Days Like These

Karni Liddell was born in Rockhampton with a neuro-muscular wasting disease. Her parents were told she'd never crawl, walk or even live past her teenage years.

Days Like These is back with new host Farz Edraki. Strap in for a brand new season of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

As Brenden Newton grows up along Sydney’s Northern Beaches in the 1990s, bodyboarding reigns supreme.

He loves the physicality, how it brings him into such close contact with the water. And after a fateful trip to Tahiti, he decides to try going pro in the sport.

But just as his career takes off, strange thoughts surface over and over, threatening to engulf his mind and his body.

And Brenden has to re-build his life before taking on the biggest wave he’s ever encountered.

The day Gough Whitlam is dismissed from office, in November of 1975, Catherine is sitting in the uni library when she hears the news over the loudspeaker. She’s incredulous, incensed.

She decides it’s time to formally join the Labor party and, shortly after, Catherine herself is elected as a local member in a harbor-side Sydney council. 

And it’s there, in the busy, chaotic world of local government, that Catherine learns how to govern, how to compromise, and how to balance her politics and personal life.

Craig was a happy go lucky 19 year old when an accident changes his life forever.

Forced to pay off a debt he decides to go work as a miner in Western Australia.

What was a temporary gig to get cash becomes a ten year career avoiding responsibility, danger and exhaustion.

Caroline Winter had a perfectly lovely life with her husband, until the day it all changed.

Despite everything she tried, she just couldn’t move forward, so she moved sideways instead.

This is a story of loss, loneliness and the ways we keep going.

Konrad has dedicated his life to studying the history of the Jewish people.

In the 1980s, he’s invited to work with an East German historian to complete his magnum opus, making frequent trips behind the Berlin Wall and back again.

But little does Konrad know that while he is researching in East Germany, East Germany is researching him, too.

Chris Ryan grew up in India in the 1980s, so despite being born in Australia, the pop culture of the time was so exotic she could hardly believe it was real. 

Moving countries is hard, you leave behind a lot and making new friends is hard. This was the challenge for nine-year-old Chris, she felt like an outsider even though she looked like she fitted in just fine. 

To tackle her problems and make some friends she took some drastic and hilarious measures that would also pay off when she became a grown-up. 

It's 1997 and friends Richard and Steve are climbing to the peak of Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. They're carrying 40 kilos of climbing gear and food. But when the climb takes a dangerous turn, much is lost.

Then, almost 25 years later, a backpack turns up on Mount Cook. Inside, there's a camera with the film intact, memories long-buried make their way back to the surface once more.

Alan Hale makes a teenage escape from Launceston when he gets work at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. It's the mid 1960s and Taronga's chief benefactor, Sir Edward Hallstrom, is pouring much of his fortune into acquiring new and exotic animals to add to zoo's collection.

Alan is apprenticed to the Head Keeper for monkeys and he's charged with cleaning out the cages each morning. He loves the zoo and his job, until he's outwitted by a family of thirty macaque monkeys who disappear over the zoo's walls and into the suburbs of Sydney.