Australian Story

When screen legend Jack Thompson checked himself into Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital last year, he had no idea how sick he was. Unbeknown to Jack, his kidneys had failed and he was 48 hours away from death. Told that he would have to go on dialysis three times a week for five hours, he realised his acting career was in jeopardy. The film he was about to shoot was set in remote Kakadu, 250 km away from the nearest dialysis unit in Darwin. It looked like he would have to pull out of the movie — until a big purple truck came to the rescue, a gesture of friendship and respect from the Territory's Indigenous community.

Tim Duncan was a junior doctor, on the brink of leaving medicine for a filmmaking career, when he found himself in desperate need of medical care. Lying by the side of an outback road, with critical injuries, he knew his only hope for survival was immediate medical attention. In that moment, as his life was ebbing away, Tim made a pact: if he survived, he would devote himself to emergency medicine.

It’s widely accepted nowadays that pregnant women shouldn’t take any medication unless it’s absolutely necessary. But in the early 1960s that wasn’t the case. Reassured by their doctors, thousands of women around the world took the drug thalidomide as a treatment for morning sickness, only to be faced with babies born with catastrophic disabilities. Born in March 1963, Lisa McManus is one of Australia’s youngest survivors. She’s leading a group who have taken their fight to Canberra’s Parliament House, in a last ditch battle for recognition, compensation and an apology.

This week’s Australian Story takes viewers behind the scenes of the Australian effort to separate Bhutanese conjoined twins Nima and Dawa. It took a village of medicos, health workers and volunteers to bring them to Australia, perform the ground-breaking operation and assist in their five month recovery. The story features exclusive interviews and vision, including the first moments the toddlers reunite with their father in Bhutan as newly independent individuals.

Writer and comedian Rosie Waterland has made a successful career out of seeing the funny side of her traumatic childhood. Whether it’s growing up with alcoholic parents, hiding from welfare workers as a "houso" kid or finding her father’s 'dead’ body', the darker things got in Rosie’s life, the funnier she became. But as Rosie's star was rising, the trauma of her childhood caught up with her. It's been her three sisters, torn apart as children when the family disintegrated, who’ve been the ones helping her back to wholeness.

The extraordinary story of Behrouz Boochani, the man who won Australia’s richest literary award but remains unable to set foot in this country. The stateless refugee, who’s in detention on Manus Island, smuggled out his entire book text by text on a smuggled mobile phone. In January, No Friend But the Mountains won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, Born during the Iran-Iraq war and suffering persecution as a Kurd in his homeland, Boochani fled Iran, seeking refuge in Australia. Arriving on Christmas Island four days after the government toughened its stance on refugees arriving by boat, he was taken to Manus Island where he has remained for five years. This is the story of determination to celebrate life, even when virtually all hope of escaping a hellish situation has been dashed.

The Seekers were the trailblazers of Australian music in the 1960s, knocking heavy hitters such as the Beatles off the top of the charts in the UK and taking the US by storm. Best known for their unique blend of harmonies and the voice of Judith Durham, the band were unlike anything of their time. Now, fresh off the back of a record deal featuring their final tour, The Seekers are taking part in the first television documentary since their split 50 years ago. All four band members Athol Guy, Bruce Woodley, Judith Durham and Keith Potger discuss their music, the impact of sudden fame and the painful fallout from their famous parting.

Jocelyn Moorhouse and PJ Hogan are two of this country’s most celebrated movie directors. The success of their debut films had Hollywood calling and they have since worked with some of the biggest names in film. They are also the parents of four children, two of whom have severe autism. And the experience of raising those children has shaped their personalities and careers. Jocelyn gave up her career to concentrate on her son and daughter’s therapy. She didn't expect to direct again. But in 2015, 18 years after making her last film, she made a triumphant return with The Dressmaker. In this intimate portrait, the family speaks candidly about the challenges, heartbreak and unexpected joys of living with two severely autistic children.

How far would you push yourself for a cause you believe in? Australian CEO Mina Guli, 48, is on a mission to draw attention to the global water crisis. In order to do that she attempted a physical feat so extreme, most people would consider it impossible — running 100 marathons in 100 days across the world. Mina is driven by urgency: By 2030, it’s estimated the demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40 per cent. But when her body literally broke during marathon 62, Mina thought all was lost. Unexpectedly, the campaign took on a life of its own.

When 21-year-old Menindee farmer Kate McBride came across thousands of dying fish in her beloved Darling River she was determined to tell the country what was happening. She posted the pictures on her family’s Facebook page and the images went viral. "I don't think there’s a way to put into words what seeing millions of dead fish on the river that you've called home for your whole life is," she remembers. "It was just pure devastation… these animals were suffering." By the time truckloads of fish were disposed of at the town dump, Kate was emerging as a fierce advocate for the health of the Darling River and a leader to watch. She’s been documenting local health concerns about water supplies from the river and is pushing for a Federal Royal Commission.

