Past Programs
Arts and Culture - 2008
Studs Terkel
29/11/2008
Ninety-four-year-old Studs Terkel, America's most eminent oral historian and author of numerous books including Working and the Pullitzer Prize-winning The Good War, graciously allowed award-winning English independent doco maker Alan Hall to visit him in Chicago in August 2004, despite having only three weeks earlier undergone heart surgery.
They recorded over two hours of interview, then and on a return visit in October 2005, touching on Studs' work, his undiminished 'radical conservatism' and his much-missed wife, Ida.
The result is this, Alan's radio portrait of this extraordinary chronicler of American life and politics.
Radio Treason
22/11/2008
For copyright reasons this program is not available as a podcast
Was Charles Cousens a traitor? There's no doubt he made radio propaganda broadcasts from Tokyo during World War II. The Japanese captured him along with thousands of other Australian soldiers at Singapore, but when they discovered he was a talented radio broadcaster, obliged him to get behind the microphone for their own purposes. Did he have to do it? Did he work for the enemy? Cousens maintained he tried to subvert the process by the way he used his voice.
An intriguing documentary reconstruction by Lachlan Colquoun and Simon Robb
Sound: Russell Stapleton
Karma of Tin
15/11/2008
An exploration of modern India told through the story of the Dabawallahs, the people working in the highly efficient meal delivery system of Mumbai.
Each morning 5,000 Dabbawallahs collect approximately 200,000 meal containers in the suburbs and deliver them to offices in the city centre. Four hours later the empty containers are collected and returned. It's a delivery system that started in the 1890s to accommodate people from different ethnic backgrounds with strict rules about how food should be prepared. It functions without managers or supervision; most of the workers are illiterate and all receive the same wages.
Last Spring in Prague
08/11/2008
A program that explores the language of a father and daughter through their music, poetry and a shared journey back to Czechoslovakia.
Jiri Neradilek, a revolutionary poet and trumpeter, is journeying with his daughter Ani back to Czechoslovakia for his mother's 95th birthday.
As they travel the streets of his hometown, Jiri reveals stories of his upbringing in communist Prague, they perform music in jazz clubs around town and Jiri shares his poetry with Ani - the poetry that led to the family's eventual defection to Australia in 1983.
Sound engineer: Judy Rapley
Exorcism in the afternoon
01/11/2008
What do the words 'demon possession' and 'exorcism' bring to mind? The violently spinning head and green projectile vomit of 14-year-old Regan, in the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist? Or something even closer to home in, say, suburban Sydney?
For the last 35 years, breakaway Sydney Anglican minister Peter Hobson, together with his wife Verlie, has conducted a weekly demon expulsion service in rented halls in suburban Sydney, casting away unclean spirits.
Come with us through the doors of the very everyday Crows Nest Community Centre on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and sit in on the sometimes exceedingly strange sounds of an exorcism in the afternoon. You will never think about demons in quite the same way again.
Sound engineer: Steven Tilley
Battle Flagging Father
25/10/2008
'...you have to look away Hamish, look away if you don't like it...'
Earlier this year Brisbane based writer and radio documentary maker Hamish Sewell travelled to Alabama in the American 'Deep South' to meet his estranged father for the first time in more than 30 years. This tentative reconciliation had to bridge not only a distance of many thousands of kilometres and a lifetime of separation, but the profound gulf between their values and understandings of history, symbolised by the giant Confederate flag (the 'Battle Flag' of the American South) hanging on Jim Sewell's front porch. The gulf between father and son is all the more profound when you know that Hamish's mother was a prominent New Zealand feminist and a senior government bureaucrat.
Set against the re-enactment of a Civil War battle, and the last stages of the Democratic Party's presidential primaries campaign, Battle Flagging Father is the story of what happens when two very different worlds collide, and an intimate portrait of two men attempting to reach out across a great divide.
Sometimes you just have to look the other way if you want to connect.
Download Battle Flagging Son, an essay by Hamish Sewell.
Download essay as a Word Document [47KB] or in PDF [77KB]
Writer and Producer
Hamish Sewell
Supervising producer
Tony MacGregor
Sound Engineer
Judy Rapley
Millionaire
18/10/2008
Roger Dowds was a painfully shy man who lived a quiet, sheltered life until he became a contestant on Ireland's popular version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Over the course of this documentary the difficult twists and turns in Dowd's life are revealed, alongside the inner strength and wit that has helped him survive.
Winner of a 2006 documentary award at the International Third Coast Audio Festival.
Produced by Ronan Kelly, RTE
AND
No Teeth
Scott Welsh is a playwright and street poet who lost his teeth at an early age. He makes his living selling his poetry to passers-by on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney....but it's not always easy when you're one of The No-Teeth People...
