Show Notes
Michael Robotham grew up in small towns in regional New South Wales before securing a coveted cadetship with Fairfax Media in 1979, aged 17. After cutting his teeth covering crime and courts for afternoon newspapers he made the jump to London's Fleet Street in the mid-1980s. The end of the Cold War provided opportunities to access previously unavailable Russian archives and he was the first Western journalist to see inside the Moscow State Archives containing Romanov letters, Stalin's Hitler file and accounts of the Chernobyl disaster. After a stint as a celebrity ghostwriter Michael returned to Australia and has published 20 crime thrillers. He is a two-time winner of the Crime Writer's Association’s Golden Dagger award and described by Stephen King as 'an absolute master'.
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This week's mystery caller migrates from southeast Asia to feed over our summer wetlands – the Whiskered Tern.
Suzie Miller is one of the world’s most influential contemporary playwrights. In The Year That Made Me, Suzie publicly shares for the first time why 1995 was a year she didn't think she would survive, and why it changed the course of her life. A former lawyer who has a degree in science and grew up in a working class family in St Kilda, Suzie's theatrical works have been staged in fifty different countries, including on London's West End and New York’s Broadway. Productions of her legal blockbuster Prima Facie picked up Olivier and Tony awards, and a recorded performance of Jodie Comer in the one-woman show was viewed by over 1.5 million people in cinemas and online. Suzie’s new play Strong is the New Pretty, about the birth of women’s AFL, is touring the country, and her new novel Inter Alia - based on her hit legal play - has just come out via Pan Macmillan. Guest: Playwright Suzie Miller.
FC aka Freakyclown has spent 3 decades breaking into banks and secure government locations, and he gave a keynote address at Melbourne's CyberCon 2026 on Friday. FC is an ethical hacker, who works for organisations that want him to reveal their security weaknesses to them. He's the co-founder of cyber security company Cygenta, former Head of Offensive Cyber Research at defence contractor Raytheon, and the author of the book “How I Rob Banks (and Other Such Places)” Guest: FC aka Freakyclown, ethical hacker, co-founder of Cygenta, and author.
The death of a Russian lab worker at an anti-plague research institute earlier this month has raised fresh concerns about the global implications of lab leaks. Initial local reporting suggested that the worker died of pneumonic plague following a lab accident, but Russian health authorities deny this, and the official cause of death remains unknown. Alison Young has reported on the Russian incident for Healthbeat and is the author of the 2023 book Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk which recounts Alison’s more than a decade of work as investigative reporter “revealing shocking safety breaches at prestigious U.S. laboratories”. Guest: Alison Young, author of Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, and the senior national reporter at Healthbeat.
Six weeks after flash flooding hurtled through northern Nepal, the government has concluded it's search and rescue mission for the thousands of people still missing. But as the government begins the slow process of recovery, how will it support and restore the lives of the 32,000 displaced Nepali who are mourning the loss of homes, livelihoods and loved ones? Guest: Kunda Dixit, publisher and former editor of Nepali Times and chair of of the Centre For Investigative Journalism Nepal