AWAYE! - Separate stories podcast

Despite his passion for music, blues muso Kevin Starkey has written and performed sparingly over the past 30 years. His debut album ranges over spoken word, jive swing, country-rock and heavy blues.

Aboriginal English terms like country, deadly and gammon are part of the wider Australian vernacular. The term 'country' encodes cultural knowledge and also has a spiritual and philosophical dimension - the relationality of people to a certain place.

Tia Gostelow has graduated with flying colours from Triple J's music academy for unsigned new artists, Unearthed High. A 17-year-old high school student and champion busker from Mackay in north Queensland, Tia won the competition's Indigenous initiative with her song 'State of Art'.

The characters in Tara June Winch's latest book After The Carnage appear to be trapped in some kind of purgatory between the mundane and the extraordinary. Rather than trying to fulfil the promise of her award-winning debut novel Swallow The Air, Tara June has been on a global quest - finding her story among the stories of others.

In what she says was an uncorrected proof from her forthcoming memoir the world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic describes Aboriginal people as terrible-looking "dinosaurs" who are "strange and different". We unpack the social media storm with an activist, a curator and a performance artist who spent two weeks in a shed with Abramovic.

When the Gurindji walked off Wave Hill station their demands were simple: equal wages, not meagre rations. The fight escalated into the first Aboriginal land claim. Led by head stockman Vincent Lingiari, the strike buoyed the Aboriginal rights movement down south and spurred activism for a generation. A unionist, a historian and an artist reflect on the meaning of Wave Hill.

The film Zach's Ceremony is a feature length documentary about a traditional Aboriginal rite of passage - initiation.

In the far south-west of New South Wales we meet a team of environmental rangers who are trying to bring country back to life by coaxing animal populations back, constructing 'fish hotels' to keep the fry safe from predators and protecting cultural heritage sites.

A serious painting for serious times is how the judges describe the Telstra Award winning artwork Tribal Abduction by Harold Thomas - better known as a landscape painter and the man who designed the Aboriginal flag.

Deborah Cheetham wrote Pecan Summer in the hope that it would bring operatic Aboriginal voices forward. "If you build it, they will come" she said at the time. Her gamble paid off.