Kate Miller-Heidke opens up to Australian Story about the private pain behind the very personal song she is performing at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. In what is a candid insight into one of the world’s leading “vocal gymnasts”, the singer reveals the challenges of motherhood and how she overcame her struggles. Inspired by the experience, she wrote a song, Zero Gravity, which she will perform at the semi-finals in Tel Aviv, Israel. Out of the Box features interviews with family, friends, and music legends Tina Arena and Ben Folds in this exhilarating backstage pass to the world’s largest song contest.

Australian Story celebrates the extraordinary life and career of Bob Hawke, Australia’s most popular prime minister, who died aged 89. Hawke won four elections, becoming Labor’s longest-serving prime minister and overseeing profound economic and social reform. Eventually Hawke's fruitful relationship with treasurer Paul Keating soured and he lost the leadership of the party, bringing to an end a stellar career Hawke approached his final years content with his life and proud of his achievements, saying "I don't think about death, I'm not frightened of death". This intimate portrait features extensive archive, including rare photos from the family’s private collection, and revealing interviews with Hawke, his biographer and second wife Blanche D’Alpuget and his three children.

When Pamela Lawrence was brutally murdered in her Perth shop in 1994 police focused their investigation around one suspect, Andrew Mallard. He quickly became the victim of a miscarriage of justice, spending twelve years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Mallard’s family fought successfully to release him, enlisting then WA Shadow Attorney-General John Quigley and journalist Colleen Egan who uncovered a trail of deception and police misconduct. In this updated episode of Andrew Mallard’s story, Australian Story talks to the friends who stood by him until his untimely death last month.

This week's story tracks the fall and rise of Debbie Kilroy — from high security women’s prisoner to high-profile crusading lawyer. Debbie was sentenced to six years for drug trafficking. She began university studies in jail and made history when she became the first woman with a serious conviction to be admitted as ‘a fit and proper person’ to the bar of Queensland. Earlier this year, Debbie mounted a spur-of-the-moment crowd-funding campaign to pay off the court debts of Indigenous women incarcerated in Western Australia for defaulting on fines. The campaign raised over $400,000 and has led to the release of 11 women from prison.

Anthony Maslin (Maz) and Marite Norris (Rin) faced the unimaginable when their "whole family was shot out of the sky”. Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was struck by a missile over a Ukrainian warzone in 2014. The couple's three children, Mo, Evie and Otis, along with their grandfather Nick Norris, became the faces of a senseless war crime. As the five-year anniversary approaches, Maz and Rin share, for the first time, how they are coping with their loss and moving forward with strength, positivity and compassion.

Encouraged by her friends to look for love online, Queensland teacher and mother-of-two Yoshe Taylor swiftly found herself immersed in the stuff of nightmares. Communications with a man calling himself "Precious Max" led to a visit to see him in Cambodia. When Yoshe cooled on a relationship, her suitor switched tacks and suggested she work with him in an arts and crafts business instead. The business was revealed to be an international drug smuggling racket that had also ensnared other unsuspecting Australians. Sentenced to 23 years in a Cambodian prison for unwittingly carrying heroin, Yoshe was helpless and largely forgotten until a group of lawyers teamed up to fight her case. Six years later, she shares her story for the first time, in a warning to others about the perils of online romance.

Left alone in a Cambodian prison, Australian mother-of-two Yoshe Taylor had all but given up fighting for her release. "I actually thought the death penalty was a much better idea than being in jail for 23 years," she says. The local court rejected Yoshe's claims that she was set up by a drug syndicate via a dating website and she was concerned for her children's ongoing welfare. "I did not want to spend 23 years away from my children… it's just causing them pain, hoping that I'm coming home," she says. It wasn't until a group of lawyers joined forces that the tide started to turn in Yoshe's favour. The lawyers discovered that three other Australian victims had been scammed by the same drug syndicate and then released — but that somehow this evidence hadn’t been shared in time to rescue Yoshe from serving six years in jail. Now back in Australia, Yoshe is sharing her story for the first time, in a warning to others about the perils of online romance.

Remembering the late Tim Fischer, who died on August 21, 2019, age 73. A widely respected and quirky political figure, Mr Fischer's remarkable career began as a 20-year-old conscript fighting in the jungles in Vietnam and ended in the Vatican as Australia's top diplomat. But the Boy from Boree Creek (a tiny town near Wagga Wagga) made his greatest contribution in politics as the deputy prime minister, and will be remembered for the key role he played in reforming Australia's gun laws. Recently as his health faded, Tim’s family invited Australian Story to join them on what turned out to be one of his last trips to his home town of Boree Creek.

