Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to change the world’s maps. It encourages use of the Equal Earth Map rather than the Mercator, which was designed more than 450 years ago to help sailors navigate. But flattening a globe onto a map comes with distortions. On Mercator, the landmasses appear larger further from the equator, making Greenland appear comparable in size to Africa, when Africa is actually about fourteen times larger.

The "Correct the Map" campaign was led by Togo on behalf of the African Group  to promote “equitable representation of the world's regions, particularly Africa”. 164 countries voted in favour of the resolution, the United States voted against it, and six abstained.

Guest: Professor Robert Dussey, Togo’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Many of the online scams that target Australians and people across the world have come from Cambodian scam centres, and the enormous scale of the illegal industry is difficult to fathom. While the Cambodian government has shut centres down, they are the tip of the iceberg of the country's "scam-state architecture", which is now "recognised as one of the world's most consequential criminal-political systems". 

Guest: Jacob Sims, a leading expert on transnational crime and human rights in Southeast Asia, and columnist for The Diplomat. Jacob is author of the National Democratic Institute report and INCA digital publication “Scam State Architecture -- Disruption, Adaptation, and the Enduring Threat of Cambodia's State-crime”.

“Will the Albanese government's faltering steps towards national leadership on housing turn into a confident stride or stagger to a halt?”

That’s the question asked in a new book by Matt Lloyd-Cape titled Our Place: How to Solve the Housing Crisis and Rebuild the Australian Dream, and it’s described as “An evidence-based guide... from a leading policy expert”.

Guest: Matt Lloyd-Cape is Senior Research Fellow at Per Capita and was the founding director of the Centre for Equitable Housing.

Michael Robotham grew up in small towns in regional New South Wales before securing a coveted cadetship with Fairfax Media in 1979, aged 17. 

After cutting his teeth covering crime and courts for afternoon newspapers he made the jump to London's Fleet Street in the mid-1980s. 

The end of the Cold War provided opportunities to access previously unavailable Russian archives and he was the first Western journalist to see inside the Moscow State Archives containing Romanov letters, Stalin's Hitler file and accounts of the Chernobyl disaster.

After a stint as a celebrity ghostwriter Michael returned to Australia and has published 20 crime thrillers. He is a two-time winner of the Crime Writer's Association’s Golden Dagger award and described by Stephen King as 'an absolute master'.

This week's mystery caller inhabits a variety of wet habitats right across Australia – the White-faced Heron

Children's author Mem Fox grew up the daughter of missionaries in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. 

She attended the local school as the only white child before local authorities forced her parents to enrol her in a school for white children.

After a stint at drama school in London during the swinging 1960s Mem returned to Australia where she re-trained as a teacher.

Her book Possum Magic was published in 1983 and has now sold over 5 million copies, it came it at number 76 in Radio National's 2025 poll poll of the Top 100 Books of the 21st century. 

In a small cell in a Poissy Central Prison, just outside Paris, is a 76-year-old man serving multiple life sentences for terrorist acts.

The man is Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, one of the world's first international terrorists and perpetrator of horrific attacks carried out in the 1970s and 80s which claimed hundreds of lives.

He was a tabloid star and provided a template for later terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the IRA. 

Guest: Joby Warrick, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Jackal: the rise and fall of Carlos, the world’s first super terrorist

Turi King is a superstar in the world of genetics, uncovering the identity of Richard III's body and analysing the Hitler's DNA. But in her latest book she shares the human stories that reflect the important role that DNA has come to play in the world, and where it might take humanity in the future.

Guest: Professor Turi King, Director of the Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath and author of The Secrets of our DNA:How Genetics has Changed the World

For a lot of the 20th century, a commonly cited estimate said there were around 300,000 Indigenous people living across Australia prior to invasion. But new research says the Aboriginal population was  “more likely 2–3 million” in 1788. 

Another recent study on the 1789 smallpox epidemic was “catastrophic to traditional Indigenous lifeways in the southeast”. 

Guests:  Dr Shane Ingrey, a researcher at UNSW and Research Manager at the Gujaga Foundation and Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University. 

A new exhibition at Melbourne’s National Communication Museum celebrates the personal computer, and the people who tinkered with, hacked and stretched computers and code into the everyday technology we now take for granted.

'Radical Computing' takes us from computers entering our homes in the 1970s, through Australia’s early rave and hacker underground, to software and ideas that were once genuinely groundbreaking.

Guest: Melanie Huang Buntine, designer, technologist and guest curator of the Radical Computing Exhibition