History

No One Saw It Coming

ABC Australia

The bit players, the unexpected twists, the turning point you missed. Join Walkley award-winner Marc Fennell as he uncovers the incredible moments that changed the course of history. New episodes out Tuesday.

80 episodes

Australia's secret slave trade 4 Oct 2026 From the mid-1800s, more than 62,000 Pacific Islanders were kidnapped, tricked or coerced into labour on Queensland's sugar and cotton plantations. Ryan Butta (Author, Blackbirdin…

The Pastry War: Half-baked diplomacy 27 Sept 2026 · 26 min A ransacked bakery. A wildly inflated bill. A demand so absurd it should have been laughed out of the room. Instead it triggered warships. In 1838, France used a pastry chef's gri…

The Pig War: Hogging the border 20 Sept 2026 · 26 min A pig trots over an invisible border, wandering into a potato farmer's garden. It's not the first time it's trespassed but it is the last. The farmer takes his gun off the wall an…

The mythical football war 13 Sept 2026 · 26 min It’s called The Football War and raged for just 100 hours. It’s a catchy name for a conflict supposedly sparked by a World Cup qualifier game. But behind the catchy title, and awa…

Birds 1 - Humans 0 6 Sept 2026 · 26 min In 1932 Australia sent soldiers with machine guns to stop 20,000 emus rampaging through wheat fields. What followed was a national embarrassment and earned the emus a reputation a…

The man who gave the gods new faces 30 Aug 2026 · 26 min Their faces are everywhere: on calendars, incense packets, and soap packaging. But how did the Hindu deities' faces go beyond temples and shrines? In nineteenth-century India, Rav…

What really happened at Pompeii? 23 Aug 2026 · 26 min You think you know Pompeii. A city wiped out. People frozen in time. A disaster that stopped time. But how much of that story is actually true? Ancient historian and writer Dr Jes…

Titanic mistakes sunk a black empire 16 Aug 2026 · 26 min Marcus Garvey is known as a civil rights activist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement. But there’s a part of his story you may not know about. Social historian Darrel Blake…

The prince, the liar, and the race to save cars 9 Aug 2026 · 26 min Imagine driving from Beijing, through the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, and across Russia into Europe. The roads are terrible, you don't have petrol stations and you have pack animals ca…

The suit that sparked a riot 2 Aug 2026 · 26 min What do you get when you combine fashion, race and a world war? From the jazz clubs and dance halls of the 1940s to an infamous city riot in Los Angeles, the zoot suit was made to…

Richard Fidler: The lie that toppled a regime 26 Jul 2026 · 26 min A well-placed lie can bring down a whole government. Hard to believe, but in Prague in 1989 that’s exactly what happened. In amongst a heaving student protest, a body was carried…

Escaped the Nazis and lost by Australia 19 Jul 2026 · 26 min She stands tall with her head tilted towards you. She’s wearing an incredible gown made of the most beautiful fabric. This is a society woman living in Vienna at the turn of the 2…

The queen behind the witch hunts 12 Jul 2026 · 26 min In the late 1500s a man sails across the North Sea. He’s battered by wind and wave. The sea seems angry, almost furious at him. He thinks it must be more than just a bad storm. It…

An 11-year-old sent us on a mission... 5 Jul 2026 · 26 min Getting a letter these days is pretty special, especially when it’s from an 11-year-old listener. Ellie wrote us a letter asking about the nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o' Roses, wond…

The secret Aussie plant that saved D-Day 28 Jun 2026 · 26 min D-Day was the biggest land and water invasion in history and would go on to be a huge turning point in WWII. And it all depended on a plant. Specifically a leaf from a tree that g…

Grapefruits vs Apartheid 21 Jun 2026 · 26 min In a Dublin supermarket in 1984, a young woman makes a split-second decision. She refuses to sell two grapefruits. Her job is on the line, and there’s a recession raging across th…

History’s favourite sex toys 14 Jun 2026 · 26 min *CONTENT WARNING* This episode explores mature themes such as sex and masturbation. When the wooden object was unearthed, the archaeologists were stumped. What was this thing? It…

The houseplant that changed the British Empire 7 Jun 2026 · 26 min On the face of it, it’s just a box. It has wooden slats, a peaked roof and glass panels. But inside this box is something that will breathe, grow, and impact lives around the worl…

Stop blaming rats for the plague 31 May 2026 · 26 min If you were asked where the plague came from you’d probably say rats. Or fleas. And you’d say it swept across Europe killing up to half of the population. But where exactly did it…

A teenager’s party created Hip-Hop 24 May 2026 · 26 min It started with two turntables and a microphone and became a worldwide movement. Today, Hip hop is one of the biggest music genres in the world - and it all started at a teenager’…

The vote that shocked the world 17 May 2026 In the week before Christmas 1894, a man in the South Australian parliament rolls the dice. He makes a gamble that he thinks will pay off. It’s incredibly risky because if his gam…

Beware gifts from Soviet spies 10 May 2026 After the Second World War, relations between America, Britain and the Soviets were frosty and as the Cold War rivalry intensified, they were watching each other with intense side…

The Met Gala began in a dead woman’s closet 3 May 2026 · 26 min The Met Gala’s 2026 theme is Costume Art. But rewind almost 100 years ago, and the fight was to get costumes to be called art at all. And if a handful of very determined women had…

The telegram that caught a killer 26 Apr 2026 · 26 min When he got on the train to London, he thought he got away with it. He thought he got away with murder. But little did he know that something was racing alongside the train, pulsi…

Clogged sink doomed a space mission 19 Apr 2026 · 26 min It’s 1926 and two men are working in a lab trying to create antifreeze. Instead, they make a thick, black goo that stinks out the lab and blocks the sink. ABC Science reporter Fio…

Ancient Greek built a steam engine for dinner parties 12 Apr 2026 · 26 min Long before steam trains, before factories, before the Industrial Revolution, someone figured out how to turn steam into motion. And he did it almost two thousand years ago in Anc…

She gave her son smallpox. Her bet paid off. 5 Apr 2026 · 26 min It was one of the deadliest diseases known to humankind. And just 50 years ago it was officially eradicated. But there’s someone missing from the story of smallpox. A woman whose…

Cocaine wine: The Pope’s energy drink 29 Mar 2026 · 26 min If you looked at it, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but this red wine had something in it that today could land you in jail. It was drunk and endorsed by presidents, royalty and even…

A horse race and a murderer invented cinema 22 Mar 2026 · 26 min Before cinema, before Hollywood, before we even understood how to make pictures move, there was a man constantly reinventing himself. He was a bookseller, a photographer, an alleg…

Starving for freedom: The prison death that changed Ireland 15 Mar 2026 As the Irish Revolution raged year after year, there was a space that the British didn’t expect to become places of revolution - prisons. Jailed rebels became martyrs and Britain’…