The Choir of Hard Knocks became a household name when it burst onto television screens in 2007, making rock stars out of 50 of the most unlikely people. Front and centre, clapping and crying, was its choir master Jonathon Welch. Made up of the homeless, drug addicts and alcoholics, the choir sold out concerts at the Sydney Opera House, amassed an Aria award and a gold album. But long after the cameras stopped rolling, Jonathon kept the choir going on his own. Now as Jonathon bids farewell to his beloved choir, he reveals the deeply personal reasons behind his departure.

When Newcastle radio host Jill Emberson was told she had terminal ovarian cancer, she opted to go public and go loud. She discovered her disease was the most neglected and deadliest of all womens’ cancers and vowed to improve awareness and research funding. Her mission took her from scientific labs, to street protests and to Parliament House in Canberra, where her message finally cut through. This is the story of Jill’s fight for her life and for a better deal for generations of women to come.

As he prepares to celebrate his 80th birthday, an uncharacteristically reflective Paul Hogan looks back over his remarkable life and career. In the first of two episodes, the actor and comedian talks about his working-class background, sudden fame in his early 30s, his relationship with John “Strop” Cornell and the genesis of Crocodile Dundee, one of the most successful independent films ever made. Paul's son Todd, speaking publicly for the first time, talks movingly of the disruptions the family faced as their father became a star virtually overnight. Featuring previously unseen childhood photos and candid insights from family, friends and colleagues, this is Paul Hogan as you’ve never seen him before.

This episode concludes the two-part exploration of comedian Paul Hogan’s remarkable life and career. Following the success of the movie Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan had the world at his feet. But when he left his wife of 30 years for Dundee co-star Linda Kozlowski the media turned on him. Paul talks candidly about the hostile media attention, the difficulty in living up to the success of Crocodile Dundee, his nine-year battle with the Australian Tax Office, his friend John Cornell’s battle with Parkinson’s disease and his career renaissance since meeting director Dean Murphy. Featuring candid insights from family, friends and colleagues, this is Paul Hogan as you’ve never seen him before.

Emma and Richard Austin endured ten years of gruelling fertility treatments in their unsuccessful quest for a baby. Two months after making the difficult decision to stop IVF, the offer of a lifetime arrived when a mutual friend introduced them to a Brisbane couple. Jessica and JP DiZane’s family was complete and they had leftover embryos that they didn’t want to destroy. After a series of heartfelt and challenging discussions between the couples, an altruistic donation led to Emma and Richard becoming the parents of baby Henry. One year later, the couples come together to discuss how a surprise gift helped to solve everyone’s problems.

We go behind the scenes at the inquest into one of Australia’s most chilling cold cases, the 1975 murder of Perth brothel madam Shirley Finn From the outset, rumours of police and political involvement swirled around the case, many believing that Shirley Finn was silenced when she threatened to reveal the secrets of powerful figures in Western Australia. When we last visited the story, Shirley Finn’s daughter Bridget Shewring and author Juliet Wills had succeeded in obtaining a coronial inquest after a decade-long battle Tonight we follow the two women through the twists and turns of the inquiry as they grapple with new allegations of police and political corruption and we hear from crucial witnesses, fronting the cameras for the first time.

When the body of a well-dressed man was found on Adelaide's Somerton Beach in 1948, police assumed that somebody would soon come forward to identify him. But nobody did. More than 70 years later, the mysterious case of the "Somerton Man", as he became known, regularly makes the lists of Australia’s most baffling unsolved cases. Was he murdered? Was he a Russian spy? Was it suicide? Or was he the victim of a love triangle? In an effort to finally unearth the truth, Adelaide University Professor Derek Abbott is pushing for the Somerton Man’s remains to be exhumed. Professor Abbott has a more personal motivation to solve the case: He is married to a woman he believes is the Somerton Man’s granddaughter.

For the past decade, Australian Story producer Belinda Hawkins has been following the case of Jock Palfreeman, a young Australian man convicted in Bulgaria for a stabbing murder he says he didn’t commit. He claims he was acting in self-defence when he was protecting a Gypsy who was being attacked; the court found him guilty of murder with hooliganism. When Jock was released on parole recently having served 12 years in jail, he and his father, Simon Palfreeman, could have been forgiven for thinking their nightmare was over. But a new crisis unfolded when Jock was caught up in a bitter stoush when politicians argued against his parole. He remains in limbo.

