s a matter of waiting for a call from the control room…
- Snorty Meets the Red Army Choir
Saturday 21/05/2005
In late 2004 Russia's Red Army Choir toured Australia, giving concerts in capital cities and regional centres.
- Dancing with the Devil
Saturday 14/05/2005
In the fourth and final episode of the series war and Peace, award winning producer Nick Franklin talks to serving soldiers and to those who have only recently left active service.
- The Spoils of War: Rape in Wartime
Saturday 07/05/2005
In part 3 of our series investigating the states of war and peace, we explore the experiences of women as the particular victims of war's violence.
The brunt of war is borne by civilians, in large part, women and children. This is largely acknowledged. What is less often articulated, and can seem incomprehensible, is that one of the ways women suffer is through the use of rape as a weapon of war - the ‘comfort women’ enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II; rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; the accounts of brutality, pregnancy and progeny in Africa. The survivors are often silent through shame or fear, and conversely, these are stories many of us don’t want to hear. This documentary articulates the stories of shame and silence and enduring trauma, and investigates the affiliation between rape and war.
April 2005
- When Time Stood Still
Saturday 30/04/2005
When Staff Sergeant John Parish dived into the cold water in the Greek port of Piraeus on the 24th April, 1941, his new watch stopped and his life changed forever. Behind him there was chaos; the “Hellas”, a ship that was evacuating wounded and sick Australian and British soldiers as well as British civilians from Greece, had been bombed. Passengers and wounded men were screaming, trapped in burning cabins; the only gangway was destroyed, and eventually the ship rolled over and sank. Estimates vary, but it’s thought that more than 700 people died on the ship. John Parish was lucky, he escaped – but he carried the events of that day with him for the rest of his life.
- Patriotism and the Australian way of Life
Saturday 23/04/2005
Any leader sending troops to war will inevitably try to appeal to his people’s sense of patriotism to justify his actions. Asking soldiers to make the supreme sacrifice and risk dying for their country is as old as war itself.
- Cetaceans vs Bush
Saturday 16/04/2005
What rights should animals have? Is it possible for an animal to be considered a legal subject? Should an animal be able to sue the state for injury or harm? What if that animal is none other than the noble whale?
- Sugar Daddies
Saturday 09/04/2005
Ghana is being swept by the ever-growing phenomenon of sugar daddies. How would you like to have someone your daddy’s age or, better still, slightly more mature, taking care of you financially, and literally being at your beck and call? Would you consider that romantic? Is age a crucial factor to happiness and romance or just convenient for material goods? We hear from sugar daddies, sugar daughters and boyfriends to find out how easy it is to find a willing, doting surrogate father; how the boyfriends can also use these older men to their advantage; and how sugar mummies are not out of the question either. TV counsellor Reverend Tetteh Dgamgbah and Matilda Asante guide us through the Ghanaian view of marriage, how sugar daddies fit in to society and how relationships can work with a little romance.
- The United States of Dating
Saturday 02/04/2005
The Global Perspective series of programs from public broadcasters from around the world continues. This year’s theme is Modern Romance, with this exploration of the modern experience of dating in the USA.
March 2005
- Putting Romance back into Sex!
Saturday 26/03/2005
Once teenage romance blossomed in furtive kisses behind the school bike shed. Today’s teenagers are more likely to be exchanging stories about how they lost their virginity, their attitudes to sex and sexual relationships based on the mixed messages they are getting from their role models about one night stands and casual sex. And, whilst many of their stories may be no more than wishful thinking, changes in behaviour, especially amongst youngsters, have led to an alarming rise in Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs).
- Love and Pragmatism
Saturday 19/03/2005
This documentary feature from Radio New Zealand is a collaboration between the producer Matthew Leonard, and the writer and comedian Philip Patston. Philip lives with a significant physical impairment and is dependant on empathetic support people for daily personal care. However his experiences as a gay man looking for love recently, got him thinking about the reality of romance for people living with disability. What are the particular challenges they face and how does society view the idea of romance, love and intimacy for people with intellectual and physical disability? Traditional attitudes around 'racial hygiene' and 'proper behaviour' still govern the ability of people with impairment to be supported to conduct relationships, particularly within the routines of group homes or 'supported living'. What are the taboos around romance between 'ABs' (the able-bodied) and people with disability? Are disabled people doing enough to claim their human rights entitlement to meaningful human relationships? Speaking with a range of his friends from across the disabled community of New Zealand's largest city, Philip disarmingly encourages them to tell all about love, romance and hot dates in a wheelchair.
