Category: Shows
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#1520 Go Play Outside
Do you remember climbing a tree as a kid? Running through the bush in the dark, feeling leaves and twigs crunch beneath your feet, your torch out of battery? Did you leap up to grab at the monkey bars even though your arms were too short to make it? It seems that in a few…
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#1519 War Stories
When we sent troops to fight in World War I the federated Australia was 13 years old. We thought we were invincible and we had something to prove, like most 13 year olds do. At the end of World War II we still didn’t know who we were. We clung to the idyllic myth of…
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#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…
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#1517 The Sea Told Slant
“While I was listening for what wasn’t being said about the boats that weren’t being talked about, I also begun to pay attention to those that were. Boats that went down in Uganda, Bangladesh, South Korea, in lakes, oceans and rivers. Cruises, tankers, yachts and ferries.” For centuries, the sea has inspired stories. Songs,…
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#1516 Only A Whale (repeat)
“These are animals that are even larger than some of the dinosaurs we’re so excited about. and they’re travelling through water they’re going up and down they’re jumping they’re splashing about.. And it’s all these things that change the ocean.” The start of May means the start of whale watching season. Look out off the…
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#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…
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#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…
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#1513 Things and Stuff
Do you have too much stuff? Clutter, collections, clothes, books, toys, old stuff, new stuff? This week on All the Best we look at the complicated relationship humans have with the things they own. We meet a woman who left behind all her things and life in the city to live in the New South…
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#1512 Quiet Please
Do you still use a library? Last time you went to the library did you actually borrow a book? These days, libraries hum with computers, and provide meeting spaces and work stations. They’re full of magazines, DVDs, graphic novels, activities. It’s kinda hard to put your finger on what a modern library even is now.…
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#1511 That Girl (repeat)
“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 a pregnancy. A…
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#1510 In A Day
A lot can happen in one day. Everything can change, or nothing can. Some days are special and some days are so completely ordinary that we can tell them apart from the others. On one day this month, 24 hours at the beginning of March, we sent All the Best producers out in search of…
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#1509 Where Are The Women?
“I cannot believe you’ve put a woman on the radio like this. You know that women get their periods and then don’t make as much sense as men. You’ve made a massive mistake.” Why aren’t there more women on the radio? It’s a debate that’s been raging for as long as radio has existed. Is…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#1505 Baby Teeth
It’s wobbling, and you can’t help but push at it with your tongue, making it bend gum-ward so the gnarled roots scratch at the inside of your mouth. It’ll be out soon, and you’ll put it next to your pillow and wake up the next morning to find a single gold coin in it’s place.…
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#1504 Portrait of a Policy
Caitlin Doyle-Markwick meets 3 men who are living on some of the 29, 564 bridging visas issued since 2011, when the then Labor government announced that asylum seekers would increasingly be placed in the community while their claims were processed. Initially welcomed by refugee supporters because of the harmful psychological effects of long-term detention, Caitlin discovers…
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#1503 Turn Your Back
Murrumu Last year, All the Best contributor Selena Shannon sat down with a man who formally renounced his Australian citizenship. Under the UN’s convention against statelessness, governments cannot allow this to happen, and so a desire to cancel your only citizenship is not legal or recognised in Australia. But Murrumu may just have found…
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#1502 No Pets Allowed
This week on All the Best – people who own pets in circumstances you might not expect. Man’s Best Friend More families is Australia have a dog than any other pet. Step outside and you’ll probably hear one, if not from your backyard then from someone else’s. But what happens if there’s a religious law on…
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#1501 Islands
The weather is warm, the sky is blue, and you have to go back to work. Look, we agree, it sucks. This week we’ll try and drag the holiday out a bit longer, and take you on an island holiday. Three, in fact. We’ll take you south to South-Western Victoria, to a tall, flat island…
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#1444 What Is Cool?
What defines “cool”? Is pop music cool? Or vintage vinyl? Is wearing grandma’s doily as a reworked cardigan cool? Or is that daggy? What makes something cool, and who decides when its time is over? When you were little, the answers to these questions were easy. Obvious, even. You knew with so much certainty that…