National Features & Documentary Series
From water and drought to coal mines in small towns, a neighbourhood's safe-injecting room to the Country Women's Association's brand of feminism, each year these and more stories are told by Australian communities in their own words through the National Features and Documentary Series. City to the bush, coast to coast, since 2013 the NFDS has commissioned audio works from all over Australia by budding community radio producers. Produced for the Community Radio Network at the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia with training and mentoring from the Community Media Training Organisation.
Episodes
Listen to 'Australian Radio Pioneer Wound Up the Cat and Put the Clock Out'
How and where you access your favourite radio programs is changing so rapidly that it can be challenging to keep up. It may be reassuring to hear that it was only about 100 years ago that radio was the new emerging technology, and an experimenter named Charles Maclurcan spent much of his time educating the general public on how...
Listen to 'Fairlight: How Australia Changed the Sound of Music'
Behind this strange claim is a story that started in a Sydney basement and ended up in recording studios around the world. Along the way, the sound of music (yes, the way music actually sounds) was changed.
The best part is that it all started in Australia, just because two nerdy guys thought they would push the boundaries of technolog...
Listen to Red Dirt In Bondi: The Story of Building Bridges'
"The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, dete...
Late last year I went along to an open mic night to support a friend of mine, Tash, who had just begun performing stand up comedy. She performed at a seedy backpacker bar in Melbourne’s CBD and though I laughed heartily at her set, I was shocked at what I heard coming out of the mouth of the MC and many other performers that night. At times I wanted to walk out, to leave behind the string of racist, sexist, t...
Listen to 'It's the Satanic Verses, Love'
One of the first audio books Ruth Mercer read after joining the RVIB (Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind) library some thirty years ago was Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The postman delivered all 32 tapes to her front door and announced “It’s the Satanic Verses, love”.
Ruth maintains to this day that if she had tried to read it in print rath...
Deep in the South Australian outback lies a place only accessible via dirt track and almost 200km from the nearest town. Out-of-towners know the small, mostly Aboriginal community of Oodnadatta as little more than a fuel fill and a quick feed. Few venture beyond the bowsers of the iconic Pink Roadhouse.
But over at the church ground rises the Cathedral of a Thousand Stars. It’s an open-air church run by ...
Listen to 'Cracked Open'
I came to this story after reading a surprising claim by Tassie's anti-battery hen campaigner Pam Clarke in an ABC news article late last year: that layer hens are no better off today than they were back in the 1980s.
In a day and age where people are more worried about what's in their food and where it comes from than ever, where 'free range' and ‘ethically sourced' are...
secrets
you know
you mustn’t
share them
so heavy
you don’t know
how to
carry them
hide them
hide them
deep inside
Welcome to the world of Multiple Personalities, or ‘multiples’ for short. You may have heard of this as Dissociative Identity Disorder. The world of I, the Many; We, the One is ofte...
Listen to 'Kabul to Kafka: Inside Australia's Community Detention'
Hello, child,
Welcome to Australia. Here are some things you'll need during your time with us.
First, here's your boat ID number. This is so that everyone knows that you don't deserve a name. Also, yours is too hard for us to say. Next, here's your gag clause. You must keep it on at all times. If we find out that you've ...
"To those I have loved, I know there were many times that we suffered, suffocated, felt the stabs of unnecessary pain and pinned self-loaded expectations onto each other. We fell apart, and this piece was made in an attempt to understand why.
To the listeners, you will hear fragments of conversations seeped in emotion, stories, ponderings and thought bubbles. You will be privy to moments of pure intima...
I am 46, single female with no kids. I find loud noises and shopping centres extremely stressful. Then you add small children having tantrums and I find the experience completely intolerable.
Why can’t parents just bloody-well deal out some discipline and consider those around them? I just don’t understand why they just can’t control their children and stop giving in to the tantrums and drama. Serio...
Nothing says ‘Australia’ like the kangaroo. From the 1960’s TV sensation Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the green & gold Made in Australia logo and the Qantas flying kangaroo to indigenous dreamtime mythology.
The kangaroo is an icon that crosses generations and cultures.
You possibly even have a few kangaroo embossed dollar coins jangling around in your pocket to pay for your morning coffee.
...
So much in my life overlaps with music.
I’d say it’s my number one passion. And my other passions, well, they’re interwoven with music as well somehow.
Because…when I hear music, I hear so much more.
And when we talk about music, we talk about so much more.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Music is a documentary piece about a unique music group in Melbourne. The group is made up of me...
From Kings Cross to the Largs Pier Hotel
In Sydney 2000 my mate Budgie was telling me a story of a band that he saw in Adelaide in 1980. Budgie recalls a harmonica player that played hard and a band that shook the foundations of the Arkabar Hotel in Adelaide.
The years go past, and I'm trawling through 7 inch single records for a jukebox restoration, when I see one from a band called Mickey Finn....
By Nikki Marcel
Adelaide tap water tastes disgusting.
It’s renowned for being the worst in Australia and people go to great lengths to get good drinking water from anywhere but the tap. I used to get rain water from my Nans house in the Adelaide hills but she’s moved and I really miss the taste of her old galv tank. It’s a unique flavor that’s quite different from plastic tanks or bottled sprin...
Riot Grrrl: loud, brash, ferocious.
Riot Grrrl is not simply a period of feminist punk in the early 90s, but is a movement whose ongoing thoughts, ideas and challenges have enriched human liberation. Riot Grrrl is a recurring motif for empowering females, placing Grrrls at the centre of music and for showing everyone the saviour of rock and roll: women.
I started ‘This is Not a Test’ with a th...
Over 150,000 Koreans have been adopted overseas since the Korean War Armistice in 1954. And I am one of them.
I was born in South Korea. I was adopted to Australia when I was a baby and raised by white Australian parents. I never knew my birth parents. All I knew was that my mother was not married when she became pregnant with me and, in 1980s Korea, could not afford to support me and had to give me ...
In Western Australia, Aboriginal children make up more than half of all children in out-of-home care or what is known as foster care. Yet Aboriginal children only make up 5 per cent of the population in the state. Aboriginal foster carer Carol Dowling goes on a journey to investigate whether she and her community are witnessing yet another stolen generation.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information...
In the spirit of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we’ve named our documentary using a ubiquitous marker of our times: the hashtag.
#CityOfLove was trending on Twitter as the ACT government made moves towards making laws to create marriage equality in 2013. As the conversation around marriage equality grew in the media, we wanted to ask: why marriage?
H...
When I would ask people about ketamine, for those who knew about it, a few ideas were evoked: an animal sedative, a hallucinogenic party drug or an anaesthetic for children. But when I mentioned ketamine to people rarely did anyone think of it as a treatment for depression. However, right now in clinics across Australia ketamine is being developed as a way of tackling mental illness.
Hundreds of peo...
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