Truth Be Told Podcast - 3 Brothers Production

On the morning of the 14th of February 2004, Valentine's Day, a seventeen year old Aboriginal kid named Thomas Hickey, everyone called him TJ, came off his bike on Phillip Street in Waterloo, inner Sydney, and was impaled on a metal fence. A police vehicle was nearby. He was taken to hospital. He died early the next morning.
He was seventeen years old.
What happened between TJ riding his bike and ending up on that fence has never been fully resolved. Whether police were pursuing him, whether their vehicle made contact with his bike, whether the four officers involved told the same coordinated story before any of them put a word on paper, these questions went into a coronial inquest and came out the other side without the answers his family deserved.
This episode tells the full story of TJ Hickey, the community he came from, and the nine hours of civil unrest that followed his death on the streets of Redfern. We talk about the Block, what it actually was and what it meant to Sydney's Aboriginal community, and the years of intensive police pressure the neighbourhood had been living under before that February morning.
We talk about the internal police profile updated three days before TJ's death. The four officers who wrote their statements simultaneously in the same room. The driver who said nothing under oath, backed publicly by his own Police Commissioner before any inquest had started. The Premier and the Prime Minister who both declared their support for police before a single finding had been made.
And we talk about Gail Hickey, TJ's mother, who has come back to that fence on Phillip Street every year for more than twenty years, still asking the question nobody in power has been willing to properly answer.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.
 
 
 

Episode 23: The Bathurst War and Windradyne's Resistance
In August 1824, a Wiradjuri leader named Windradyne walked into Parramatta for an annual public gathering. On his head he wore a piece of paper attached to his hat, with two words written on it in English.
Peace. Windradyne.
He had been declared an outlaw. There was a reward on his head. He had spent months at the centre of one of the most sustained campaigns of Aboriginal resistance in the history of New South Wales, while the colonial government responded with soldiers, martial law, and orders to shoot Aboriginal people on sight across an enormous stretch of Wiradjuri country west of the Blue Mountains. And here he was, walking into the colony's biggest public gathering, on his own terms, with his name and the word peace on his hat.
This episode tells the full story of the Bathurst War, the armed conflict between the Wiradjuri nation and British colonisers that tore through the districts around Bathurst from the early 1820s, and of Windradyne, the man at the centre of it. We talk about what was actually happening to Wiradjuri country in those years, the rapid seizure of river flats, the destruction of food sources, the poisonings, and the organised Wiradjuri response to all of it.
We talk about Governor Brisbane's declaration of martial law in August 1824, the second time in New South Wales history a governor had authorised soldiers to shoot Aboriginal people without legal constraint, and what that authorisation produced on the ground across Wiradjuri country in the months that followed.
We also talk about Bells Falls Gorge, and what the historical evidence suggests happened there.
And we talk about a man who died at around forty having won nothing formal, but who left behind the clearest possible demonstration that the Wiradjuri had never consented to any of it.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

Episode 22: The Queensland Native Police
In 1861, a parliamentary committee sat down to question a Native Police officer named Frederick Wheeler about reports that Aboriginal people had been shot dead and their bodies set on fire to destroy the evidence. The committee chair asked him directly what he meant when he said he had dispersed the people in the camp.
Wheeler's answer was simple. Firing at them.
The committee concluded the force was working exactly as intended. Wheeler kept his job.
This episode is about the Queensland Native Police, a government-funded, government-commanded paramilitary force that operated across Queensland for more than fifty years, from 1848 into the early twentieth century. Its sole operational purpose was to push the colonial frontier forward by killing Aboriginal people. Not arresting them. Not relocating them. Killing them. The word used in official correspondence, in parliamentary reports, and in sworn testimony was dispersal. Everyone involved understood exactly what that meant.
We talk about how the force was structured, how Aboriginal troopers were recruited from distant nations specifically so they had no ties to the communities they were deployed against, how some were pulled directly from prison sentences to serve, and how desertion was the single biggest problem the force faced because men kept running the moment they realised what they were being asked to do.
We talk about the scale of the killing, a death toll historians estimate in the thousands, across hundreds of separate engagements, in a system specifically designed so that nothing incriminating ever had to be written down.
And we talk about what archaeologists are finding today at the sites of Native Police camps across outback Queensland. Dozens of bullets in the dirt. No trace of who they were used on.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

