The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

The Rest is History Episode 645 The Fall of the Incas: Massacre in the Andes (Part 2) What happened when the Spanish conquistadors lead by Francisco Pizarro came face to face with the ruthless emperor of the Incan Empire, Atahualpa? How did the Incas treat their strange, pale, alien visitors with their horses? And, why did a brutal, bloody fight to the death break out between the two sides after the meeting? In 1532 Pizarro read the ‘Requirement’ which legally bound the Incas to submit to vassalage and established a municipality which made their conquest legal. Pizarro then headed off with 168 men, few of whom were trained soldiers, while the Incas were checking them out from a distance. Atahualpa thought that the Spanish could be useful in the Civil War with his brother. A meeting between Pizarro’s brother, de Soto and Atahualpa agreed to meet the following day. Atahualpa knew that the Spanish were outnumbered and the horses were of great interest to him. After delays, the meeting finally took place in a square. Atahualpa dropped a book (a bible?) and this was the prompt for a massacre which saw many dead and Atahualpa taken captive. There’s shades of Mexico here, and perhaps the historiography has confused Mexican and Inca conquest.

Foundling Episode 4 and 5 The Fallout. SPOILERS Despite her birth-mother warning Jess to consider the effect of her investigations on the later families created by her parents, Jess then searches for her father. She had done a DNA test with Ancestry, but had no success. She then went with a different company and tracked down her father’s family. (It just goes to show how the commodification of DNA testing means that you can’t get definitive results without subscribing to several services- just like streaming. And because it can identify you through your relatives, even if you haven’t submitted your own sample, there’s no escape). Jess encounters Lewis, her father, and his wife Debbie who was completely unaware of any extra-marital relationship between her husband and Jennifer, and their children. His wife is very upset, and so too is their psychologically-fragile daughter Chloe, when she finds out that Jennifer has been her mental health nurse. In best journalistic fashion the podcasters claim that they’re not making insinuations that the discovery had such a drastic effect on Chloe, but they are really.

From Our Own Correspondent (BBC) I love Foreign Correspondent reports, and this weekly program brings BBC correspondents from all over the world. In the episode of 25 April 2026 Kate Adie introduces dispatches from Pakistan, the Turkey-Iran border, Kenya, Ukraine, and Paraguay. Why was Pakistan chosen as the host of peace talks between the US and Iran? It’s a question some in Islamabad have been asking themselves – and has fired-up a sense of national pride. Caroline Davies has watched on as the country gets ready for another round of negotiations. When the war in Iran began, there was a sense of jubilation among some Iranians, who had long-dreamed of the regime falling. Now that seems like a distant reality, and the mood is changing. BBC Persian’s Omid Montazeri has been on the Turkey-Iran border, where he has found attitudes towards the war are shifting. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, which remains the world’s worst nuclear accident. Jordan Dunbar visited the city of Slavutych in Northern Ukraine, which was purpose built to rehouse workers evacuated from the power plant city of Pripyat – and recounts his search for a DJ legend of the 1980s. In northern Kenya farmers and their families are suffering the effects of consecutive seasons of low rainfall. A new report estimates around 400,000 people are experiencing acute levels of hunger. Sammy Awami reports from Turkana, one of the worst affected areas. And the semi-arid lowlands of the Gran Chaco span an area of around 280 thousand miles across South America – more than half of that is in Argentina, a third in Paraguay and the remainder in Bolivia. It’s the region’s second-largest forest ecosystem after the Amazon – and is also home to a wide range of animal, bird and plant species – as Sara Wheeler discovered.

How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians Episode 4 The Balfour Declaration to the Arab Revolt. In the fourth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin (a female voice at last!), author and historian James Barr and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. (No Simon Sebag Montefiore this time!) At the end of 1917 the British troops took Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, just 67 words long, expressed support for a Jewish ‘national home’- but not a State. It was largely designed to attract Jewish support for Britain’s war aims. Britain was promising land that it didn’t own to a people who didn’t live there and the majority of Arabs rejected it outright. There was a series of riots during the interwar years because of the purchase of land by Zionists and the influx of Jewish migrants which was changing the demography of Palestine. The Peel Commission report of 1937, held after the Arab Revolt, and its subsequent White Paper partitioned the northern part of Palestine for a Jewish state (first time Britain had been talking about a ‘state’) and limited the amount of Jewish immigration, and the rest of Palestine was to be annexed to Transjordan, another British mandate- an early form of ‘two-state solution’. ‘Independence’ was promised to the Palestinians in ten years, but it was not really independence. The Jewish population saw the White Paper as a betrayal, but Britain saw the quelling of the Arab Revolt as a way of moving more soldiers back to Europe where they were needed in the fight against Germany.

The Book Show In Episode 4: Hamnet:Love Grief and Motherhood Dominic and Tabby discussed Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and the film. I was surprised by how much Dominic enjoyed the book, which he gave a 9/10 (although he wasn’t so impressed with the film, to which he gave 6/10). Tabitha loved it too, giving the book 10/10 and 8.5/10 to the film. I was struck again, hearing them read extracts from the book, how beautifully written it is.

