Earshot ABC listen

Imagine facing death with no next of kin and no funds to pay for your funeral.  In Victoria you’ll end up in the care of Alan Barr at the Old Ballan Cemetery. He’s made a promise to people like this, who often become State Trustees, to provide a dignified end to their lives.

When Miyuki Jokiranta finally finds her friend, Monika, a State Trustee who died during the pandemic, she meets Alan, the keeper of the forgotten souls

 

Promise me you won’t walk out of our restaurant, quit on our kids, run from our poverty, ignore our autism, ADHD or alopecia, or be defeated by our pandemic-induced loss of home and income.

If author Naomi Hart had known the marriage vows that had tripped off her tongue so easily 14 years ago would come to mean all this, would she ever have said them in the first place?

You will laugh, cringe and cry as Naomi and her husband Gregory share the story of their marriage. 

Susan Lester inadvertently entered a world of political and corporate corruption when she was made the promise of a lifetime by one of Tasmania’s most powerful businessmen.

When she signed a contract with Edmund Rouse to paint 200 watercolours of birds she had no idea it would be a decision that would overwhelm her and her artistic career.

Jess made a promise to a woman she would never meet, the mother of her daughter Noelle.

Baby Noelle was found in the arms of her dead birth mother on the streets of Kinshasa in The Congo, she lived in an orphanage until she was four. Now, she’s 16 and living in Melbourne with Jess and her sisters, but she’s never known another Congolese person.

Will a trip to Shepparton to meet the Congolese community take away that emptiness that she feels inside? Will it fulfil the promise that Jess made all those years ago? 

It was supposed to be a hiking adventure, but it ended in an unforeseeable accident that would change Warren and Geert's futures forever.  

The unlikely story of two half-sisters who connected late in life, a birth mother turned adoptive mother, and what can happen when biological relatives turn up out of the blue.