The Australian Bite
Archive for October, 2009
Breast cancer, body image and boys having a blast!
29 October 2009
Listen and download: MP3
Breast Cancer month is just wrapping up – a month of public education campaigns and fundraising for breast cancer research. So on this week’s Australian Bite we hear from breast cancer survivor, former Federal Government Minister, and Chair of the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Ros Kelly, about some of the issues and research to do with this major health issue that affects one in 11 women in Australia. We also catch up with the recommendations of the government’s National Advisory Group on Body Image, and then head up to the Ellendale Diamond mine in Western Australia, where there’s a whole lot of noise going on.
Advice for students & a day at the races
22 October 2009
Listen and download: MP3
The quadrangle at Sydney University (photo by iansand - flickr)
On this week’s Australian Bite, Danny Ong, the former President of the Monash University international Students Asociation joins me to talk about his very informative new book, The International Students Handbook – Living and Studying in Australia. And we also head up north to the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and drop in on the annual Picnic Races and fundraiser in Derby.
Things that make us go cringe
15 October 2009
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Australians can get pretty feisty when it comes to playing around with our national icons, as Kraft found out when it tried to use crowdsourcing to name a new Vegemite/cream cheese blend. The public were invited to send in suggestions, but when the name selected from their entries was announced, it was widely condemned as rubbish, leading to a major backdown and a (this time) public-approved rebranding. More on that story on this week’s Australian Bite, as well as another cringe-worthy incident, which brought Australia into the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons . . . that’s the blackface Jackson Five skit perfomed on the TV variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Oh dear . . .
A tale of convicts and cannibalism
8 October 2009
Listen and download: MP3
Feeling hungry? Well hopefully not so much as the miserable bunch of escapees featured in the new Australian film Van Diemen’s Land. The film tells the story of Alexander Pearce, the only survivor of a small group convicts who escaped into the Tasmanian wilderness and turned to cannibalism, and we meet the film’s director, Jonathan auf der Heide on this week’s Australian Bite. We also find out why many former inmates of Australia’s immigration detention centres are breathing a collective sigh of relief, and hear how Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service has hit the runway in a popular mobile phone game.
