Truth Be Told Podcast - 3 Brothers Production

On the morning of the 20th of January 1842, around five thousand people gathered on Franklin Street in Melbourne to watch two men hanged. It was the first execution the settlement had ever carried out. It didn't go cleanly. One of the men strangled slowly at the end of the rope, in front of the entire crowd. Both were buried in unmarked graves. Today, that exact spot sits underneath the Queen Victoria Market — where most visitors walking through have absolutely no idea what's beneath their feet.
Their names were Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner. Both were Tasmanian Aboriginal men who had already survived the Black War. Both had spent years working as guides for the colonial protection system. And the judge who sentenced them to death admitted, openly, that he designed the execution specifically to terrorise other Aboriginal people into submission.
This episode traces how two survivors of one genocide ended up on trial for their lives on the other side of Bass Strait — and why, when you understand what both men had already lived through, their final months in Victoria look a lot less like crime and a lot more like a second act of resistance. We talk about the lawyer who argued the colonial court had no right to try them at all, the rule that stopped them from speaking in their own defence, and the woman who was walking beside them when they were captured — Truganini herself.
We also talk about what's underneath the Queen Victoria Market, and how long it took for anyone to put a name to 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.

On the 27th of May 1967, Australians went to the polls and delivered the most lopsided result in this country's referendum history. Ninety point seven seven per cent voted yes. Every single state. No organised opposition. The highest yes vote ever recorded for a federal referendum, before or since.
Most Australians will tell you it's the day Aboriginal people got the right to vote. Or citizenship. Neither of those things is true — and understanding what it actually did, and didn't do, tells you almost everything about how this country handles Aboriginal recognition.
This episode traces the decade-long campaign that got the referendum over the line, led largely by Aboriginal women — Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs, and a network of organisers who spent ten years petitioning, marching, and showing up at parliament with signatures until politicians ran out of reasons to say no. We talk about what the two constitutional clauses actually said, why removing them mattered, and why the practical change for Aboriginal communities was slower and more complicated than the landslide result suggested.
We also place 1967 directly alongside October 2023 — two referendums, fifty-six years apart, both about the legal and political standing of Aboriginal people in this country's Constitution. One passed with near-unanimous support. The other failed. The contrast says something uncomfortable about how much has, and hasn't, shifted in the time between them.
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 27th of October 1857, around a hundred Yiman warriors attacked a homestead called Hornet Bank on the upper Dawson River in central Queensland. Eleven settlers were killed. It's remembered today as one of the deadliest attacks on white settlers in Australian colonial history — and it has its own cairn, listed on Queensland's official heritage register.
What happened over the following months has no memorial at all.
In the reprisal campaign that followed, somewhere between ninety and three hundred Yiman people were killed by Native Police, settler militias, and one man with a very personal grudge — a man who shot two acquitted defendants dead as they walked out of a Rockhampton courthouse, in broad daylight, and was never once arrested for it. A parliamentary inquiry looked directly at the evidence and recommended funding more of whatever had caused it. And the Yiman people, who colonial accounts assumed had been wiped out entirely, survived anyway — scattered, dispossessed, and largely unnamed in the historical record for over a century.
We also talk about why the attack happened in the first place — including the false sheep accusation that triggered the whole thing — and the 2016 Federal Court ruling where a judge sat in a packed country town hall in Taroom and finally said the land had always been theirs.
Eleven names on a heritage cairn. Somewhere between ninety and three hundred names that nobody bothered to write down.
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 23rd of August 1966, around two hundred Gurindji stockmen, domestic workers, and their families put down their tools at Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory and walked off the job. They weren't just striking for fair wages. They were asking for their land back.
This is the story of Vincent Lingiari, the Gurindji elder who led a nine-year standoff against one of the most powerful pastoral companies in the world, sustained by union levies, international solidarity strikes, and a young eye surgeon's spontaneous five hundred dollar donation. It's the story of a community that turned down twenty new government houses because housing was never actually the point. And it's the story of a Prime Minister kneeling in red dirt, pouring a handful of soil into an old man's open hand, in a moment that became one of the most iconic photographs in Australian history — and still wasn't quite what it looked like.
We also talk about what actually happened after the cameras left. The conditional lease. The government that tried to claw it back. The twenty more years it took to get freehold title. And the native title recognition that finally arrived in 2020, fifty-four years after that first walk-off.
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 1790, a young Bidjigal man was shot through the back by colonial soldiers and survived, the wound earning him a permanent limp and, within his own community, a reputation as someone who carried supernatural power. Over the next twelve years, Pemulwuy became the most persistent and effective resistance leader the British colony in New South Wales ever faced, leading raids the colony's own officers admitted they couldn't stop, surviving capture, and escaping custody while still in chains.
This episode covers Pemulwuy's decade long campaign against the colony, from the killing of Governor Phillip's gamekeeper that set it all in motion, to his dramatic march on Parramatta at the head of a hundred warriors, to his death in 1802. We also trace the strange afterlife of his remains: his head, removed, preserved, and shipped to England as a scientific specimen for Sir Joseph Banks, very likely destroyed in the Blitz over a century later, and the decades long, still unresolved push to bring him home.
Content warning: this episode discusses colonial era warfare and killing, and includes the decapitation and display of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In the early hours of 17 April 1816, British soldiers acting on written orders from Governor Lachlan Macquarie himself drove a camp of Dharawal people toward the edge of the Cataract Gorge, south west of Sydney. At least fourteen people were killed, their bodies decapitated and displayed in trees as a deliberate warning, with their heads carried back to Sydney for a colonial bounty of thirty shillings and a gallon of rum.
This episode covers the Appin Massacre, one of the earliest documented massacres in Australian colonial history, ordered by a governor still remembered today on banknotes and street names for his roads and reforms. We trace how the massacre fit into years of escalating conflict over land, what happened to the remains taken that morning, including a journey to a Scottish university collection and back, and why it took until 2022, two hundred and six years later, for the site to finally receive official heritage recognition, decades after Dharawal and Gandangara people had already been gathering there every year on their own.
Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical descriptions of a massacre, including the deaths of children, decapitation, and the display and eventual repatriation of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On the morning of 19 November 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, known to his community as Mulrunji, was arrested on Palm Island for allegedly swearing at a passing police car. Forty four minutes later, he was dead in a cell, with internal injuries doctors compared to a high speed car crash. The autopsy findings, made public a week later, set off one of the most significant instances of civil unrest involving an Aboriginal community in modern Australian history.
This episode covers Palm Island's own history as one of Queensland's most punitive forced settlements, what happened to Mulrunji in custody, the riot that followed, and the extraordinary fourteen year legal fight that came after it. We trace two coronial inquests, a manslaughter trial that ended in acquittal, two more deaths by suicide connected to the case, and a landmark 2017 Federal Court ruling that found Queensland Police had engaged in unlawful racial discrimination in how they treated the community in the days after Mulrunji's death.
Content warning: this episode includes graphic descriptions of injury, details of a death in custody, civil unrest, and the suicides of two people connected to this story. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Lifeline is also available, any time, on 13 11 14.

