Australia On This Day

REPEAT: Born in 1900, Charles Shaw grew up in poverty, was orphaned at age 14 and worked more tough jobs than he could count over the next two decades before settling into a career as a newspaper journalist and columnist for the Bulletin. On this day in 1952, Hollywood bought Charles's latest novel — and it'd become a movie classic. Though flush with case, the orphan-turned-swaggie-turned-reporter-turned-author kept working and writing, creating a hardboiled noir series that was published and praised all over the world.

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REPEAT: On this day in 1968, geologist Jim Bowler found the bones of an Aboriginal woman who'd died and been ritually cremated and buried more than 40,000 years ago. Mungo Lady — as she became known — and Jim's next discovery — known as Mungo Man — rewrote our history books. More than half a lifetime later, Jim Bowler joins us to recall those discoveries, how they changed our understanding of Australia and their ongoing relevance.

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REPEAT: Shonky Melbourne bookie Don McLeod fleeced Flemington punters through a scam known as scaling. When his luck ran out and he felt the full fury of a mob of mug punters, the shock waves were felt all the way to the Victorian state parliament.

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REPEAT: On this day in 1940, a bullet-ridden body was found in a dark alley in Sydney's Surry Hills. The reign of razor-gangster William Smiley had come to a bloody end. But which of his many enemies had killed him?

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REPEAT: At the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, champion swimmer Fanny Durack became the first Australian woman to win a gold medal. But Fanny nearly didn't get there because her very presence at the games had been staunchly opposed by an influential Sydney feminist and by powerful Australian swimming and Olympic bigwigs.

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REPEAT: Back when the Village People's Can't Stop The Music was top of the charts and AC/DC's Back In Black was about to be released, Australian rock fans were hanging out for the start of FM radio that'd cater to their tastes. The race was on between 2MMM, 2Day FM and 2JJJ in Sydney, and 3EON FM and Fox FM in Melbourne. But who'd hit the airwaves first? And who'd be delayed for three weeks?

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REPEAT: After much preparation, expenditure and near catastrophe, the rival cities of Sydney and Melbourne are as last connected by telephone — but for first-day callers there are some things you're not allowed to say.

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REPEAT: Aboriginal boxer Dave Sands was a household name in the late 1940s and early 1950s, holding three Australian titles — and wearing the Empire Middleweight Crown. But tragedy intervened as this champion prepared his run at a world title.

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REPEAT: On this day in 1965, wireless pioneer Sir Ernest Fisk died in his Sydney home. This eccentric genius left a colourful legacy, having not only introduced radio broadcasting to Australia but having also proposed we might use it to communicate with the dead.

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REPEAT: This was a crime against a child that shocked a nation. Yet the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne was also the sensational story that young media proprietor Rupert Murdoch needed to make his acquisition of Sydney's Daily Mirror a success — just as his father Keith Murdoch had bolstered his newspaper career 40 years earlier in Melbourne by capitalising on a "good murder story" where the victim was a child.

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