In September 2016, a twenty-nine year old Aboriginal man named Wayne Fella Morrison was loaded into the back of a prison transport van at Yatala Labour Prison in Adelaide. He was cuffed at the wrists and ankles, face down, with a spit hood over his head. The van doors closed. Three and a half minutes later, he was pulled out unconscious and turning blue. He never woke up.
What happened inside that van became known, in the coroner's own courtroom, as the black hole. Three and a half minutes that five years of coronial inquest could never fully account for.
This episode tells the full story of Wayne Fella Morrison, a Wiradjuri, Kokatha, and Wirangu man who should never have been in those circumstances in the first place. We talk about the week leading up to his death, the barbaric conditions he was held in before he ever reached Yatala, the intake process so poorly handled that no one even correctly recorded he was Aboriginal. We talk about the twelve guards, the spit hood, the simultaneous statement writing, and the legal privilege that let the officers inside that van stay silent for years.
We also talk about what the coroner found, a litany of institutional failure at every stage, and nobody individually responsible for any of it. And we talk about Fella's Bill, the law passed in his name that made South Australia the first state in the country to ban spit hoods outright.
His mother Caroline has been fighting for the truth for nearly a decade. She is still fighting.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

In early 1839, between forty-five and fifty-two Aboriginal people were camped at a place called Puuroyup, beside a creek in what's now Victoria's Western District. Most of them belonged to the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung nation. It was night. People were asleep.
A station manager named Frederick Taylor led a group of shepherds on horseback into position around the camp in the dark, forming a complete cordon around the sleeping families before anyone inside knew they were there. Then his men opened fire.
The justification? An unverified claim from one of his own shepherds that two unidentified Aboriginal people had killed some sheep. George Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, reviewed that claim and asked, in writing, whether the shepherd might simply have killed the animals himself and handed the leftovers to local Aboriginal people. Nobody listened. Between thirty-five and forty people were killed anyway.
This episode tells the full story of the Murdering Gully massacre — one of the most thoroughly documented frontier killings in Victorian history, precisely because so many independent sources, survivor testimonies, settler diaries, missionary records, and Aboriginal Protectorate files, all happened to converge on the same sequence of events. We talk about what happened to the bodies, what happened to the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan, and what happened to Frederick Taylor — who fled to India, returned years later, built an entirely new life on Gunai country in Gippsland, and faced exactly one consequence for the rest of his long, comfortable life. Not a trial. Not a conviction. A refused land application.
We also talk about Niel Black, the settler who bought out Taylor's station and recorded in his own diary that taking up new land in this country required a conscience, in his own words, sufficiently seared to slaughter natives right and left — and who positioned himself as more civilised than Taylor simply by purchasing an already-cleared run instead of clearing it himself.
Thirty-five to forty people killed in their sleep. One creek renamed in disapproval. Nobody charged.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

Episode 18: The Northern Territory Intervention
In late June 2007, military jeeps rolled into Mutitjulu, a remote community four hundred and sixty kilometres south west of Alice Springs. Residents described never having seen their families so nervous and scared. Some parents genuinely believed the army had come to take their children.
It had been six days since the federal government declared a national emergency in the Northern Territory. Six days since a careful, eight-month inquiry — built on community consultation, genuine research, and ninety-seven specific recommendations — was handed to a Prime Minister who used it to justify something the report's own authors never asked for.
This episode tells the full story of the Northern Territory Intervention — what the Little Children are Sacred report actually said, what the government built on top of it, and why those two things looked so different from each other. We talk about the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, the welfare quarantining, the compulsory land leases, the abolition of the CDEP program, and the word that doesn't appear once across hundreds of pages of the actual legislation — children. We talk about the Ampilatwatja elders who responded by walking out of their government-provided housing and setting up a bush camp, describing life under the Intervention as feeling exactly like the old welfare days of the sixties and seventies.
We also talk about the change of government that changed almost nothing. The Racial Discrimination Act, left suspended for three more years under Labor. The Stronger Futures extension that kept the core measures running until 2022. And the independent evidence, gathered across more than a decade, that never managed to show the central measures actually did what they were said to be for.
A report that called for community-driven solutions. A response assembled in six days that delivered soldiers instead.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

