After "The Day After"

Allegations have swirled around Willie Brigitte ever since his discreet deportation from Australia and his much-publicised arrest in France in October 2003.

Willie Brigitte

Ticky Fullerton looks at the management of Tasmania's forests and how one timber company enjoys extraordinary political support for its operations.

Lords Of The Forests

Fuelled by a cocktail of drugs, armed robberies are growing more violent and unpredictable.

In the Firing Line

Why has Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat - once feted at the White House but now holed up in his West Bank headquarters - become such an outcast?

Arafat Investigated

How police laid a trap to catch drug dealers but instead found themselves entangled in a web of corruption allegations.

The Speed Trap

Michael Buerk returns to Ethiopia 20 years after first alerting the world to the Ethiopian famine.

Ethiopia: A Journey with Michael Buerk

Are Australia's sports bosses surrendering to the drug cheats?

Tarnished Gold

What really happened that night in the tiny Redfern community .

Riot In Redfern

Troubling questions arise when the legal and psychiatric worlds collide.

A Crime of Insanity

Are Australians hitching a ride on China's economic juggernaut?

Lost In Translation

A report on the conditions that made the violence in Rwanda possible.

Killers

A special report on the frightening trade in nuclear secrets.

The Nuclear Bazaar

Allegations of sexual violence have engulfed some of Australia's top AFL footballers and their clubs.

Fair Game?

The fight between Australia and East Timor over billion dollar oil and gas interests.

Rich Man, Poor Man

The inside story of the family that lived and trained with Osama Bin Laden.

Al Qaeda Family

Where will the credit binge end for the many thousands of Australians in debt?

Till Debt Us Do Part

Under what circumstances should a child be taken from its birth parents?

The Taking of Logan Marr

The story behind what may endure as defining images of war in Iraq.

Chain of Command

Corruption spreads from state police forces into the Australian Crime Commission.

Corruption Inc.

Is the RSPCA turning a blind eye to cruelty for the benefit of commercial interests?

A Blind Eye

Bill Clinton defends his record and tells how his public and private lives clashed.

The Clinton Interview

How the justice system failed star swim coach Scott Volkers and the women he was accused of sexually molesting.

A Case To Answer

How one company’s obsession with the bottom line left a trail of death and dismemberment among its workers.

A Dangerous Business

Four Corners investigates the story behind Mamdouh Habib's incarceration at the notorious prison Guantanamo Bay .

Worst of the Worst?

Chris Masters talks to bent cops and police chiefs around Australia about the painful costs of corruption, the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures and the need for constant vigilance.

Training Day

Jonathan Holmes investigates the cost to our subsidised pharmaceutical scheme since Australia signed the Free Trade Agreement.

A Bitter Pill?

This expose reveals the truth behind what the BNP has been telling the public in recent years, as it has tried to shed its image of a far-right, racist party.

The Secret Agent

Four Corners tells the story of the Dalton family breakdown in the context of the Government's recent initiatives to reform the Family Court system, and the rising political influence of men's groups.

Losing the Children

"The Plea" examines the cases a jury will never get to hear and asks the question, is the plea bargain undermining an entire legal system?

The Plea

What do Iraqis think about the war and its aftermath?

After Saddam

From outright fraud to allegations of cover up … and those who simply bend the rules.

Doctoring the Figures

Five Australians tell their story of beating depression; the 'black dog" affecting one in five Australians.

Beating the Black Dog

Four Corners presents the incredible journey of four young men .

Run For Your Life

How can one island nation lose a two billion dollar fortune in the space of twenty years?

Island Raiders

Liz Jackson follows the leaders' trails during an election campaign that's gone from truth in government, to billion dollar give-aways and old fashioned fear tactics - as the parties battle to win over middle Australia.

The Contenders

Reporter Jonathan Holmes takes us on a colourful journey through the battleground state of Ohio during the US Elections.

Battleground State

City Limits

Jamie Whitaker had been created to save the life of his brother Charlie, who suffers from Diamond-Blackfan anaemia, DBA, a form of bone marrow failure.

A Baby To Save Our Son

A story of spies, counterspies, double agents and defections as Andrew Fowler reveals the betrayal inside one of Australia’s secret intelligence agencies.

Trust and Betrayal

An exclusive story following a brave little boy’s fight to be cured.

Blood Brothers

In a place where they should have felt safest, the children of Beslan were targeted in an act of barbarism.

What the Children Saw

2004 will be remembered chiefly for international issues, primarily events in Iraq: including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal; as well as the continued threat of terrorism. We also faced crucial elections both at home and in the United States.

2004: In Review

Four Corners returns for 2006 with a whistleblower... and revelations of a powerful insiders' club...

The Greenhouse Mafia

There's road rage over private tollways... Have deals between politicians and tollway bosses killed off grand new visions for public transport and decongested streets? Are they creating a road monster that leaves Australians addicted to cars?

Wheeling and Dealing

Jack Thomas has become the first person to be convicted under Australia's new terrorist funding laws.

The Convert

Kid watching is very grown-up business. The 12-and-unders are a demographic that marketers ignore at their peril.

