Truth Be Told Podcast - 3 Brothers Production

Jak Jay
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  • True Crime

Truth Be Told is a podcast giving voice to crimes committed against First Nations people across Australia, the ones left out of the classroom and the official record. Each episode sits with one case or one pattern, from frontier violence through to today's unresolved disappearances, and asks the questions that have gone unanswered for far too long. This is truth-telling, one episode at a time.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    10. Pemulwuy - Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    In 1790, a young Bidjigal man was shot through the back by colonial soldiers and survived, the wound earning him a permanent limp and, within his own community, a reputation as someone who carried supernatural power. Over the next twelve years, Pemulwuy became the most persistent and effective resistance leader the British colony in New South Wales ever faced, leading raids the colony's own officers admitted they couldn't stop, surviving capture, and escaping custody while still in chains. This episode covers Pemulwuy's decade long campaign against the colony, from the killing of Governor Phillip's gamekeeper that set it all in motion, to his dramatic march on Parramatta at the head of a hundred warriors, to his death in 1802. We also trace the strange afterlife of his remains: his head, removed, preserved, and shipped to England as a scientific specimen for Sir Joseph Banks, very likely destroyed in the Blitz over a century later, and the decades long, still unresolved push to bring him home. Content warning: this episode discusses colonial era warfare and killing, and includes the decapitation and display of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    24 min

  2. 5d ago

    9. Appin Massacre - Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    In the early hours of 17 April 1816, British soldiers acting on written orders from Governor Lachlan Macquarie himself drove a camp of Dharawal people toward the edge of the Cataract Gorge, south west of Sydney. At least fourteen people were killed, their bodies decapitated and displayed in trees as a deliberate warning, with their heads carried back to Sydney for a colonial bounty of thirty shillings and a gallon of rum. This episode covers the Appin Massacre, one of the earliest documented massacres in Australian colonial history, ordered by a governor still remembered today on banknotes and street names for his roads and reforms. We trace how the massacre fit into years of escalating conflict over land, what happened to the remains taken that morning, including a journey to a Scottish university collection and back, and why it took until 2022, two hundred and six years later, for the site to finally receive official heritage recognition, decades after Dharawal and Gandangara people had already been gathering there every year on their own. Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical descriptions of a massacre, including the deaths of children, decapitation, and the display and eventual repatriation of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    26 min

  3. Jul 2

    8. Palm Island - Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    On the morning of 19 November 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, known to his community as Mulrunji, was arrested on Palm Island for allegedly swearing at a passing police car. Forty four minutes later, he was dead in a cell, with internal injuries doctors compared to a high speed car crash. The autopsy findings, made public a week later, set off one of the most significant instances of civil unrest involving an Aboriginal community in modern Australian history. This episode covers Palm Island's own history as one of Queensland's most punitive forced settlements, what happened to Mulrunji in custody, the riot that followed, and the extraordinary fourteen year legal fight that came after it. We trace two coronial inquests, a manslaughter trial that ended in acquittal, two more deaths by suicide connected to the case, and a landmark 2017 Federal Court ruling that found Queensland Police had engaged in unlawful racial discrimination in how they treated the community in the days after Mulrunji's death. Content warning: this episode includes graphic descriptions of injury, details of a death in custody, civil unrest, and the suicides of two people connected to this story. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Lifeline is also available, any time, on 13 11 14.

    24 min

  4. Jun 30

    7. The Black War - Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    In the 1820s, a girl named Truganini lost her mother to whalers, her uncle to soldiers, and her sister to sealers, all before she'd finished growing up. It was the world the Black War created on the island now called Tasmania, lutruwita, a conflict that killed an estimated sixty percent of the entire Aboriginal population within less than a decade and remains one of the most intense, sustained colonial conflicts in this country's history. This episode covers how the war escalated from isolated violence to martial law and the Black Line, the largest domestic military operation ever mounted on Australian soil. We follow Truganini's complicated path through it, as negotiator, survivor, and eventually the woman colonial authorities falsely declared the last of an extinct people. We also look at what happened to her remains after death, how the palawa community survived and rebuilt their language against every official prediction, and where the fight for a Treaty in Tasmania stands right now, in 2026. Content warning: this episode covers an extended period of historical violence, including widespread killing, sexual violence against women, and the deaths of children. It also discusses the exhumation and display of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    33 min

  5. Jun 25

    6. Myall Creek - Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    On 10 June 1838, a group of armed men rode onto a station in northern New South Wales and killed at least twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, men, women, and children, then burned the bodies two days later to destroy the evidence. What happened next set this massacre apart from hundreds of others across colonial Australia: a station manager reported it, a Governor ordered an investigation, and seven men were eventually hanged for it, the only time in this country's colonial history that white men were executed for killing Aboriginal people. This episode walks through how the Myall Creek massacre unfolded, why the first trial ended in a not guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and how one Attorney General's decision to pursue a second trial changed the outcome. We also look at what happened to the men involved afterward, including the leader who was never caught, and how this single, partial moment of accountability did nothing to stop the broader pattern of frontier violence across the continent, a pattern researchers are still mapping today. Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of a massacre, including the deaths of children, and of the trial and executions that followed. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    21 min

