Truth Be Told Podcast - 3 Brothers Production

On 1 May 1946, around 800 Aboriginal workers walked off more than twenty stations across the Pilbara, using calendars made from jam tin labels to coordinate a strike across thousands of kilometres with no phones and no radios. It became the longest strike in Australian history, running for three years against arrests, chains, and starvation tactics, two decades before the more widely known Wave Hill walk off.
This episode looks at Stolen Wages, the government run practice of withholding and mismanaging Aboriginal workers' pay across WA and the rest of the country for most of the twentieth century. We trace how protection laws handed control of Aboriginal wages to protectors and station managers, why a 2006 Senate inquiry concluded the scale of it could never be properly counted, and how the fight for that money is still playing out today, in Queensland's settled class action, NSW's repayment scheme, WA's ongoing court case, and a new claim against the Commonwealth covering the Northern Territory.
Content warning: this episode discusses systemic financial exploitation and forced, underpaid labour. 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 1931, three Aboriginal girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, were taken from their families and sent to a government settlement over 1,500km from home. Two nights later, they walked out and followed the rabbit-proof fence for nine weeks to get back to Country. Most people know this as the story behind Rabbit-Proof Fence. Few know what happened to Molly only a few years later, and that part of the story says everything about what this system really was.
This episode traces how the 1905 Aborigines Act stripped Aboriginal parents of legal guardianship in WA, how A.O. Neville's removal policy operated, and what life was actually like inside Moore River Native Settlement. We look at the scale of the Stolen Generations nationally, and bring the story up to the present: WA's 2025 redress scheme, the ongoing work of organisations like Link-Up and the Healing Foundation, and the intergenerational impact still being felt by survivors and their families today.
Content warning: this episode discusses forced removal of children, conditions inside government institutions, and the deaths of children in care. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This episode looks at six Aboriginal men who have disappeared from the Pilbara and Kimberley since 2021: Jeremiah "Jayo" Rivers, Wesley Lockyer, Clinton Lockyer, Wylie Oscar, Zane Stevens, and Brenton Shar. Some vanished within days of each other, none of their cases has been resolved, and police maintain there's nothing connecting them. Their families see it differently, and they've taken that fight all the way from search parties in the bush to Parliament House in Perth and the halls of Canberra. This episode follows what's known, what isn't, and what it says that these families have had to do most of the searching themselves.

Episode 1 of Truth Be Told starts with Ms Dhu, a 22 year old woman who died in a South Hedland police cell in 2014 after being locked up over unpaid fines, and dismissed twice when she said she was in pain. From there we go back to 1834, to the Pinjarra Massacre south of Perth, which took almost 200 years to get an official apology. We trace the Stolen Generations, the death of John Pat in Roebourne in 1983, the death of Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie in 2016, and where things actually stand today on incarceration, child removal, and life expectancy. This isn't history that's finished. For a lot of families, it's still just Friday

Before we get into the stories, we wanted to introduce ourselves.
We are Jake, Sebastian, and Chris, three Aboriginal brothers from Gundungurra Country, raised on Ngarigo Country in New South Wales. Between us we work across ICT, investigative journalism, and advocacy. But the thing that connects all three of us more than anything else is growing up around people who carried this history quietly, in fragments, in things left unsaid, because they were too scared to speak it out loud.
We got tired of watching that happen. So we built this show.
Truth Be Told is about Australian Blak history and the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, told honestly, without the softening and sanitising that has kept so much of this out of classrooms and off the national conversation for two hundred years. The massacres. The stolen children. The stolen wages. The deaths in custody. The legal battles. The resistance. And the reality that most of this is not ancient history. A lot of it is still happening right now, just under different names.
In this first episode we introduce ourselves properly, walk you through what the show is about, explain how each episode is structured so you know what to expect, and let you know that new episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday.
If you have ever wanted to understand this history but did not know where to start, this is the place.
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.