
The young letter writer
Dying young, Sylvia McArthur would make her mark, documenting in letters to a newspaper’s children’s page what life in rural Tasmania around...
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Meet the people who were willing or unwilling participants in the events that made headlines. In cemeteries, gravestones hint at our history – tales of unsolved murders, love lost, mystery,...

Dying young, Sylvia McArthur would make her mark, documenting in letters to a newspaper’s children’s page what life in rural Tasmania around...

Some bushrangers became folk heroes, others were opportunistic thieves, but the Clarke Brothers were murderous thugs who hanged on duel gall...

Madam Weigel's patterns dressed the women of Australia for nine decades but in the large cemetery plot bought for three, there are no bodies...

Mark Jeffrey lived with the 1100 or so deceased residents on the Isle of the Dead, tending his own plot. But how did he avoid being buried t...

Little did Professor Theodore Flynn and his wife, Lily, of Sandy Bay, Tasmania, know that their son, Errol Flynn, would become Hollywood’s f...

A story that has passed into folk law – how bushman Bernard O’Reilly put his mind to finding a missing aircraft with seven people on board w...

In the days when ‘freak shows’ were entertainment, Mrs Augusta Rewald, a Queensland resident, was exhibited as the ‘biggest woman in the wor...

For more than a century, Sam Knott was one of the best-known faces on advertising billboards. But how did this unconventional man find himse...

On a beautiful summer’s eve, January 1924, in the Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, five people's lives were about to change. A gunman was on the...

If it wasn’t for a persistent father, Walter Lindrum might never have risen to World Champion. He was nicknamed the ‘Don Bradman of billiard...

On a Sunday afternoon in February 1921, 13-year-old Chrissie Venn left home to run an errand for her mother. Two days later Chrissie’s body...

The man in a suit looked like he was resting in the sun on Somerton Beach, Adelaide, in 1948, until a couple of good Samaritans checking on...

He was the Holocaust survivor saved by Oscar Schindler – this is the story of Leo Rosner, a talented Jewish musician who made a post-war lif...

Many Australians know the story of the execution of Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock—but there were other Australians charged with...

Years of isolation, deprivation and often the loss of children, even a case of madness; who were the stoic ladies who accompanied their husb...

Sudden deaths from a plague caused panic in Sydney involving quarantining, demolitions and disinfecting. The year was 1900 and the nervousne...

Alice Anderson was one of Australia’s first female mechanics and her ideas and inventions were ahead of her time. But Alice’s life came to a...

An unspeakable crime – two women murdered, a third left for dead, and a young killer on drugs on the loose. In Autumn 1964, the community of...

On Monday 31 July 1972, the residents of Ipswich in Queensland were awoken by a blast that destroyed the Box Flat Colliery and killed 17 min...

What’s the real story of the bohemian who broke out of an asylum and was known for her ability to quote any passage from Shakespeare for mon...

Three men went into a pub … no it is not the start of an Irish joke, but it was the start of a syndicate that would turn racing on its head....

Mental asylums were often regarded as feared places of suffering – but for one young girl and her family who lived at the asylum, the inmate...

Dan Kelly, brother of Ned, died in the 1880 Glenrowan shoot-out with police. So, who was the man living in Ipswich who claimed in 1933 that...

It was school holidays, December 1921 and 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke left home to run an errand in the heart of Melbourne. She was found the...

The winged keel wonder – Australia II and the eccentric mind behind it – Ben Lexcen was the man who engineered the only win over the USA at...

Queensland’s oldest cold case – three Murphy siblings from Gatton were slain late on Boxing Day, their bodies left for all to see. The inves...

The drowning of two little girls who were attracted by water lilies in a pond at Walloon, near Ipswich, inspired Henry Lawson to write his c...

How did an unarmed stretcher bearer manage to capture 18 armed German soliders in the trenches of France in World War One? You won't believe...

A $15 million prize was hijacked in what was the nation’s most brazen and probably biggest cash robbery ever. And despite the ruthless crimi...

The woman who escaped him was called the ‘uncemented bride’. But those who loved him called him the gentlest of lovers. Several of them were...

This is the story of the down-and-outer from a rough childhood who found redemption and why he spent his life writing the word ‘Eternity’ on...

It was only his second sea journey, and a sailor's life is meant to be an exciting one on the ocean’s waves – adventure, mateship and the my...

Who really lies in a humble grave marked with a white cross in a Melbourne cemetery? Is it the woman they call the ‘Pyjama Girl’, Linda Agos...

The newspaper declared ‘startling disclosures’ would be revealed at the trial of Martha, 24, charged with killing her sister, Bertha, 14. Wa...

A farmer’s wife inspired the design of the Australian ute, and its designer, Lewis Bandt, would take his last breath in it.

Overpaid, oversexed and over here – US soldiers during World War II. This is the story of one GI who killed innocent Australian women to pos...

Was Robert Francis Burns our first serial killer? Using the solitude of the bush, Burns hid his victims’ bodies, but when found guilty of on...

The inexplicable story of a mother who murdered her husband, her three young girls and her new fiancé’s brother with poison… and how one fin...

The three ladies, Grace, Rose and Meta, retired for the night on 22 March 1964 in the residence at the back of their little shop. After midn...

His namesake is famous in AFL circles… yet Charles Brownlow played much of his footy for Geelong under an assumed name. This is the curious...

Nothing strikes fear into the heart like the words 'black death' – a plague that can wipe out a whole town and can be passed on by a sneeze!...

Mollie Thompson went missing early one morning – no-one knew where she was until her body was found 10 days later in an impossible to get to...

Thirty-eight-year-old journalist Juanita Nielsen remains on the Australian Missing Persons Register. What happened to the feisty Sydney jour...

Heading home from work in 1896, Grace, 27, was seen walking slowly towards the river... she missed the first ferry and decided to wait for t...

Could deserted bride, Eliza Donnithorne, be the role model for Charles Dickens' Miss Havisham from Great Expectations? Five years before Mis...

Could a serial killer who so cold-bloodily murdered five women now rest on a leafy hillside in a Brisbane cemetery? That may well be the cas...

A love that was meant to be? It was a maritime tragedy when the Loch Ard was shipwrecked near Port Campbell in 1878 with 54 passengers onboa...

Who was the owner of the human arm that a shark spat up in front of a crowd at a Coogee Aquarium? The twisted tale of the Sydney’s strangest...