How The Kids Took Over

One Sunday last December, 5000 Australians gathered at Cronulla, singing and waving the national flag as they "reclaimed" the beach. Fuelled by drink, the crowd became a mob, hunting down and beating anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

Riot and Revenge

It's cheap, highly addictive and ultra-powerful. "Ice", or crystal methamphetamine, is now more popular than heroin, playing havoc with the minds and the bodies of nearly 50,000 Australians.

The Ice Age

Seven got life sentences and two are facing death by firing squad - but the blood of the Bali Nine will not stain the hands of this country's crimefighters.

Big Fish, Little Fish

Sex Slaves

For Saddam Hussein, it must have been a no-brainer. He would pay $200,000 to a top UN official. In return, Saddam would be showered in billions.

Cash Crop

In the space of four days, Australians have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of their Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister each submitting to rigorous, sustained and public interrogation at the Cole inquiry.

Cash Crop Part Two

All of London was on edge when a young electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, headed off for work on 22 July last year. The previous day, four would-be suicide bombers had attacked the transport system. A fortnight earlier, a series of suicide bombings had killed 52 people.

Stockwell - Countdown to Killing

Many thought he was dead or wounded. But when he dramatically appeared this week in an Internet video, firing off an automatic weapon and anti-American rhetoric, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi looked very much alive.

The Making of Zarqawi

The Westpoint collapse...Ticky Fullerton digs into the scheme that has wiped out the life savings of thousands of Australians. Who's taken their money? And why did regulators let it happen?

The Boys

In the hours before he killed himself in April last year, Campbell Bolton wrote a long note in which he told his family how sorry he was for the pain he was about to cause them. "It fills me with grief when I think of what I have done to you," he wrote.

A Deathly Silence

Murder, drugs, extortion, robbery, gambling, prostitution... for 40 years, this has been the daily business of the Aryan Brotherhood, according to US law enforcers.

Reigning in Hell

There's another story buried deep beneath the horrific headlines about sexual abuse in indigenous Australia.

The Road to Nowhere

Imagine being about to give birth, cocooned in a speeding car on a night-time dash to a hospital that's still hours away, every bump, every brake to dodge a kangaroo sharpening the pain and discomfort.

Far From Care

To his fans, research psychologist Harry Harlow was a 20th century hero, a scientific pioneer who revolutionised the way we raise our children today.

Monkey Love

As Australian troops stand between the warring factions in East Timor, Liz Jackson reveals the power plays and intrigues that are tearing the infant nation apart.

Stoking the Fires

If your late model car goes missing, don't expect to see it again soon.

Car Wars

"Do no harm." It's the ethos of medicine, the bedrock principle for all its practitioners.

Killed by Care

"The price of petrol is disgusting, absolutely disgusting..."

Peak Oil

For decades the Liberal Party has carried itself proudly as a broad church, home to a wide spectrum of ideology among members. Now a bitter factional war is playing out in Australia's biggest state that many say is disenfranchising grassroots members and threatening democracy.

The Right Stuff

Breast cancer stalked Becky Measures. It had struck 14 of her female relatives, killing some of them.

The Price of Life

Four Corners often explores extravagant claims and tall tales. Rarely though does it meet a character quite as colourful as author Gavin Menzies.

Junk History

Not long after dawn on August 15, 2004 a teenage girl was dragged through a town square in the Iranian provincial city of Neka, past a crowd of people to the spot where a mobile crane had been converted into a makeshift gallows. Atefah Sahaaleh was 16 years old. She was hanged that morning for crimes against chastity.

Execution of a Teenage Girl

A member of a 'raskol' gang talks about rape as a ritual part of crime. A career truck driver on the highland's highway picks up a teenage prostitute - just part of his routine. A 'hostess supervisor' at a Port Moresby brothel explains that he may tell clients to use a condom with his girls but that sometimes he is too tired to bother. These are voices from Matthew Carney's intimate report on how Papua New Guinea became a hot spot for the AIDS virus.

Sick No Good

Cares and crowds are forgotten. Sand crunches between your toes, there's salt on your skin and sun on your back. Here is where blue ocean meets virgin bush, and a golden stretch of beach is all yours for camping, swimming and quiet reflection.

Seachange

Heat waves and cyclones; droughts ravaging farmland; rising seas swamping beach havens; forests drying up and species dying out; the Barrier Reef and Kakadu, icons of nature, doomed.

What Price Global Warming?

It's a battle for your body and for your money - a tug-o-war between two powerful forces: the marketing pressure to eat more versus the social pressure to weigh less.

Diet Confidential

The dust settled long ago at Ground Zero. But the world is still searching for clarity after 9/11.

Five Years

They were ordinary suburban Australians setting out on a big overseas adventure... to cheer on the Socceroos at the World Cup, or take in the sights of Europe. They would climax the trip with a visit to ancestral lands in southern Lebanon where they would rekindle family ties, rediscover their heritage and relax.

In the Line of Fire

They've launched controversial forays into election campaigns in Australia, New Zealand the US. Now the Exclusive Brethren are drawing more unwanted headlines, this time accused of trawling for dirt on the sex life of the NZ Prime Minister's husband.