On the 5th of January 1855, a gallows stood built directly onto the Queen Street footpath in front of Brisbane Gaol. As the man climbed the steps to the platform, he called out across the street to the crowd of Aboriginal people gathered on the rise above him. He told them who had betrayed him. He told them to avenge his death.
His name was Dundalli. For more than a decade, he had been the single most significant resistance figure the colonial settlement of Brisbane had ever faced. And what happened on that gallows — the last public execution ever carried out in the history of Queensland — did not go quickly, or cleanly.
This episode tells the full story of Dundalli, a Turrwan — a great leader, educated under his own people's law — who spent fourteen years organising a measured, reciprocal response to the poisonings, shootings, and dispossession already being carried out against his people in the districts north of Brisbane. We talk about the bunya nut country he came from, the deliberate distinction his raids made between targets, the years of protection he received from communities who sheltered him, and the betrayal that finally ended his freedom.
We also talk about the trial — including his reported attempt to bribe the judge with sixpence — and the hangman who made such a mess of the execution that the crowd on Wickham Terrace heard everything.
And we talk about what happened in 2023, when Queensland formally declared the 5th of January Dundalli Remembrance Day as part of its Path to Treaty process — and what happened less than two years later when that entire process was scrapped by an incoming government, and the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance kept showing up at Post Office Square anyway.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

At one in the morning on the 27th of January 1972, four young Aboriginal men got out of a car on the lawn opposite Parliament House in Canberra. They'd just driven down from Redfern in Sydney. Between them, they were carrying a beach umbrella and a handful of placards. They planted the umbrella in the grass, propped up a sign, and called it the Aboriginal Embassy.
More than fifty years later, it's still there. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is now the longest continuously running site of political protest anywhere in the world.
This episode traces how four men with a beach umbrella became one of the most effective — and most persistently inconvenient — protest movements in Australian history. We talk about the Prime Minister's announcement the night before that sparked the whole thing, the formal list of demands presented to the government six days later that reads, in hindsight, like a blueprint for every land rights argument that followed, and the July 1972 police crackdown that tore the embassy down, only for a court to rule the removal had been unlawful, only for the government to rush through new legislation the very next day to make it legal retroactively.
We also talk about how a storm, multiple evictions, and a change of government couldn't kill it. How a Prime Minister's lost shoe made international headlines. How an act of arson by a sovereign citizens group in 2022 was condemned by the same Ngunnawal elder who'd been at the founding fifty years earlier. And how, after more than five decades, most of the original 1972 demands remain entirely unmet.
A beach umbrella that became the world's longest running political protest. Still on the same lawn. Still waiting.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.

On the 17th of October 1861, nineteen settlers were killed at a station called Cullin-la-Ringo in central Queensland. It remains the single largest killing of European settlers by Aboriginal people in Australian colonial history. There's a cairn marking their graves. Their names are recorded. Their deaths are documented in careful, specific detail.
The Gayiri people killed in the months that followed have no memorial. In most accounts, they don't even have a name.
This episode tells both sides of what happened at Cullin-la-Ringo — including the part that almost never gets told. The false sheep accusation that triggered the original killing at Rainworth station the week before. The strong historical case that the attack on the Wills party was a case of mistaken identity, aimed at the wrong man entirely. The seven Native Police detachments deployed in the aftermath. The settler accounts of groups being lined up in open fields and shot as they ran. A death toll that may have reached three hundred, depending on whose count you trust.
We also talk about the man who survived because he was out mustering horses that afternoon — Tom Wills, co-founder of Australian Rules football and coach of the first Australian cricket team to tour England, who also, by credible historical account, organised armed reprisal raids against the Gayiri in the weeks after his father's death. Two facts about the same man that most sporting histories have never quite managed to hold in the same paragraph.
And we talk about the roadside sign erected in 2009 that names the nineteen settler dead in specific detail — and doesn't write the word Gayiri anywhere on it.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In 1974, a gardener named Eddie Mabo was having lunch with two historians at James Cook University in Townsville when the conversation turned to his home — a small island called Mer, out in the Torres Strait. Mabo started talking about his family's land. The historians glanced at each other. They knew something he didn't. Under Australian law, that land wasn't his. It belonged to the Crown.
His response was immediate. No way. It's not theirs. It's ours.
That lunchtime conversation is, as much as any single moment can be, where the most significant land rights case in Australian history began.
This episode tells the full story of Eddie Koiki Mabo — the man before the case. The boy exiled from his own island as a teenager. The union organiser. The man who had to leave his community just to access the old age pension. The activist who co-founded a school so his own children wouldn't grow up cut off from their language and culture. And then the ten-year legal fight that followed, including the Queensland Government's extraordinary attempt to pass a law specifically designed to make his case disappear — and the High Court striking that law down instead.
We also talk honestly about what native title actually is, and isn't — because the popular memory of Mabo sometimes treats it as a sweeping handback of land that it was never designed to be. And we talk about the fact that Eddie Mabo died five months before the verdict. Three of the five original plaintiffs never heard the outcome at all.
Terra nullius. Land belonging to no one. A legal fiction that underpinned two centuries of dispossession — finally, formally, declared exactly that.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.