Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan McHugh, Honorary Associate Professor, Journalism, University of Wollongong
Quality narrative podcasts experienced a downturn this year, with industry layoffs in key networks including Pineapple Street Studios and Wondery. But commercial cutbacks have reinvigorated the artistic spirit of the genre.
In a class of its own is a soaring audio biography of Fela Kuti, the brilliant Nigerian artist who invented Afrobeat and asserted his country’s cultural and political independence. It could only have been made by Jad Abumrad, legendary inventor of Radiolab, with his trademark mash-up of music, social history and searing critique.
Looking ahead, Resonate Festival’s Pitch Party is a podcast of indie pilots, featuring would-be shows and aspirations. The Vodou Project is my tip.
2025 also offered these gems.
Gina
Guardian Australia
Her eerily soft voice belying her ruthless profiteering and court battles with her children, Gina Rinehart is a fascinating subject.
Sarah Martin dives deep into the many-chaptered life of Australia’s richest person, from her isolated childhood near the Pilbara iron ore mine founded by her father Lang Hancock to her anointing as mining magnate and Trump devotee.
Martin balances the personal and public in this deftly produced series, featuring revealing interviews from Lang’s garrulous mate John Singleton to a memorable episode devoted to Gina’s eldest son, John, estranged from his mother for 20 years, over real life stoushes that would give Succession a run for its money.
Fallout: Spies on Norfolk Island
SBS Audio
If it wasn’t for the fact that an innocent man, Fernando Pereira, died when a Greenpeace protest ship was blown up in Auckland Harbour in 1985, this podcast could be called an entertaining romp.
We move from semi-amateur police on tiny Norfolk Island to the sinister efficiency of the French agents who mounted the attack as a riposte to New Zealand’s rejection of nuclear weapons.
Richard Baker introduces a fabulous array of characters as he navigates the gnarly geopolitics that saw Pacific “allies” stymie New Zealand’s attempts to solve this outrageous act of terrorism.
Half-life: The History Podcast
BBC and Falling Tree
Dark themes nestle alongside tender family moments in this beautifully judged podcast, opened by host Joe Dunthorne excavating a journal left by his Jewish great-grandfather, a chemist in Germany in the 1930s.
The series is elevated by fresh, unflinching writing and aching music, while evocative sound design takes us from a German chemical weapons factory to Turkish caves redolent with ghosts.
Missing in the Amazon
The Guardian
In 2022, British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous defender Bruno Pereira vanished in the Amazon. The pair had been documenting the predations of mining companies, drug dealers and poachers.
Host Tom Phillips traces the doughty campaign by these two men to protect the Amazon and its inhabitants. Family memories bring both men vividly to life.
The podcast vibrates to ear-popping sounds of the jungle as Tom recreates their last journey.
Unravel: Huntsman
ABC
Rachael Brown unveils the chilling back story to Greg Lynn, convicted of murdering High Country camper Carol Clay in 2020. The podcast sat on ice for a year under a judicial suppression order, lifted last month. The conviction was quashed last week due to procedural issues and a retrial ordered, but the ABC has decided to keep the podcast available to listeners.
21 years before Clay’s death, Lynn’s separated wife, Lisa, was found dead in strange circumstances.
Her body was found on the lawn. A Nick Cave song, Nobody’s Baby Now, was playing on repeat – Cave was a favourite of Lynn. An inquest found Lisa died from a mix of alcohol and medication, yet friends insist she would never have over-indulged with her toddler sons inside.
With a measured tone, Brown builds a disturbing picture of a woman trapped in what we now recognise as coercive control. It should be mandatory listening for domestic violence responders.
Heavyweight
Pushkin Industries
The simple premise of this luminous, quirky podcast is to help listeners resolve a query from their past. The episode Kevin features the titular Vietnamese American man, who wants to be reunited with his friends, Jason and Gerald, from the housing project where they grew up.
Host Jonathan Goldstein tracks down Gerald, now a gentle drifter who’s sleeping rough but wants to be around for his kids. This brings up traumatic memories for Kevin, now happily married.
The skill involved in encouraging these informants to so reflectively tell their story is matched only by the artistry with which their words are crafted into glorious moments of wisdom and compassion.
The Retrievals, season two
Serial Productions and the New York Times
The Retrievals is a reminder of how assured, gimlet-eyed writing – along with a pressing story premise, strong interview talent, solid research and flawless production – can elevate a narrative podcast to a compelling hybrid of art and journalism. Susan Burton eschews the usual host-focused lens, and is all the more persuasive for it.
The series examines how women’s pain is ignored and downplayed, here in regard to Caesarian sections, the most common major surgery in the world.
Division Street Revisited
PRX
It’s a delight to hear interviews conducted in the 1960s by renowned oral historian and broadcaster Studs Terkel with “ordinary” Americans – a janitor, a Native American activist, a union leader, an Appalachian mother of 15 – reframed via the keen observational eye of Mary Schmich.
Schmich gets contemporary friends or family to add their own interpretation.
Division Street Revisited manages to be both gentle and punchy, conveying social history as engaging personal story.
We Used To Be Journos
Ette Media
Lebanese Australian journalists Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf are friends with a shared passion – to give two fingers to the stale white male media establishment and increase media literacy. In We Used To Be Journos, these high profile media insiders “break down broken news”.
They’re sassy, funny – and building new audience demographics who lap up their pointed media analysis.
Siobhan McHugh receives funding from Australian Research Council. She has previously worked with journalist Richard Baker.
– ref. Festering families, difficult truths and transcendent grace: best podcasts of 2025 – https://theconversation.com/festering-families-difficult-truths-and-transcendent-grace-best-podcasts-of-2025-270687
