Encore: The beautiful questions your intellectual mind can't answer

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1. 

   15 Sep 2026 · 52 min

   Encore: What happened when I tried MDMA therapy

   Author Rebecca Huntley used supervised MDMA therapy to help her with complex PTSD and the legacy of childhood trauma. Rebecca's public life as a broadcaster, an author and a social researcher made her well-known to many Australians. But in private, Rebecca spent years grappling with complex PTSD and childhood trauma. At 50, while walking the Camino, she realised that despite decades of therapy, she was still living with a roiling anger about what had happened to her as a child. She decided to undergo MDMA therapy delivered by an underground healer. Further Information Rebecca Huntley's book…

2. 

   14 Sep 2026 · 49 min

   Healing intergenerational trauma and epigenetics—the children of the Third Reich

   Catrine Clay with the story of the children of Nazi perpetrators and Holocaust survivors came together under extraordinary circumstances to come to terms with their dark past. In the early 1990s, historian and author Catrine Clay was working at the BBC, making a documentary about a woman named Renate. Renate had been born in Germany in 1941, and grew up in the postwar years as the sole child of a single mother. When Renate asked her mother about her missing father, she was told he had been an important general in the German forces, who had been imprisoned by the Russians. But that wasn't the…

3. 

   11 Sep 2026 · 52 min

   Comedian Urzila Carlson regrets nothing

   Urzila Carlson grew up in South Africa. Her father threatened the family with a gun when she was 6, and he walked out on the family soon afterwards. Urzila's mum, who she describes as a 'warrior woman', raised Urzila and her sister. When she was in primary school, one of Urzila's teachers taught her a big lesson about regret, which has stayed with her for life. Urzila moved to New Zealand in 2006 to begin working in advertising. One day a group of her co-workers persuaded her to perform at a local open mic night. Within a year she had become a professional comedian in Australia and New…

4. 

   10 Sep 2026 · 49 min

   Encore: Meg Washington on the magic of music

   The singer-songwriter on her early introduction to musicals in Port Moresby, how singing became a form of speech therapy for her stutter and also a path into her life’s work. Meg Washington was born in a musical home in Port Moresby, where her parents had met as Australian expats. Meg and her sister spent a lot of their time watching classic Hollywood musicals and also down at the local yacht club where their dad DJ'd every Saturday night. Singing became something Meg was encouraged to do herself after she developed a stutter as a little girl. And eventually it grew from a therapy into a…

5. 

   9 Sep 2026 · 48 min

   Louise Adler on why she questions everything

   Louise Adler has been one of the biggest and most controversial names in Australian publishing for decades. This is the story of how she fell in love with the world of books. ⁠ An asthmatic child, she spent most of Melbourne’s winters in bed with nothing else to do but read novels. But it wasn't until her parents intervened in Louise's obsession with Enid Blyton’s boarding school series that her deep pleasure in the world of books began in earnest. ⁠ Shaped by her family's story of surviving World War Two, Louise grew up in questioning everything. She was 15 years old when she went to her…

6. 

   7 Sep 2026 · 52 min

   Black ops and human shields—the secrets on board Flight 149

   Why were 400 civilians allowed to fly into a war zone as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? What really happened to them when they were held as hostages? And why has the British government fought for so long to keep it all a secret? Stephen Davis is an investigative journalist who has been following a story, within a story, within a story for more than 30 years. It starts on 2 August, 1990 when a British Airways plane landed in Kuwait for a scheduled stopover. There were nearly 400 passengers and crew on board, mostly British, who had no idea they were flying straight into Saddam Hussein's…

7. 

   4 Sep 2026 · 55 min

   From the Nazis to the Stasi, how ordinary citizens live through extraordinary times

   Historian Katja Hoyer was born in 1985, under the old regime of the GDR and grew up in the 1990s, watching many former East Germans struggle in the years after reunification. Learning about the Nazi era was a big part of her education but Katja left school feeling unsatisfied about what she’d been taught about the period when the Nazis rose to power. She knew about all the big political moments, but not much about the lives of ordinary Germans and how they responded to the dramatic changes that unfolded around all around them. So Katja the historian traced the lives of residents in the town…

8. 

   3 Sep 2026 · 51 min

   Encore: The family secret which inspired 'The Teacher's Pet'

   Journalist Hedley Thomas grew up knowing that his grandmother Gladys had vanished in the sea off Sydney in the 1950s. The mystery of what happened to Gladys helped to inspire his hit podcast 'The Teacher's Pet'. Hedley has had a storied career in journalism which has seen him win many Walkley Awards and expose a lot of corruption and dodgy dealings. But it has also placed Hedley and his family in harm's way. In 2002 Hedley and his wife Ruth were at their home when bullets were fired into their bedroom. The shooter was never found, and Hedley grappled with PTSD after the event. A couple of…

9. 

   2 Sep 2026 · 46 min

   Loving my dad, who has younger-onset Alzheimer's

   Millie Robinson’s family had been through enough as it was before her devoted dad Jim Rogers received his diagnosis in 2021. Today they navigate the unknown together and stay in the moment to enjoy their tight-knit community. Millie is a celebrant, mum and author living in Brisbane. She also supports her dad, Jim, who has younger-onset Alzheimer’s. Millie started life in the UK, in a very tight-knit network of family and friends who wrapped their arms around Jim, Millie and her siblings when Millie’s mum died of cancer. Jim became the dad and the mum of the house, and for years put himself…

10. 

    1 Sep 2026 · 51 min

    Encore: An infamous WWII prison and the soldiers who tried to escape

    British writer Ben Macintyre on the eerie history of Colditz Castle which the Germans used as a prisoner of war camp during World War II. Since the Middle Ages, Colditz Castle has existed in some form, perched on the edge of a cliff in eastern Germany. Colditz has served as a royal hunting lodge, a madhouse, and most famously as a prisoner of war camp during World War II. It was said to be inescapable, but that didn't stop the English officers from trying to escape the nightmare of this gloomy fortress, and the clutches of the Germans. Ben Macintyre tells the full story of Colditz and the…