ABC Rewind

It might surprise you to learn that until 1997, a man could go to jail for up to 21 years for having sex with another man in Australia.

Acoustic Views by Bill Fontana and produced for radio by Andrew McLennan was a sound sculpture realized through eight giant speakers on the roof of the Art Gallery of New South Wales during the 1988 Sydney Biennale. Bill Fontana's idea was to associate sounds with the distant places that could be viewed from the art gallery, "to create a situation in which visitors to the Art Gallery could hear as far as they could see" across the city of Sydney.

It’s a sculptural relocation of ambient sounds from Audley in the Royal National Park south of Sydney, the Harbour Bridge, Taronga Zoo, Bondi Beach, Circular Quay, Central Railway, the GPO bell tower, the Belfry of St. Mary’s Cathedral, the trading floor of the Sydney Stock Exchange and from the last remaining bell-buoy on the harbour.

Imaging the Forest by Andrew McLennan. A journey through Australian forests. From the Nullarbor Plain to the Arctic Beech Forests of the New England National Park, from Maralinga to Timber Town, surprising acoustic images of the forest emerge.

Meanwhile on the shifting sands of the Central Australian Desert, left sterile from atomic testing, eerie whistling sounds disturb the night air. Somewhere on the North Coast of NSW a grassfire explodes into a forest blaze and the bullock team that snigged the old forest giants is replaced by mechanical fellers. The axe is relegated to Royal Easter showmanship, while the chainsaw becomes an instrument of decimation.

Colleagues called him maestro, visionary, experimenter, radio magic man. To long-time close friend, John Bell, he was “Merry Andrew”.

This is the story of an unsung legend in Australian broadcasting and radio as you may not have heard it.

Andrew McLennan's friends and collaborators speak up.

When Penny Bristol Jones inherited a battered trunk full of family objects, she uncovered a rich wartime history in the collection of letters written by her great grandmother Edie Digby, whose husband and two sons were away fighting in World War One

Journalist Fiona Gruber goes on a very personal journey in the footsteps of her great grandfather, Victorian music hall comedian Walter Groves, to uncover his career and his hidden link with the greatest comedian of them all, Charlie Chaplin.

In 1768 when James Cook sailed from Tahiti looking for the great southern land, Tupaia, a traditional Polynesia navigator was on board.

His knowledge proved invaluable to Cook and his sailing skills astounded the crew. What role did Tupaia actually play in the voyage and why haven't we heard heard about him?

The story of how the traditional custodians of Ooldea got their sacred water soak back and the healing of the land.