Earshot

Earshot is an ABC podcast that finds broad human questions inside sharply specific lives. Its best episodes begin with a scene that feels almost private. A child loses sight of her mother in Kmart. A daughter wakes to a voicemail from her father. A funeral reveals that old magnetic tapes helped revive an Indigenous language. From there, the program widens the frame. Family stories become stories about systems, memory, culture, access, and inheritance. The series is comfortable with unresolved mysteries, as in the Marree Man episode, where faxed clues, a buried plaque, desert geography, and small-town speculation keep leading away from a single clean answer. It is also comfortable with emotional directness. In the episodes about motherless motherhood and parental addiction, grief is not packaged as a lesson; it is allowed to remain complicated. Earshot has a strong interest in voice, both literal and cultural. Jodie Mundy’s story moves through sign language, interpreting, music, and the private demands placed on a hearing child in a Deaf family. The Indigenous language revival episode asks what can be rebuilt from fragments preserved on tape. The haka episode follows performance as ceremony, protest, grief, pride, and debate. Sport and music appear here too, but through people rather than trivia. Bev Francis is framed through strength, visibility, and the limits placed on women’s bodies. The Cure episode follows older women whose fandom has deepened rather than faded. Earshot suits listeners drawn to narrative radio with emotional patience, archival texture, and a willingness to follow real lives into difficult territory. It rarely rushes toward a punchline. The appeal is in the listening.