The Rest is History We were watching The Irish Civil War 3-part series on SBS before it disappeared, I realized that I hadn’t finished listening to the Rest is History series on the Irish Civil War. Episode 581 The Irish Civil War: The Killing of Michael Collins (Part 2) features historian and friend of the podcast Ronan McGreevy. The fighting in Four Courts lasted three days, culminating in the Public Record Office being blown up, thus destroying records going back centuries. The fight moved into the streets outside the GPO. There were more anti-Treaty supporters than Free-State supporters in the IRA, but the Free State had the support and the weaponry of the British government. At the June election in 1922 the anti-Treatys only got 20% of the votes. People just wanted peace. The National army began recruiting heavily, and the Irregulars (i.e. the anti-Treaty IRA) were beaten, so they decided to embark on a guerilla campaign. Collins travelled to Cork, his home county, and visited friends and his brother and spent some time at the pub. Returning back from the pub, they traversed the same route – something you never do in a guerilla war. Did it matter that Michael Collins was killed? He was young, and would have brought dynamism to the Free State. Now it turns nasty with tit-for-tat killings, the expulsion of Protestants, and the sacking of the Big Houses. The Irish Civil War only lasted 11 months and 1400 were killed- and was less damaging that the other civil wars in Europe at the time. It the end, it just petered out, but the IRA didn’t go away- as we know.

How Did We Get Here? (BBC) Israel and the Palestinians 1: From Earliest Times to the Romans This is a 10 part series presented by Jonny Dymond. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University, and historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’. I was expecting rather more divergence between them, but they tended to agree. The first five books of the Old Testament were set in the Bronze Age around 3000 BCE. ‘The Land’ comprised Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, west of the River Jordan, up to Egypt. They were a People, rather than a Place, and there were other Semitic people there too. The first five books do contain history, but the history serves a theological purpose. By the time we reach the Iron Age, history and archaeology are coming together. King David ruled in 1000 BCE, but there is little archaelogical evidence of a huge temple. There were mixed tribes there, but there was no stark difference between the Jews and others. The Biblical texts talking about Yahweh having a wife were expunged. During Roman times, the right to rule over ‘the land’ was farmed out to client Kings e.g. Herod. In 66CE there was a Jewish riot, and Jerusalem was besieged. In 70CE Titus invaded and destroyed the temple and enslaved the Jewish people. The Siege of Masada in 72 and 73CE was the last gasp of the first Jewish-Roman wars. Now that there was no temple, the Torah became a type of portable temple, and by now they were ‘Jews’ rather ‘Judeans’ (i.e. a geographical identity). However, the early Christians escaped and the Christian community split into two streams, the first headed by James and dominated by Jesus’ family, and the second headed by Paul. In 130-135 CE there was another rebellion against Hadrian, and Judea was renamed Palestine.

Israel and the Palestinians 2: From the Muslim Conquest to the Nineteenth Century. This episode spans the 7th-19th centuries, with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’, and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. By 7th century and the spread of Christendom , Jerusalem had become a pilgrimage site by Christian tourists. Early Islam turned to Jerusalem (in fact, during prayer they literally turned to Jerusalem rather than Mecca) and Muhammed was said to have ascended from the Temple Mount, but actually he never physically went there. Jerusalem fell to the Arabs in 638 and they were welcomed by both Jews and Christians as they brought relief from the taxation and oppression of the Byzantium rulers. There was no sense of contradiction in embracing the Arabs, because the Arabs did not attempt to suppress the Jewish or Christian religions. Meanwhile, back in Europe, in 1095 Pope Ruban believed that the Christian shrines were in danger. 100,000 men answered the call and although Muslims were the target, there was a massacre of ‘infidels’ including Jews. The Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and killed everyone, but by this time there were only 12,000 crusaders. Saladin fought back and established rule over Greater Syria. The Jews always wanted to return to Zion, but they were in no position to do so because of persecution in Christian countries. In 1517 Selim the Grim conquered the Mamluk Sultanate. Originally Selim was going after the Persians, but then he changed direction and went for the Mamluks instead. There was no sense of ‘Palestine’ at the moment – clan, or city, or religious identity- but not a nation. The Ottomans saw Palestine as being part of Syria, and the ‘Holy Land’ contained Jews and different Christian sects. Suleiman the Magnificent specified that the Jews had to pray in a specified area, and this became the ‘Wall’.

Rear Vision (ABC) Pete Hegseth- war monger or true believer? (broadcast 28 March 2026) Almost as bad as seeing Donald Trump on the war is to see his Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth. I refuse to call him ‘Secretary of War’ because only Congress can change the name of a department. Hegseth was raised in Minnesota and attended Princeton university where he signed up for the Reserve Officers Training Corp. After graduating he worked briefly on Wall Street, before being deployed by the National Guard to Cuba, then Iraq. He was highly critical of the army and the ‘restrictions’ that were imposed on them in both deployments. He returned to New York, and feeling disoriented and lost, he began working with veterans’ organizations: Vets for Freedom and later Concerned Veterans for America, but in both positions there were reports of bullying, rorting and drunkenness. He then worked for Fox News. But then he found God and joined an extreme evangelical group the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – I’m not sure which is worse really. The guests on this program include Dave Philipps, Military reporter for the New York Times; Jane Mayer, investigative journalist at The New Yorker Magazine; Missy Ryan, Staff Writer at The Atlantic covering national security, foreign policy and defence and Logan Davis, investigative journalist who grew up in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.