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

Execution of a Teenage Girl

The Price of Life

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.

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.

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

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.

Junk History

Seasons22

Season 46 Episodes38

Discussion

Episode Summary