  6. Jun 23

    5. Coniston Massacre - 3 Brothers Production

    In August 1928, a dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed near a waterhole called Yurrkuru in the Tanami Desert, after breaking Warlpiri marriage law. What followed was ten weeks of killing carried out by a police constable and his posse, sweeping across Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye Country with no real attempt to distinguish the people involved in Brooks's death from anyone who simply happened to be nearby. To this day, nobody agrees on how many people died, with estimates ranging from the official count of thirty one to oral histories putting the number closer to two hundred. This episode covers the Coniston Massacre, often called the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history. We trace how a single phone call gave one constable a free hand to punish an entire community, how a government inquiry concluded the killings were self defence, and why this event, well within living memory, is only now starting to find a place in how Australia remembers its frontier history, including an upcoming Frontier Wars gallery at the Australian War Memorial. Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of mass killing, including the deaths of women and children. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    20 min

  7. Jun 19

    4. Stolen Wages, Truth Be Told - 3 Brothers Production

    On 1 May 1946, around 800 Aboriginal workers walked off more than twenty stations across the Pilbara, using calendars made from jam tin labels to coordinate a strike across thousands of kilometres with no phones and no radios. It became the longest strike in Australian history, running for three years against arrests, chains, and starvation tactics, two decades before the more widely known Wave Hill walk off. This episode looks at Stolen Wages, the government run practice of withholding and mismanaging Aboriginal workers' pay across WA and the rest of the country for most of the twentieth century. We trace how protection laws handed control of Aboriginal wages to protectors and station managers, why a 2006 Senate inquiry concluded the scale of it could never be properly counted, and how the fight for that money is still playing out today, in Queensland's settled class action, NSW's repayment scheme, WA's ongoing court case, and a new claim against the Commonwealth covering the Northern Territory. Content warning: this episode discusses systemic financial exploitation and forced, underpaid labour. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    20 min

  8. Jun 19

    3. The Stolen Generation- Truth Be Told, 3 Brothers Production

    In August 1931, three Aboriginal girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, were taken from their families and sent to a government settlement over 1,500km from home. Two nights later, they walked out and followed the rabbit-proof fence for nine weeks to get back to Country. Most people know this as the story behind Rabbit-Proof Fence. Few know what happened to Molly only a few years later, and that part of the story says everything about what this system really was. This episode traces how the 1905 Aborigines Act stripped Aboriginal parents of legal guardianship in WA, how A.O. Neville's removal policy operated, and what life was actually like inside Moore River Native Settlement. We look at the scale of the Stolen Generations nationally, and bring the story up to the present: WA's 2025 redress scheme, the ongoing work of organisations like Link-Up and the Healing Foundation, and the intergenerational impact still being felt by survivors and their families today. Content warning: this episode discusses forced removal of children, conditions inside government institutions, and the deaths of children in care. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

    21 min

  9. Jun 18

    2. WA's Missing Men, Truth Be Told- 3 Brothers Production

    This episode looks at six Aboriginal men who have disappeared from the Pilbara and Kimberley since 2021: Jeremiah "Jayo" Rivers, Wesley Lockyer, Clinton Lockyer, Wylie Oscar, Zane Stevens, and Brenton Shar. Some vanished within days of each other, none of their cases has been resolved, and police maintain there's nothing connecting them. Their families see it differently, and they've taken that fight all the way from search parties in the bush to Parliament House in Perth and the halls of Canberra. This episode follows what's known, what isn't, and what it says that these families have had to do most of the searching themselves.

    13 min

  10. Jun 18

    1. WA's Blak History, Truth Be Told- 3 Brothers Production

    Episode 1 of Truth Be Told starts with Ms Dhu, a 22 year old woman who died in a South Hedland police cell in 2014 after being locked up over unpaid fines, and dismissed twice when she said she was in pain. From there we go back to 1834, to the Pinjarra Massacre south of Perth, which took almost 200 years to get an official apology. We trace the Stolen Generations, the death of John Pat in Roebourne in 1983, the death of Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie in 2016, and where things actually stand today on incarceration, child removal, and life expectancy. This isn't history that's finished. For a lot of families, it's still just Friday

    18 min

  11. Jun 17

    Introduction to Our Podcast series

    Before we get into the stories, we wanted to introduce ourselves. We are Jake, Sebastian, and Chris, three Aboriginal brothers from Gundungurra Country, raised on Ngarigo Country in New South Wales. Between us we work across ICT, investigative journalism, and advocacy. But the thing that connects all three of us more than anything else is growing up around people who carried this history quietly, in fragments, in things left unsaid, because they were too scared to speak it out loud. We got tired of watching that happen. So we built this show. Truth Be Told is about Australian Blak history and the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, told honestly, without the softening and sanitising that has kept so much of this out of classrooms and off the national conversation for two hundred years. The massacres. The stolen children. The stolen wages. The deaths in custody. The legal battles. The resistance. And the reality that most of this is not ancient history. A lot of it is still happening right now, just under different names. In this first episode we introduce ourselves properly, walk you through what the show is about, explain how each episode is structured so you know what to expect, and let you know that new episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday. If you have ever wanted to understand this history but did not know where to start, this is the place. This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present. This is a 3 Brothers Production.

    9 min
  • 11 Episodes

About

Truth Be Told is a podcast giving voice to crimes committed against First Nations people across Australia, the ones left out of the classroom and the official record. Each episode sits with one case or one pattern, from frontier violence through to today's unresolved disappearances, and asks the questions that have gone unanswered for far too long. This is truth-telling, one episode at a time.

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