This week's mystery caller skulks in dense cover near mudflats and marshes all over mainland Australia – the colourful Buff-banded Rail.

The Right Reverend Susan Bell is the 12th Bishop of Niagara in Canada and is in Australia to give the Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture at the University of Melbourne's Trinity College. She will be talking about what we can learn about managing polarisation from the 17th century priest and poet George Herbert.

Guest: The Right Reverend Susan Bell, 12th Bishop of Niagara

While the bagpipes are the national instrument of Scotland, how global is their history? The first written account of someone playing the bagpipes was Nero in the first century - was he playing them while Rome burned? How do you explain the absence of she-pipers in their history? And who were the pipers responsible for the first case of Scottish Nationalist terrorism in the 1940s.

Guest: Richard McLauchlan, author of The Bagpipes: A Cultural History (Hurst)

Women competing at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September will have to undergo an SRY gene test before competing. But the professor that discovered the relevant gene has concerns that thew policy is misguided.

Guest: Professor Andrew Sinclair, Deputy Director of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and Professorial Fellow, translational Genomics

Article in The Conversation: World Athletics' mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know - I discovered the relevant gene in 1990

Australian Uyghurs are taking Kmart to court, in a bid to determine whether Kmart engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct around the use of forced labour of Uyghers by some of its clothing suppliers in China. This court action comes just weeks after eight young men from Mali, forced into slavery as children by cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, had their class action suit dismissed against major chocolate manufacturers, including Mars and Nestle.

Guest: Fiona David, CEO and Founder of Fair Futures 

Links:

Kmart denies sourcing any products from factories linked to forced labour in China 

Australian Uyghurs file legal action

For almost twenty years under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch carried out investigations in 100 countries to uncover and expose human rights abuses.

From the genocide in Rwanda in the mid 1990s, through to China’s abuses against the Uighurs and Russia’s war in Ukraine, Human Rights Watch has been at the frontline of efforts to call out and, where possible, bring an end to the actions of authoritarian regimes.

GUEST:

Kenneth Roth Lawyer and human rights advocate and Executive Director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 until 2022.

Righting Wrongs - Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments.

https://www.penguin.com.au/books/righting-wrongs-9780241806913

Can you guess this week's tweeter?

How personal tragedy drove John Simpson to establish a foundation that aims to better connect urban and rural Australia. 

GUEST: 

John Simpson AM Deputy Chancellor Monash University

The socks that fell up not down, Stackhats and the kitchen knives that were always sharp.

Those are just a few examples from what is a quintessential list of Australian made products, designs and campaigns that have been brought together in a new book called What A Ripper - 60 Everyday Objects That Shaped Australia. 

GUEST:

Tim Ross Author, broadcaster, architecture enthusiast and design nerd.

2025 is UNESCO's International Year of Quantum Science and Technology and so the annual Marie Curie lecture series is being given by two women who have already made their mark in the world of quantum physics in spintronics and quantum computing. While Marie Curie was usually the only woman in a room of physicists, these two physicists report that the percentage of women in their field remains stubbornly low.

Guests: Dr Danielle Holmes, Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at UNSW and Dr Sol Jacobsen is Group Leader at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU