ABC Rewind

We travel to the west coast of Tasmania, to meet the mining communities who carry on a rich cultural tradition of storytelling in poetry and song.

The Australian instrument that shaped the sound of the 1980s and forever changed how popular music was made. This documentary won the 2023 Prix Italia in the Radio & Podcast Music category.

In 1899 two thousand people attended the funeral of an African-American banjo player in Sydney.  Who was he? How did he come to be in Australia and why was he so loved? Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe tells the story of Hosea Easton, along with the history of minstrel music and the banjo, in Australia and the United States.

The story of one of history’s most mysterious flags - the Jolly Roger. It’s the pirate flag that defined one of the world’s greatest criminal enterprises and it helps us to understand how the high seas transformed from lawlessness to order

The story of the  diamond so infused with underhand deeds and deadly acts that it was thought to curse any male ruler who wore it..

The Carbolic Smoke Ball was touted as a miracle cure for all kinds of illnesses that were rife in the 1890s. It never actually cured anything, but what it did do was change the law forever.

The humble potato is not just a lump of carbohydrate: it tells the story of how food, so essential to life, is also central to politics. This is the story of how the potato became a weapon.

The story of briefcase that almost killed Hitler in 1944, how it was stopped only by a misplaced table leg, and the fate of the man at the heart of the assassination plot. 

In the 1980s & '90s, an influx of artists and creative types changed the face of Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, in inner-city Fitzroy. What was once a humble industrial shopping strip transformed into a bustling hive of creativity, full of cafes, bars, art and music.

A chance discovery of a bag of old photographs leads two Asian-Australian artists, Mayu Kanamori and William Yang, to explore their histories.