Separate Lives

It was a signature TV news image of the 1990s: the bush as battleground, greenies blocking bulldozers, shouting slogans and trading insults with angry timber workers.

The A Team

Two weeks ago a leaked US intelligence assessment gave powerful new ammunition to critics of the Iraq war.

The War on Al Qaeda

From Iraq to Solomon Islands and Afghanistan to East Timor, Australia's Army is stretched tight. The burden of overseas deployments weighs like a straining kitbag on the back of each of Australia's 22,443 regular soldiers.

@NZACS

From marginal to mainstream, once furtive but now flaunted, cosmetic surgery is being eagerly explored by Australians from teens to pensioners, female and male.

Buyer of Beauty, Beware

Each week more than a thousand Australians are delivered the cruel diagnosis: they have dementia - incurable, untreatable, terminal.

Journey of No Return

It's blokey and it's bolshie, the envy of other unions, with near blanket coverage of its workforce. For decades it has sought to influence election campaigns, dragged concessions out of fearful governments and fought ferociously for its members.

The Culture

You don't have to be sitting on a street corner urinating in your trousers and shadow boxing to be a drunk. I'm living proof of that... - Ian

Battling the Booze

For years the global warming debate has swirled like a firestorm. Science has been tossed about in a tornado of spin from doomsayers and doubters, deep green activists and fossil fuel lobbyists.

The Denial Machine

Who's tough on crime? It's an election season ritual: the law and order auction to see which party will put more cops on the streets or increase sentences or build more jails.

The Road to Return

Across southern Australia, fire chiefs are anxiously waiting for the cool draughts of autumn to extinguish another stress-filled season of sparks, flare-ups and rushed responses.

Firestorm

Our world might be getting smaller, thanks to technology, but virtual worlds and games are booming. Millions of people venture daily into these new and constantly evolving landscapes where they can conquer mythical armies, slay dragons and embark on other fantastical quests.

You Only Live Twice

In May 2005, citizens of Spokane, USA, woke to startling news about their city's mayor, Jim West. The outwardly conservative Republican, who had pushed legislation barring gay teachers from public schools, had whiled away his private hours trawling for young men on an Internet chatroom, the Spokesman-Review newspaper alleged. West reportedly abused his office by offering internships to lure them into more intimate relationships.

A Hidden Life

With a wispy moustache and long, lank hair, it was a different David Hicks who just faced US military court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No longer the clean-cut young man smiling familiarly out of old family snaps - and no longer protesting his innocence.

David Hicks' Story

Australia is planting trees. After years of debate about logging old growth forests what could seem more sensible or more worthy? And yet a national quarrel has developed about tree plantations, a quarrel that Chris Master discovers is quietly dividing rural communities and members of the Coalition Government.

Treechange

Picture a windswept hillside lined with slender white skyscrapers, each crowned by a giant whirring rotor longer than a jumbo jet. Or a swathe of desert covered by a sea of mirrors drawing power from the sun.

Earth, Wind and Fire

Imagine surviving a massive brain injury, then waking up in hospital to discover your personality has completely transformed.

Painting the Mind

"Well mate... let me just say this to you. I mean you wouldn't know this but I'm not a f...... good enemy to have..." (Brian Burke on the telephone)

The Dark Arts

A confronting report in which fit and healthy elderly Australians reveal plans to take their own lives before they lose their independence. Is this a new fact of life in greying Australia?

Dr Rosanna Capolingua

One spring day in 1964, Charles Moore and Henry Dee were hitchhiking in rural Mississippi. The two black men were picked up by the Ku Klux Klan, tortured, locked in a car boot and driven to Louisiana, then chained to an engine block and dropped alive into the Mississippi River.

Mississippi Cold Case

Nick off, it's not for sale!... Qantas shareholder's answer to the takeover offer.

A Private Affair

"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Torture

Shackled, gagged and blindfolded, they are bundled on to spy planes, spirited to Third World capitals and dumped in prison hellholes. There they face repeated interrogations that typically include prolonged sessions of torture, crudely inflicted, unimaginably endured.

Ghost Prisoners

"We run an absolute dictatorship and that's what's going to drive this transformation and deliver results... If you can't get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice... then you just shoot 'em and get them out of the way... " - Telstra Chief Operations Officer Greg Winn (at a May business meeting)

Tough Calls

While politicians clash noisily over global warming and how to fight it, millions of Australians are trying modestly to cut their energy use, to be a small part of a big solution.

The Home Front

Four Corners is Australia's longest-running investigative journalism/current affairs television program. Broadcast on ABC1 in Australia, it premiered on 19 August 1961 and celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2021. Founding producer Robert Raymond and his successor Allan Ashbolt did much to set the ongoing tone of the program.

Based on the Panorama concept, the program addresses a single issue in depth each week, showing either a locally produced program or a relevant documentary from overseas. The program has won many awards for investigative journalism, and broken many high-profile stories. A notable early example of this was the show's epoch-making 1962 exposé on the appalling living conditions endured by many Aboriginal Australians living in rural New South Wales.

All Episodes of Four Corners

Browse all episodes of Four Corners

Season 1