Grave Tales Australia: the series

Dying young, Sylvia McArthur would make her mark, documenting in letters to a newspaper’s children’s page what life in rural Tasmania around the turn of the 20th century was like.

Some bushrangers became folk heroes, others were opportunistic thieves, but the Clarke Brothers were murderous thugs who hanged on duel gallows.

Madam Weigel's patterns dressed the women of Australia for nine decades but in the large cemetery plot bought for three, there are no bodies.

Mark Jeffrey lived with the 1100 or so deceased residents on the Isle of the Dead, tending his own plot. But how did he avoid being buried there?

Little did Professor Theodore Flynn and his wife, Lily, of Sandy Bay, Tasmania, know that their son, Errol Flynn, would become Hollywood’s favourite son from the early to mid-20th century and die too…

A story that has passed into folk law – how bushman Bernard O’Reilly put his mind to finding a missing aircraft with seven people on board when no-one else could.  

In the days when ‘freak shows’ were entertainment, Mrs Augusta Rewald, a Queensland resident, was exhibited as the ‘biggest woman in the world’. But did she really want to be on show, or was she crue…

For more than a century, Sam Knott was one of the best-known faces on advertising billboards. But how did this unconventional man find himself fronting a beer poster?

On a beautiful summer’s eve, January 1924, in the Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, five people's lives were about to change. A gunman was on the loose. A true-crime story from the 'Grave Tales: Melbourne …

If it wasn’t for a persistent father, Walter Lindrum might never have risen to World Champion. He was nicknamed the ‘Don Bradman of billiards’ and they had to change the rules to beat him! This is Wa…

On a Sunday afternoon in February 1921, 13-year-old Chrissie Venn left home to run an errand for her mother. Two days later Chrissie’s body was found in a hollowed-out stump 3.5 metres off the ground…

The man in a suit looked like he was resting in the sun on Somerton Beach, Adelaide, in 1948, until a couple of good Samaritans checking on him, discovered that he was dead. He had nothing on him tha…

Many Australians know the story of the execution of Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock—but there were other Australians charged with them, and one of them wanted to be shot as well but was sen…

Years of isolation, deprivation and often the loss of children, even a case of madness; who were the stoic ladies who accompanied their husbands at the Cape Otway Lighthouse Station?

Alice Anderson was one of Australia’s first female mechanics and her ideas and inventions were ahead of her time. But Alice’s life came to an untimely end on a Friday evening in the back of her garag…

On Monday 31 July 1972, the residents of Ipswich in Queensland were awoken by a blast that destroyed the Box Flat Colliery and killed 17 miners. But what happened to the men of the mine who remained …