Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Behind the Met Gala's red carpet "Fashion is Art" theme this year is a more nuanced interpretation of how fashion and art collide. The Met's Costume Institute has a new exhibit called Costume Art, which pairs nearly 400 historical and contemporary garments with paintings, sculptures and artefacts from across the museum's 5,000-year collection.

Guest: Dr Llewellyn Negrin Adjunct Senior Researcher at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Tasmania

The heroic accounts of Australian Army Nursing Sisters Margaret Anderson and Vera Torney who survived the perilous evacuation of Singapore in 1942.

In 2012, a group of writers organised a workshop in Junee Correctional Centre with funding from the South Coast Writers Centre. The collection of writing by inmates was published in a volume called Dreaming Inside: Voices from the Junee Correctional Centre. Since then, the project - now known as Ngana Barangarai (or ‘Black Wallaby’) has grown significantly, with Aunty Barbara Nicholson at the helm as project director. Guests: Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson, Wadi Wadi elder and project director, and Luke Patterson, Gamilaroi poet, educator and musician.

In her new book Being Reasonable: the case for a misunderstood virtue, Professor Krista Lawlor describes reasonableness as 'one of the essential fluids in our social machine'.

The release of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after eight months in jail has prompted debate over whether Thailand's long-dominant 'Thaksin era' has finally come to an end.

A painting looted by the Nazis has been discovered hanging in the home of a Dutch SS-Commander's descendants. Portrait of a Young Girl, a modernist painting by Dutch artist Toon Kelder was recovered thanks to the work of art detective Arthur Brand, known as the 'Indiana Jones of the art world'.

Dancing was always part of Frances Rings' childhood, helping her make sense of the world around her in a small country town. But when, at just 17, she boarded a bus to Sydney to study at NAISDA Dance College, Frances discovered dance could be more than movement — it could be a way of carrying culture, ceremony and storytelling, and a deeper connection to her identity.

Guest: Frances Rings, Artistic Director and co-CEO of Bangarra Dance Theatre

A growing body of research suggests that experiencing awe has positive effects for our sense of wellbeing - an idea that might make intuitive sense, but which is being increasingly supported by empirical research in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Guest: Dr Nikki-Anne Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the UNSW Australian Ageing Futures Institute and Conjoint Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia. 

How did the formative experiences, personality traits, world views and leadership styles of Australia's last seven Prime Ministers influence the instability of Australian politics in the last quarter century? Guest: Paul Strangio, author of The Alchemy of Leadership: Seven Australian Prime Ministers in a Turbulent Twenty-First Century, emeritus professor of politics at Monash University.

Proponents of direct action say it’s part of democratic life. It’s detractors say it's a threat to safety, a violation of majority rule and rule of law. What can the history of direct action tell us about its place in our democracy today? Guest: Sean Scalmer, professor of history at the University of Melbourne