Background Briefing (ABC) Progressives here in Australia feared for the effects on the availability of abortion after Brett Kavanagh’s ascension to the Supreme Court. But we shouldn’t be too smug about the provision of abortion here in Australia. At the time of this recording, abortion was still illegal in Queensland under a 119 year old law (it has since changed), and the provision of late term abortion is very difficult to access. This podcast looks at the Marie Stopes provider in Maroondah, known as The Clinic of Last Resort for women all over Australia seeking a late surgical abortion.
Rear Vision (ABC) In celebration of Armistice Day, Rear Vision put out an excellent episode The Centenary of Armistice: Australia and World War I. There’s been so much about WWI and this encapsulates Australia’s war both overseas and domestically in just half an hour. Features Robert Bollard, Rae Francis from ANU and Meleah Hampton from AWM. So if you want to listen to just one podcast about the war- this could be it!
I recently read Laura Spinney’s book on the influenza epidemic and I saved Rear Vision’s The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. The broadcast is actually from 2009, and it draws quite heavily on Geoffrey Rice’s book ‘Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand’.
History Today And other podcast about the influenza epidemic, this time from History Today. The Spanish Flu pandemic features author Catharine Arnold, whose book Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History takes a more biographical approach to the spread of disease, particularly in Britain
Revolutions Podcast. Episode 9.10 Chickens Coming Home to Roost is a bit of a stop-and-take-a-look-back type of episode. The presenter Mike Duncan was on a book tour so in his absence, he reads an essay that he wrote in grad school on the fall of the Porfirio Diaz’s long regime. I enjoyed this episode because, when you’re listening to something as elongated as this, you wonder if you have forgotten important things along the way. It’s reassuring to find that I haven’t.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 