Convicts, bushrangers and letter writers from Australia's overlooked past.
Chris Adams and Helen share the telling of each story, quoting old letters and first-hand accounts before stopping to react and compare notes. Their subjects run from the murderous Clarke brothers and a Port Arthur convict to Errol Flynn's Tasmanian family and a passenger plane that went missing in 1937.
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Grave Tales Australia: the series works at the scale of a single life. Its subjects range from a Hollywood star's parents in Tasmania to a convict who spent his days tending the dead. Chris Adams and Helen share the telling. Each story is introduced with the Grave Tales book it comes from: volumes tied to Tasmania, Melbourne and Queensland's Scenic Rim, plus a true crime collection. An adults-only advisory comes first, then a short teaser sets the scene. After that, it is a conversation. Helen often puts the plain question, such as what exactly the Isle of the Dead was, and Chris supplies the history. They quote their sources generously. Sylvia MacArthur, who died in 1912 at 15, speaks through her letters to a newspaper's children's page. She lists the store, butcher, baker and police station of her Tasmanian town and notes that one of its two hotels burnt down two days before Christmas. In 'The plane that flew into a cyclone', a survivor's statement carries the account of a passenger plane that went missing in February 1937 with seven people aboard. The survivors lit fires on a plateau and the rain put them out overnight. One man set off toward a farm with sheep that the others insisted was not there. The story turns on bushman Bernard O'Reilly, who found the aircraft where no one else could. Crime gets sterner treatment. When Helen asks whether the Clarke brothers were bad guys or just misunderstood, the reply is flat: as bad as it gets. What follows is a family web of outlaws around Braidwood, where the 40 or so police in the area were openly defied, until a royal commission finally stopped them. Elsewhere the mood lightens. 'The grave with no bodies' follows a paper-pattern business that dressed Australian women for nine decades to a Brighton Cemetery plot bought for three, where no one is buried. Along the way comes a joke about a gentleman's dressing gown fit for Clark Gable. The Flynn story moves from a professor's family at Sandy Bay to Errol playing Fletcher Christian in a Sydney production, 'In the Wake of the Bounty'. It also touches on a claimed family link to the mutiny itself. Asides about growing up in country Victoria slip in between the facts. The endings tend to settle on a single line, from a withering verdict on the Clarke brothers to a quiet 'Adieu, madame.' The closing credits name Kai Engels for the music and point to the books in paperback, e-book and, for some titles, audiobook.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys Australian social history told through one person at a time, from convicts to country-town children, and who prefers the facts delivered as an easy back-and-forth rather than a lecture.
What sets it apart: Every story is adapted from a Grave Tales book organised by place or theme. Two presenters talk each one through, quoting letters and first-hand statements and stopping to react, rather than one narrator reading it straight.
Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events
A schoolgirl's 1912 letters and a crashed Stinson: your Australian history habit gets very personal.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A teenager's letters preserve the life and decline of a Tasmanian mining town.
Sylvia MacArthur's letters give Balfour, a Tasmanian mining town, a brief but vivid presence. Chris Adams and Helen Galtz trace her correspondence with the Launceston Weekly Courier's children's page, moving from her careful appeal to Dame Durden into descriptions of town life,…
A grim Braidwood crime story about bushranger violence and the local law enforcement failures around it.
The episode places the Clarke brothers in the criminal world around Braidwood, where family loyalty, highway robbery, and weak local policing let violent thieves dominate the roads.
A grounded Tasmanian family story follows Errol Flynn from Sandy Bay toward Hollywood.
Errol Flynn's Tasmanian beginnings give this family story its center, starting with Lily and Professor Theodore Flynn welcoming their only son and spending time on the chilly beach at Sandy Bay.
A 1937 aircraft crash becomes a spare, tense account of injury, rain, hunger, and a stubborn search for survivors.
Grave Tales Australia follows a 1937 flight that becomes a grim survival story, shaped by bad weather, a remote plateau, and Bernard O'Reilly's resolve. A passenger plane leaves Brisbane despite worries about sticky conditions and vanishes with seven people aboard.
A Queensland giantess's touring life becomes a measured look at spectacle, exploitation, and local history.
Augusta Riewoldt's life as a Queensland giantess sits at the centre of a strange, unsettling piece of Australian show history. The episode gives her story real physical presence, moving from the advertising that promoted her measurements to the meals described on the road to…
Crash reports, cockpit logic, human banter.
Aerospace history, news, and working knowledge.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Grave Tales Australia: the series follows Sylvia MacArthur, the teenage Balfour correspondent whose first letter to the Launceston Weekly Courier appeared on 11 January 1912.
Grave Tales Australia: the series examines Thomas and John Clarke, bushrangers from near Braidwood who robbed travellers, businesses, and racegoers in New South Wales during the 1860s.
["Grave Tales: the series follows Errol Flynn from Sandy Bay, where Lily Flynn and Professor Theodore Flynn raised Tasmania's first-born Errol, to the Warner Brothers years that made him a Hollywood star.", "The hosts linger on Theodore Flynn's work at the University of Tasmania, his role in the Field Naturalist Club, the Royal Society, and Mawson's Australian Antarctic expedition.", "They also tell the family stories that define the episode: Errol trapping kangaroo rats for a shilling each, tipping girls into an ornamental fountain, and sailing the 13-ton Sirocco to New Guinea.", "The biography revisits Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, his failing health, and Theodore Flynn's defense that his son was more sinned against than sinning."]
On 19 February 1937, a Stinson passenger plane left Archerfield Airport in Brisbane for Lismore and Sydney as a Bureau of Meteorology cyclone warning covered the route.
Chris Adams and Helen Galtz examine Augusta Riewoldt, the Fassifern Giantess, who toured Australia from 1905 while publicly lifting two full-sized men.
This episode recounts the 1924 Botanic Garden Murders in Melbourne, where a gunman killed four people in a park.
Grave Tales Australia: the series examines the February 1921 murder of 13-year-old Chrissie Venn, whose body was found inside a hollowed stump three and a half metres above ground.