ABC Rewind

The story of one of history’s most mysterious flags - the Jolly Roger. It’s the pirate flag that defined one of the world’s greatest criminal enterprises and it helps us to understand how the high seas transformed from lawlessness to order

The story of the  diamond so infused with underhand deeds and deadly acts that it was thought to curse any male ruler who wore it..

The Carbolic Smoke Ball was touted as a miracle cure for all kinds of illnesses that were rife in the 1890s. It never actually cured anything, but what it did do was change the law forever.

The humble potato is not just a lump of carbohydrate: it tells the story of how food, so essential to life, is also central to politics. This is the story of how the potato became a weapon.

The story of briefcase that almost killed Hitler in 1944, how it was stopped only by a misplaced table leg, and the fate of the man at the heart of the assassination plot. 

In the 1980s & '90s, an influx of artists and creative types changed the face of Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, in inner-city Fitzroy. What was once a humble industrial shopping strip transformed into a bustling hive of creativity, full of cafes, bars, art and music.

A chance discovery of a bag of old photographs leads two Asian-Australian artists, Mayu Kanamori and William Yang, to explore their histories.

In the early years of the twentieth century thousands of poor Chinese workers crossed the seas to a tiny dot in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Christmas Island was rich in phosphate, and when a British owned mine company set up on the island it needed workers. They came to seek their fortune and instead struck tragedy, as most of these men would never return home to China.

In 1824 Hamilton Hume and William Hovell with 6 convicts began an expedition south-west of Sydney into the unknown. Governor Brisbane wanted to find an inland route from Sydney all the way to Bass Strait.

The country however was neither unknown nor uninhabited. Hamilton Hume's friendship with and assistance from local Aboriginal groups throughout the journey enabled the opening up of some of the most pristine land in New South Wales and Victoria

The D-Day landings in 1944 involved a lot of planning, deception, and in one case as comedic as it was dangerous, a bloke from Perth. An outlandish wartime caper that ended up on the silver screen.