Category: Favourites

  • #597 Great Expectations

    #597 Great Expectations

    This week, stories about the burden of expectations and the triumph of defying them. The Burden of Low Expectations In our first story, Esther navigates different cultural expectations of disability when she migrates to Australia via Uganda and Sudan. Content Warning: A note that this story contains examples of discriminatory attitudes towards disability. This story…

  • #510 The Bold Source

    #510 The Bold Source

    This week we’re sharing stories from a collaboration with The Bold Source, a magazine led, curated and designed by creative young people in the city of Brimbank.

  • #416 Snap Judgement

    #416 Snap Judgement

    Stories of people being judged and dismissed based on the superficial impressions of others. Hear them out.

  • #297 Picking up the pieces

    #297 Picking up the pieces

    Stephen hasn’t seen his high school girlfriend in nearly 30 years. Things didn’t end so well when they were teenagers, but suddenly he has the opportunity to reconnect with her. The only thing is something has changed in Stephen, something very big, and he’s not sure if his high school sweetheart is ready to find…

  • #287 Life After

    #287 Life After

    #1710 Life After What does life feel like in the wake of death? How do we cope, who do we turn to, and what can we do to make it better when we’re left behind? This week we’re looking at life after loss. ~ ‘Where the sky meets the sea’ by Bethany Atkinson-Quinton When you stare at…

  • #286 A Night Away

    #286 A Night Away

    A lost sex toy, the persistence of nightingales, and the choices about life and love we make after the sun goes down. This week is our second instalment of stories from our listening party in Sydney, where we invited an audience to spend a night with All The Best. In this episode we’ll be taking you…

  • #285 What keeps me up at night

    #285 What keeps me up at night

    Stories straight from our Audiocraft listening party! If you missed the midnight garden gathering, here is the first instalment of nocturnal tales we made for our Sydney relaunch event “Spend a night with All The Best”. Four pieces from contributors who just can’t sleep, all for different reasons, and want you to lie awake with them. This…

  • #1617 Online Identities

    #1617 Online Identities

    It’s 2016, so it’s more than likely you have an online identity. In fact, you may struggle to remember a world without the internet, without a way for your followers to echo your political views, to see what you had for lunch, and to keep up to date on how #blessed you are. But what’s behind the…

  • #1606 Lead Affected

    #1606 Lead Affected

      “I felt betrayed, because I loved Broken Hill and I loved my house and I loved the town, and I loved the streets and I loved everything about it. And to think that my lovely town was poisoning my beautiful baby was heartbreaking.”  Broken Hill sits on the world’s largest known deposit of silver,…

  • #1532 Then It Was Us – Syrian Refugees in Amman

    #1532 Then It Was Us – Syrian Refugees in Amman

      I have a big mission coming in two days and they want to go to Za’atari and I said “If you want to go to Za’atari I will take you to the Dead Sea, and I will take a photo of you at the Dead Sea, because you are coming for tourism. Everybody that…

  • #1526 Be Strong and Have Courage

    #1526 Be Strong and Have Courage

    “I remember in year 7 especially feeling really different from everyone, classic, and I remember feeling like there was a space where I was more myself than I could be at school.” That place is Hashomer Hatzair, or ‘Hashy,’ a Jewish Socialist Zionist youth movement where producer Hannah Reich spent 10 years as a student…

  • #1518 Ayahuasca

    #1518 Ayahuasca

    Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic brew historically and traditionally used by shamans in the Amazon basin to gain access to the spirit world. In the past decade more and more tourists are travelling to Peru to drink ayahuasca in hopes of having an enlightening experience. But what does it mean when a cultural practice is commodified…

  • #1515 A Walk In The Park

    #1515 A Walk In The Park

      When 17-year-old Masa Vukotic was murdered in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster while out for a walk in a park near her house, the Victorian Homicide Squad Chief responded to the tragedy by suggesting this: “…people, particularly females, they shouldn’t be alone in parks…I’m sorry to say that is the case.” And it hit…

  • #1514 Grapes of Ridicule

    #1514 Grapes of Ridicule

    What are you looking for when you buy a bottle of wine? If you’re alone do you reach for the cleanskin? If you’re sharing it with friends maybe you want something a bit more fancy, a wine to show off, mark you as someone who knows their shit. If you’re taking it to your parents…

  • #1508 A Way With Words

    #1508 A Way With Words

    Some things are harder to say than others. The most important things to say, messages you really want to get across, can be boring and complicated. Or you might not feel comfortable saying them at all. There are people all over Australia learning to express themselves using poetry -and not the kind you learned in…

  • #1507 Legal Walls

    #1507 Legal Walls

    Access to the law is something it’s easy to take for granted – if there’s an injustice, if you are wronged, we’re taught to believe that the law has the ability to make that wrong right again. In 1977, the lack of affordable legal service options for disadvantaged and marginalised people led to the opening…

  • #1506 Best Practice

    #1506 Best Practice

    A lot of us trust our doctors to make us healthy, or at least to cure our illnesses. But can they make us happy? According to the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health, one in two Australians will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives. Research organisations and support networks like…

  • #1436 Blowing the Whistle

    #1436 Blowing the Whistle

    This week we work our way through the government’s changes to national security legislation, and zero in on one change that passed earlier this month – Section 35P of the ASIO Act. The change makes it illegal to disclose information about something called a ‘Special Intelligence Operation’ by ASIO. The problem for journalists is, these operations are…

  • #1432 Borrowing Sugar

    #1432 Borrowing Sugar

    There’s a lot of mythology around neighbours. A good neighbour can turn into a very convenient friend, one who lends you a cup of sugar when you run out mid-bake, or who’ll water your plants when you’re out of town. Then there are the neighbours who are a pair of eyes over a back fence,…

  • #1416 That Girl

    #1416 That Girl

      “I didn’t want to be That Girl Who Had An Abortion, because I’m not… When you look at the statistics, there are many of those girls” We have so many conversations about abortion, but most of the time they’re abstract and political, they’re not about the lived experiences and choices of women who’ve terminated…

  • #1415 Human – Live from the Sydney Writers’ Festival

    #1415 Human – Live from the Sydney Writers’ Festival

    You know, and we know, that the best stories are about people. On May 22 we invited five of our favourite people to tell us a story at the Sydney Writers’ Festival Club. Realising somebody is human after all, or that they’re only human. Humans being awful to each other, or excellent to each other. Cats acting…