Hindsight
Hindsight is the only program on Australian radio devoted exclusively to social history. It offers new perspectives on well-known aspects of the past and brings to light those stories long-ignored on the public record. The memories of ordinary Australians are woven into complex, credible and satisfying documentaries. Hindsight is published every Sunday.
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4 Episodes of this Podcast:
Hindsight 2009-11-01
Published: 2009-10-31 10:00:00Travel writer May Vivienne was born around 1857. Married twice, and twice widowed, she was an opera singer who turned her talents to writing about her journeys - particularly around the goldfields of Western Australia. She travelled alone by horse and buggy, and was a keen observer of life around the mineshafts, the countryside, and the men, whose company she enjoyed tremendously! Perth's Kings Park is very nearly eclipsed by the view it offers - across the Swan River, down over the city, and across to the hills that surround it. It's an outlook that has played its part in the history of the land upon which the park sits: the local Aboriginal people (Nyoongars) used it as a vantage point to observe who was travelling towards them. Much later, Captain Stirling saw its potential for the military fortification of the young colony. The land around this prominence -- which became known by the settlers as Mount Eliza -- was set aside as parkland by the colonial forefathers early in the history of the settlement. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the vision was clear: the land would be transformed into something resembling an English gentleman's estate, with sweeping lawns, European trees and decorative flower beds. It would be civilised and civilising, and it would remind the settlers of home. But money was always short, and the majority of the land remained as natural bushland -- as it does to the present day. Many decades later, that would be seen as a blessing -- an expanse of land on the doorstep of the city where (apart from the hum of traffic on the freeway below!) the natural environment can be observed and enjoyed, especially in the much-celebrated wildflower season. Around six and a half million people visit Kings Park every year -- it is the most visited place in Western Australia. And over the years, it's come to be used much as the Nyoongar people used it: for ceremony and celebration, as a meeting place, and a place where the local flora is valued and protected.
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Hindsight 2009-10-25
Published: 2009-10-24 10:00:00In 1921, when he was six years old, Souren Antoyan was sent from his occupied homeland of Armenia to spend the next eight years in orphanages, including the Australian-run Ghazir Orphanage, in Beirut. Souren Antoyan's story is testimony to the enduring legacy of Armenia's bitter and unresolved 20th century history, and sheds new light on the little-known role that Australia played in the international relief effort that emerged in the wake of the Armenian genocide. Producer Cara Rosehope travelled to Lebanon, where a chance meeting with 93-year-old Souren Antoyan uncovered this antipodean connection -- in Souren's own life but also within the wider play of history in the period after World War One.
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Hindsight 2009-10-18
Published: 2009-10-17 10:00:00Just two generations ago, before the term multiculturalism became the norm, Australian society was polarised between two main groups: Protestants and Catholics. Religion was code for identity, with tensions fuelled by historical grievances that dated back long before the First Fleet. `Catholic´ meant Irish, and to an English Protestant Establishment, that meant trouble. Until the 1960s, job vacancy advertisements might include the stipulation that `Catholics Need Not Apply´. Irish Catholics were an underclass - Australia´s first ethnic minority. When a Catholic married a Protestant (one in five marriages until the 1960s were `mixed´), conflict and family fatwas often ensued. Catholics are no longer the underdogs in Australia, but bigotry and prejudice remain, directed against a new `other´. In Part Two - 'Between Two Worlds', children who grew up in a mixed marriage recall a hybrid world of divided loyalties.
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Hindsight 2009-10-11
Published: 2009-10-10 10:00:00Just two generations ago, before the term multiculturalism became the norm, Australian society was polarised between two main groups: Protestants and Catholics. Religion was code for identity, with tensions fuelled by historical grievances that dated back long before the First Fleet. `Catholic´ meant Irish, and to an English Protestant Establishment, that meant trouble. Until the 1960s, job vacancy advertisements might include the stipulation that `Catholics Need Not Apply´. Irish Catholics were an underclass - Australia´s first ethnic minority. When a Catholic married a Protestant (one in five marriages until the 1960s were `mixed´), conflict and family fatwas often ensued. Catholics are no longer the underdogs in Australia, but bigotry and prejudice remain, directed against a new `other´. In Part One: in the sectarian atmosphere of pre-multicultural Australia, to marry across the Protestant/Catholic divide was, for many families, to consort with the enemy. Mixed marriage couples describe how they bridged the gap, despite conflict with family and church authorities.
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