Past Programs
Relationships - 2008
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
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
No Way Out
12/04/2008
According to official statistics, one woman a month is killed in the UK by her family in the name of honour, usually because she has rejected or tried to escape from a forced marriage, or has found a partner to love of her own choosing. Though honour killing is sometimes thought to be a Muslim problem, it occurs in many patriarchal communities around the world, including Hindu, Sikh, and Christian too.
In this feature from our Global Perspective series on the theme of escape, three women, one of them in hiding in fear of her life, talk about why they have become targets of such rage and threatened violence. And how the very people who they would have hoped would protect them have turned on them. For these women who have challenged their family's expectations, there is a life-long price to pay -- they can never relax, it feels like there's 'No Way Out'.
Produced by Shazia Khan - BBC
