Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

While there has been greater recognition of the challenges faced by women during their service, women veterans report being “under-recognised, under-represented, and routinely excluded” from support organisations. 

This week's mystery caller hunts insects in Tasmanian woodland, farmland and heath – the Dusky Robin.

Yann Martel might have found fame and fortune when his novel Life of Pi won the Booker Prize in 2002, but the year that shaped his path as a writer came much earlier. After a nomadic childhood spent traversing the world, ricocheting between cultures and languages, it was in a moment of stillness in a Paris apartment that Martel found the inspiration and confidence to write the story that launched his career.

Guest: Author Yann Martel, who is visiting Australia in May to introduce his new novel, Son of Nobody. 

From ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, a new book explains why pretentious and punctilious people have always annoyed us.

“Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake” explores the history of typos across five centuries. 

Vasili Mitrokhin was sent to work in the KGB archives after failing as an intelligence operative. His disgust with the Soviet spy agency led him to steal troves of secrets and share them with the West. 

Frida Kahlo’s works are so revered in Mexico that, in 1984, they were declared “artistic monuments” — protected as national treasures by the Mexican government.

But now a major group of Kahlo self-portraits, part of the world-famous Gelman Collection, is at the centre of a dispute between Mexico’s art establishment and the Spanish bank now managing the paintings.

The fight is exposing the opaque financial deals and ownership arrangements that have surrounded the collection for decades.

Guest: Ximena Apisdorf, curator and cultural analyst based in Mexico City. 

When the billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, he was billed as its ‘saviour’, and for a while, it seemed like he was. But across his tenure, the masthead that broke the Watergate scandal has been in financial and reputational decline. In The New York Review of Books, ex-managing editor of The Post Robert G. Kaiser says that a directive from Bezos to not endorse Kamala Harris before the 2024 election was one of the factors that signalled a serious change at the masthead, and which dealt it "a great blow".

This week, Pakistan’s Prime Minister crossed the Middle East, meeting with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Türkiye about a second round of peace talks between Iran and the US. Why was regional player the United Arab Emirates left off the guest list?

This week's common, conspicuous and colourful caller inhabits the east and the south-east – the Crimson Rosella.