Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

On the final day of the Melbourne Writers festival 2024, Leslie Jamison tells us about her unflinching memoir Splinters.  Exploring motherhood, art and new love, she deploys the powerful thinking, scorching honesty and magnetic prose that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics.

Paul Pritchard suffered a catastrophic accident while rock climbing in Tasmania 26 years ago.

When patients start unexpectedly dying at a regional hospital, nurse Toni Hoffman takes a big risk to blow the whistle on a negligent surgeon. But years later, it's still unclear why she was ignored for so long. 

Can you identify this week's tweeter? 

Marco Renai's work mentoring at risk young men has seen him recognised as Queensland’s Australian of the Year 2024. His secondary school provides free meals, emotional support and education to boys who are struggling to engage in mainstream schools.

As conflicts rage on across the globe, we’re seeing an alarming number of unchecked innovations in modern warfare. Should we be concerned that it isn't always a human finger on the trigger?  This week at the Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems experts came together to assess the need for tighter constraints.

Drawing from 8 years working in education, interviews with dealers, users, police, ex students and teachers Author Murray Middleton paints a vivid picture of Melbourne’s inner west. No Church in the Wild is the latest novel by the award-winning author and lauded chronicler of Australian life.

In 2017 Grace Karskens stumbled across an extraordinary manuscript: a handwritten list created in 1829 of 178 Aboriginal place names for Dyarubbin and Ganangdayi, also known as the Hawkesbury and Macdonald Rivers in New South Wales. A team of Darug researchers, educators, linguists, artists, geologists and archaeologists have successfully relocated many of these names and produced a Story Map.

Frogs are often considered 'canaries in the coalmine' for ecosystems. In winter of 2021, Australia's frogs began dying in alarmingly high numbers. In a world first, new research has found rodenticide in frogs. The research was the culmination of a large citizen science project.

Kathy Jackson was once heralded as a revolutionary who shone a bright spotlight on union corruption but she too was later found to be a fraudster who had misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars in union members' money. So who was the man responsible for blowing the whistle on her? 

Reporter Annika Blau investigates.