This week we travel to Australia for a game of Marn Grook, to discuss origin stories; perhaps the archetypal troubled sportsman - and horrific massacres.

Trigger warnings: Murder, suicide, colonialism, and to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people listening to this episode - I discuss some of your origin legends as best I can, and play a brief excerpt of a speech from an Aboriginal elder.

Sources Include:

Australia’s Most Unbelievable True Stories by Jim Haynes This University of Newcastle Article on Aboriginal massacres, quoting studies by Professor Lyndall Ryan This NSW State Library piece on The ‘First Fleet’ This article on Edward Wills First Contact by Anita Heiss This piece on the Dreamtime.

The deplorable (alleged) Neo-Nazi interruption of tribal elder Mark Brown, care of the Guardian Speeches from Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese on election night 2025, care of SBS News.

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The American actress Ilda Orme knew a thing or two about being cancelled, a long, long time before social media put the cancel button in the hands of the public at large. Her cancellers, she suspected were two hateful former in-laws and a theatre manager in their pocket.

Her cancellation was nearly literal - culminating in an assassination attempt.

What does one do when cancelled? If you’re Ilda Orme, you seek revenge in the most public way possible.

Trigger warnings: Gun violence and false accusations leading to incarceration.

Note: This fortnight’s episode is a little shorter than usual in the hope that doing a quick firebreak episode will get me back on a two-weekly schedule. Next fortnight should be back to around half an hour again.

Sources Include:

The Battered Body Beneath The Flagstones and Other Victorian Scandals by Michelle Morgan

The Madness of Ilda Orme by Dr Nell Darby

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On, or around 11th June 323 BC Alexander the Great died in Babylon. While there are mysteries surrounding his passing - did an Indian holy man prophesy his passing a year prior while self immolating in Alexander’s presence? Was he poisoned? Did somebody entomb him while still alive? - He is just a cameo in this Tale.

This week we travel to Athens - then chafing under the Macedonian yoke - as they make a bid for freedom.

Trigger warning: some swearing, talk of three suicides. We discuss the fall of two mighty empires and one despot.

Sources Include:

Ghost On The Throne by James Romm A History of Greece To 322 BC by N.G.L Hammond

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On May 18th 1926 the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson took a trip to Santa Monica Beach, California to work, seek inspiration and have a little fun in the sun. However, the day would end in tragedy when Aimee disappeared without a trace.

Was her disappearance all it appeared?

Sources Include: The Vanishing Evangelist by Lately Thomas

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Hi all, welcome back (again) - sorry it’s a week later than planned… a few ongoing voice issues from the cold. This week we conclude the tale of Sidney Reilly and the ‘Red Terror.’

Sources Include:

R.H. Bruce-Lockhart ‘Memoirs of a British Agent’ Sidney Reilly + Pepita Bobadilla ‘ Adventures of a British Master Spy’ James Palmer ‘The Bloody White Baron’

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Hi all, welcome back - sorry it’s a week later than planned… I had a nasty cold. This week we’re in Russia just after the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks have taken over, plunging the nation even further into disarray. They’re determined to exit the First World War.

Britain, knowing this would be disastrous for their war with Germany need a hero to go in there and upset the apple cart - the kind of talented, yet completely amoral man Ian Fleming would draw on years later when crafting his best known invention - James Bond.

This week, part one of two: Who was Sidney Reilly, and how did Russia find herself in this mess?

Sources Include:

R.H. Bruce-Lockhart ‘Memoirs of a British Agent’ Pepita Bobadilla & Sidney Reilly ‘ Adventures of a British Master Spy’ This ‘Spycraft 101’ episode Featuring Giles Milton

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Please leave Tales a like and a review wherever you listen. The best way you can support us is to share an episode with a friend - Creative works grow best by word of mouth. I post episodes fortnightly.

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Hi all, Happy Holidays! This year I’ve got a ghost story for you all. Today we travel to Greenbrier County, West Virginia in 1897.

Sources Include:

Again this week I’ve gone from a handful of online articles, a few online genealogy pages - and a couple of podcast episodes.

Including…

‘How The ‘Greenbrier Ghost’ Helped Convict a West Virginia Murderer in 1897’ by Joey Rather. This website on ghosts in West Virginia. ‘Can We ‘See’ Dead People?’ By Mark Shelvock. ‘The Greenbrier Ghost’ by Brian Dunning. Zona Heaster Shoe’s ‘Family Search’ genealogy page. Erasmus Stribbling Shoe’s listing on Find a Grave.

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This week we travel to Tana Island, Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides) in the midst of World War Two. God has returned - and not a moment too soon. Having abandoned them decades earlier, just as bad men with awful intentions arrived to steal their land - and send their people off to far away locales to be worked to death - he was back, as an American soldier named John Frum.

Sources Include:

This week a lot of articles (which I had saved in tabs - when my iPad crashed and needed a restore…This is as best I remember it.)

In John They Trust by Paul Raffaele This explainer in the Guardian This Guardian article by Christopher Lord Archiving a Prophecy: An ethnographic history of the ‘John Frum files’ (Tanna, Vanuatu, 1941–1980) by Marc Tabani This short piece on the NZ History site (that confirms my memory NZ too had blackbirded labour) How Blackbirding Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders into Slavery After the Civil War by Shoshi Parks Blackbirding and Indentured Labour in 19th Century Queensland by Sue Thompson From the Islands by Scott Hamilton (everyone should go and follow Scott on Twitter, if you’re still on there… I miss not seeing him in my feed, now I’ve X-ited) Hunting the Blackbirder: Ross-Lewin and the Royal Navy by Doug Hunt

There were a handful more, including pages of old newspaper clippings on the Daphne Slave-ship bust, and a couple of articles specific to Blackbirding in Peru - I apologise for not backing these sources up somewhere as I went…

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