In the 1820s, a girl named Truganini lost her mother to whalers, her uncle to soldiers, and her sister to sealers, all before she'd finished growing up. It was the world the Black War created on the island now called Tasmania, lutruwita, a conflict that killed an estimated sixty percent of the entire Aboriginal population within less than a decade and remains one of the most intense, sustained colonial conflicts in this country's history.
This episode covers how the war escalated from isolated violence to martial law and the Black Line, the largest domestic military operation ever mounted on Australian soil. We follow Truganini's complicated path through it, as negotiator, survivor, and eventually the woman colonial authorities falsely declared the last of an extinct people. We also look at what happened to her remains after death, how the palawa community survived and rebuilt their language against every official prediction, and where the fight for a Treaty in Tasmania stands right now, in 2026.
Content warning: this episode covers an extended period of historical violence, including widespread killing, sexual violence against women, and the deaths of children. It also discusses the exhumation and display of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On 10 June 1838, a group of armed men rode onto a station in northern New South Wales and killed at least twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, men, women, and children, then burned the bodies two days later to destroy the evidence. What happened next set this massacre apart from hundreds of others across colonial Australia: a station manager reported it, a Governor ordered an investigation, and seven men were eventually hanged for it, the only time in this country's colonial history that white men were executed for killing Aboriginal people.
This episode walks through how the Myall Creek massacre unfolded, why the first trial ended in a not guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and how one Attorney General's decision to pursue a second trial changed the outcome. We also look at what happened to the men involved afterward, including the leader who was never caught, and how this single, partial moment of accountability did nothing to stop the broader pattern of frontier violence across the continent, a pattern researchers are still mapping today.
Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of a massacre, including the deaths of children, and of the trial and executions that followed. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In August 1928, a dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed near a waterhole called Yurrkuru in the Tanami Desert, after breaking Warlpiri marriage law. What followed was ten weeks of killing carried out by a police constable and his posse, sweeping across Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye Country with no real attempt to distinguish the people involved in Brooks's death from anyone who simply happened to be nearby. To this day, nobody agrees on how many people died, with estimates ranging from the official count of thirty one to oral histories putting the number closer to two hundred.
This episode covers the Coniston Massacre, often called the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history. We trace how a single phone call gave one constable a free hand to punish an entire community, how a government inquiry concluded the killings were self defence, and why this event, well within living memory, is only now starting to find a place in how Australia remembers its frontier history, including an upcoming Frontier Wars gallery at the Australian War Memorial.
Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of mass killing, including the deaths of women and children. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.