- Brooklyn to Banja Luca
Saturday 12/03/2005
From Holland comes the story of a unlikely couple and a relationship that crosses many borders.
- The Sobbing Celebrant and other nightmares
Saturday 05/03/2005
ABC producer Natalie Kestecher thought it might be useful to have a few options up her sleeve if she ever decides to stop making radio documentary features. So she decided to become a Marriage Celebrant. Natalie enrolled in one of the first ever training courses which, under new Australian legislation, all intending Celebrants must complete in order to be accredited.
February 2005
- The Dream Factory Worker
Saturday 26/02/2005
In this award winning documentary feature from New Zealand, producer Simon Morton heads to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in India, determined to make his debut as an extra in Bollywood – the huge Indian movie making industry, based in Mumbai.
- Kinshasa Story
Saturday 19/02/2005
Miriam Abud loves the music of the Congo – the central African country formally known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Hassan & the Djinn
Saturday 12/02/2005
Listeners to Radio National have probably heard more about asylum seekers in Australian detention in places like Woomerah and Port Headland than audiences for any other media outlet in the country. Perhaps we have become weary of these stories, tired of the demand upon our imaginations to empathise with the trials and tribulations of others, while at the same time becoming familiar with the arguments both for and against the Australian Government’s policies on refugees and detention. Can anything new be said? You can download the script of Hassan and the Djin as a Word Document (rtf) or as a PDF file.
- In Search of the Hermit Within
Saturday 05/02/2005
Most of us have probably felt the desire ‘to get away from it all’, to retreat from the rat race, and ‘contemplate’. And for most of us, enmeshed in the business of work, family, relationships, home – attachments - it remains an occasional dream, and aberrant wish. But some people do indeed turn their backs on these worldly attachments, and become for some greater or lesser time, solitaries, living alone in the bush, or on the edge of a country town. Becoming a hermit in this way is not always voluntary, nor is retreating to the bush and living alone the expression of a desire to contemplate the meaning of life. It may indeed be another kind of loneliness, another kind of homelessness.
January 2005
- Infinite Reality: the Monastery and the Observatory
Saturday 29/01/2005
Producer Roz Bluett journeys to New Norcia, a Spanish monastery in the Western Australian wheat belt, to see how the monks, and the scientists of the nearby space station (established by the European Space Agency), get on. As it turns out, monks and astrophysicists get on just fine: after all, both parties are seeking the same things - the secrets of the Universe. And both groups share similar experiences: water is a problem, the landscape compelling, and they spend a lot of time by themselves thinking about fundamental questions.
- Second Creation
Saturday 22/01/2005
A drama documentary co-produced by the ABC and Swedish National Radio about the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, who accompanied Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, and in 1770 'discovered' the East Coast of Australia. Second Creation explores a conflict in 18th century thought - the attempt at scientific and systematic exploration of the world by men who struggled with their belief in God. Daniel Solander's beliefs about the natural world order came undone when he faced the mysteries of Australian flora and fauna.
- Chika
Saturday 15/01/2005
Chika is the story of a Japanese tourist who lost ten years of her life in Australian prisons for a crime many people believe she never committed. What started out as the holiday of a lifetime nearly became a death sentence, after Chika was accused of involvement in one of Australia's biggest heroin smuggling cases.
- Legs, Hope and Water
Saturday 08/01/2005
In 2001, the year the Tampa journeyed into Australian waters and into our news headlines, another ship full of immigrants and refugees, this one in the Ionian Sea, found itself in trouble. The Erenler, with more than 800 people on board, was towed into the harbour off the Greek island of Zakynthos.
- Two Weeks in Another Country
Saturday 01/01/2005
Winner : Best Radio, Media Peace Award 2004 - United Nations Association of Australia
Ten years ago, Radio Eye Producer Sharon Davis was living and working in South Africa. It was a time of tumult, a country in the midst of momentous change after the first apartheid election.
Coming up | 2006 | 2005 | | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | Available Transcripts
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