ABC Rewind

Is he a baronet or a butcher from Wagga Wagga? Can he claim the estate of an English aristocrat thought to be lost at sea?

Throughout the 1870s, this question attracted global attention, and was the subject of one of the longest, most sensational court cases Britain had ever seen. 

Guests: 

Robyn Annear (author) The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant

Zadie Smith (author) The Fraud

Claire Campbell (former) Wagga Wagga head librarian and Tichborne aficionado

Credits: 

• Narrator - Richard Roxburgh
• Producer - Lyn Gallacher
• Sound engineer - Angie Grant
• Script Editors - Kirsti Melville & Tom Wright
• Music - Matthew Crawford
• Artwork - Lachlan Conn

One of Australia’s craftiest counterfeiters forges two million dollars in his suburban basement in the 1950s. Richard Roxburgh, renowned for playing shady characters on screen, tells the story of Robert Baudin and his brazen ability to make fake money.

After help from the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, the people of Rongelap atoll, in the Marshall Islands, have a new, safer place to live. But at what cost? What does the future hold for them? And will they ever be able to go home? 

Credits:

• Writer, producer, host: James Nokise
• Writer, script editor: Sophie Townsend
• Writer, producer: Justin Gregory
• Head ABC Radio Australia: Justine Kelly
• Executive Editor Audio RNZ: Tim Watkin
• Content Director ABC Radio Australia: Faleagafulu Inga Stünzner
• RNZ Production Coordinator: Briana Juretich
• ABC Production Manager: Alison Barclay
• Audio engineer RNZ: Rangi Powick
• Design RNZ: Dexter Edwards
• Editorial Policies advisor ABC: Tiger Webb

It’s July 1985, and public anger is at its peak in New Zealand, as the hunt begins for those responsible for bombing the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. Shockwaves ripple around the globe once it’s discovered who is behind the attack.

By 1985, nearly four decades after the US nuclear testing in the Pacific's Marshall Islands,  advocate Jeton Anjain has had enough. He decides to act to save his people of Rongelap Atoll. And with the help of some well-connected friends, he pulls off one of the great humanitarian feats of the 20th century.

In the days following the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear detonation, the people of Rongelap, in the Marshall Islands,  desperately need help.  But when that help arrived, it came with something they didn’t expect and never agreed to.

The Atomic age arrives in the Marshall Islands as the US turns the region into a nuclear testing ground. But after one massive detonation, nothing will ever be the same for the people of Rongelap Atoll.

The crew of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior should have felt safe and welcome when they arrived in Auckland, New Zealand in July 1985. Instead they became the target of a violent attack, which led one person dead. But why – what is the twisted back-story to these events, which led to spies, secrets and bombs?  

Miyakatsu Koike was a mild-mannered Japanese bank official who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was working in Surabaya in Indonesia when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.

Koike was arrested by the Dutch East Indies authorities and sent to Loveday detention camp in South Australia where he spent four long years behind the wire.

Italian anarchist Francesco Fantin fled Mussolini's Italy for the freedom of the Queensland cane-fields, only to find himself locked up in a detention camp in wartime Australia, surrounded by his political enemies.