The History Listen ABC Radio

This story is set on Worimi and Biripi country in the year 1894 The avid colonial botanist Joseph Maiden is making a trip through the forests around the NSW towns of Stroud and Gloucester, recording every tree, leaf, and plant he encounters in meticulous detail in his journal. 130 years later historian Jodi Frawley re-traces Maiden's journey, using his original records as a guide.

The little known story of perhaps the greatest endurance feat in Antarctic history. The survival of Robert Falcon Scott's Northern Party in the winter of 1912.

Britta Jorgensen grew up hearing many tales about her great Uncle Keith Byson, whose life sounded like something out of a children's story book - that he was a hermit who lived in a shack on a deserted island in the Great Barrier Reef, warding off strangers with a wooden shotgun, and who got around in his underwear. Years after his death Britta heads to her uncle's island home, to try and sort out the truth from the tall tales

Hidden family truths are discovered as two sisters follow the trail of their late fathers' secret life.

On the night Dai Le was elected to Federal Parliament as an Independent she was remembering being a frightened 10 years old, out in the open sea, escaping Vietnam in a boat.  For The History Listen Dai returns to the place she first landed, Hong Kong, looking for traces of the refugee camp where she lived, worked in factories and like so many thousands, waited for a visa to The West.

In 1899, twenty-three years after her people were declared ‘extinct’, Fanny Smith made a revolutionary recording where she announced to the world that she was The Last Tasmanian. Far from ‘extinct’, she was a proud Aboriginal woman raising her eleven children and publicly singing and speaking her Pakana language. This is her extraordinary story.