Episodes

In this chapter: The convict who tried a ‘fool’s gold’ trick – twice; The real gold rushes and the birth of the swaggie; The arrival of the Chinese goes off like fireworks, so here comes the White Australia Policy; Grog and m...

Now Red Dust listeners, I have no interviews to present to you this episode. Rather, let’s head back in time, to before recording devices were invented. Australia, as with the rest of the world, right now is in the midst of t...

Two States, one Territory. Three isolated women, each with totally different backgrounds and motivations, tell tales about goats and ghosts and tin mines, that go back to early 20th Century Outback Australia.

Now I want to present to you a time capsule. It’s a radio documentary I prepared in 1972, for the ABC. Back then it’s title was, ‘The Urban Aborigine’ , and you’ll find the word 'aborigine' features strongly thoughout For ma...

This episode has everything: A road trip. (Well, on mainly dusty tracks) across three quarters of Australia. Memorable encounters with remnants of Aboriginal tribes – two of whom were the last speakers of a number of ancient ...

Ned Conroy, the craggy-browed Scotsman with the missing teeth and a dusty face the colour of the red earth he dug in, loved the bush, and the chase for floaters – those bits of gold on the surface – and then the dig-down sea...

From the age of 12 Les Craigie was a professional boxer. In our interview he compared an easily bruised apple with the delicacy of a pummelled human brain. At 21 he’d had enough of the risks, and for the next 25 years he work...

Woops. Once again, we’re a long way from the usual Red Dust Tapes Outback territory. This is the second of the two-part anecdotes of John ’Snow’ Williams, who first went to the Antarctic in 1958, at the end of the Internation...

Welcome to Season 2 of Red Dust Tapes. We commence this second season as far as you can possibly get from the usual Red Dust Tapes territory, in The Land of the Blizzard, Antarctica. It’s also just 67 years ago – so far more ...

THIS IS THE FINAL EPISODE IN SEASON ONE. Whoah! It seems I achieved something that the great television interviewer and self-confessed cricket nut Sir Michael Parkinson longed for, but never managed – to not just meet, but to...

When I interviewed Ernest Skein in 1970, I was told he had recently been let out of jail. I didn’t want to close down an interview with a fascinating old-time prospector, so when I got the message that some subjects were not ...

PICTURED: Fred Teague leans against his dry blower, his brother George is to his left, with the gold pan. Taken on the Koonamore goldfield, South Australia, 1934. In the Depression years Fred Teague had been a gold miner and ...

It was bitterly cold up there, in leather cap and goggles, in the open cockpit. Turbulence in those North Queensland skies was often terrifying. Passengers could do nothing but hang on and bear it, hopefully holding something...

One day 1970, in the Outback town of Broken Hill, I was standing on a street corner, tape recorder in hand, grabbing sounds for a radio documentary. A short, energetic little fellow wandered up and said, ‘Hello son, what are ...

Last edition we met Sis McRae, the all-night fiddler from the early part of the 20th Century. Sis had just one child, Margaret McRae, who married Jim Coad. Both families had mining backgrounds. With Margaret and Jim this cont...

There are two distinct parts to this episode: first, more revelations about an early aviation legend. Then, we visit Ada (Sis) Mcrae, born 1889, who recalls the hardships and joys of life in a small Outback town. SIR NORMAN B...

‘They wouldn’t let Brearley look at the bodies. A women said it was the first time she’d ever seen a man cry.’ World War One dogfighter Major Norman Brearley was the first off the ground with an airline in Australia, dramatic...

Within a few short years after the First World War, over the heads of horses donkeys camels and bullock teams, a new sound could be heard in Australia’s interior: the droning and spluttering of aircraft. First it was the 'bar...

Opal miner Franko Albertoni was born in 1883. He was 88 when John Francis interviewed him in 1971, but still jumping around in the crushing heat like a little pixie. In 1920 Franko and his brother were among the very early mi...

It was 1919, and Charlie Gill was 12 when he started work on a cattle station east of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. It was a tough but joyous life for a boy. Charlie was an acute observer, with the memory of a steel...

Are you intrigued by Australian oral history? You’ll really love RED DUST TAPES. Soak up the voices and the stories of Outback old-timers who were born over 130 years ago. Here's a quick trailer of RED DUST TAPES, which wi...