Former Socceroos captain and respected football analyst Craig Foster has been an outspoken, sometimes controversial public broadcaster, driven by an unrivalled passion for the game. But privately, he has led another life, working with those less fortunate than himself. And in November last year, when a fellow football international, Bahraini refugee Hakeem Al-Araibi, was arrested in Thailand and threatened with extradition back to the country where he had been imprisoned and tortured, Craig Foster led a global campaign to free him. Now he and Hakeem reveal the full story of that campaign, and how close it came to disaster.

In the NSW mid-coast town of Kempsey, principal Mark Morrison brushes close to the rules to give troubled teens their last chance at a high school education. At Macleay Vocational College, the former private school teacher and rugby league coach does whatever it takes to get students past the high-security fence and into a classroom. These kids mostly come from generational disadvantage, where poverty, drug addiction, domestic violence and/or cultural trauma is the norm. Life has taught them unacceptable behaviour but Mark Morrison hasn’t given up on them. In fact, as the end of the school calendar draws close, he’s looking at a record-breaking number of student graduations.

Award-winning Melbourne artist Vincent Fantauzzo doesn’t hold with the idea of the starving artist. Instead, he's made a spectacular life for himself despite leaving school at 13 barely able to read or write. His teenage years were spent working menial jobs and dabbling in petty crime until his boxing coach encouraged him to follow his passion for art. When he was outed for plagiarism at art school, his trouble with words was finally diagnosed as dyslexia. After successfully completing his fine arts degree he forged a successful career as one of Australia’s best known portrait artists. Heath Ledger, Julia Gillard, Baz Luhrmann and wife Asher Keddie are some of his high-profile subjects. Today Vincent no longer sees his dyslexia as a disability. Instead he calls it the gift that allows him to see the world and his subjects from a different perspective.

When Shanna Whan realised she was an alcoholic, she didn’t just decide to give up drinking. She drew on her experience to start a one-woman campaign to start a conversation about the pervasive culture of alcohol in rural Australia. And she took the brave step of going public with her own 20-year battle with the bottle, as a way of encouraging others who want to change to step forward and seek help. Now her online community "Sober in the Country" is spreading the message throughout the bush: "It’s OK to say no to a beer."

Ursula Barwick was 17 years old when she vanished without a trace. Her family dropped her to the train station on the NSW Central Coast in Spring 1987. She was headed to Sydney to start a new job and was to call when she got there. But that phone call never came. Desperate and worried, Peter Barwick reported his daughter missing but police at the time failed to prioritise the case. Friends and family were not interviewed and potential leads were missed. For the next three decades, those closest to Ursula lived with an enduring heartache, not knowing if she was dead or alive. When Ursula's fate was finally discovered by two new detectives in 2016, it raised uncomfortable questions for NSW Police as to why her disappearance had gone unsolved for so long.

Late last year Ghanim Al Shnen was working on a building site when a metal bar he was holding struck overhead wires. He suffered catastrophic injuries that resulted in the amputation of both his arms. Now, in a world-first procedure, he is being fitted with two robotic arms that he will control with his mind. Overseeing this complex process is renowned orthopaedic surgeon Dr Munjed al Muderis. The two men have much in common. Both fled Iraq in fear of their lives, arriving in Australia by boat. Boat spent time in detention centres where they used the time to educate themselves. To adapt to a life with no arms is profoundly difficult but Ghanim has impressed everyone with his resilience, positivity and good humour. Australian Story filmed with Ghanim over six months, following this medical miracle as it unfolded.

When Justine Barwick went for a swim off her yacht in Queensland’s iconic Whitsundays region last year, she had no idea her life would change in minutes. She was bitten by a shark just as she dived under water in Cid Harbour. A dramatic twilight helicopter rescue ferried the unconscious woman to Mackay hospital where surgeons managed against all odds to save her life and her leg. Her attack became the first of three in a matter of weeks in the Whitsundays. Five attacks since September last year have ignited a heated conversation about shark control in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park area. In the midst of the debate, Justine Barwick remains resolute about maintaining a positive attitude about her recovery and the Whitsundays.

From a homeless alcoholic living in the wild to academic success, this is the next chapter in the inspiring comeback story of forest-dweller Gregory Smith. When he left school at 14, dogged by the crushing assessment from teachers that he was “functioning at the lower level of the dull range”, Gregory had already endured a violent upbringing and months in an orphanage. At 35, struggling with a lifetime of trauma, he opted to escape into the wild with no desire to return to the society that had failed him so dismally. In an incredible turnaround, he emerged from the rainforest and gained an undergraduate degree and then a PhD at Southern Cross University. This powerful story explores how Gregory is now using his voice to help others sleeping rough.