Afternoons for Monday 2 September 2013
1:10 Best Song Ever Written - Helen Butcher of Tawa nominated 'For You' by John Denver.
1:20 8 Months To Mars - Jesse Mulligan.
2:10 The Pelicans - Kevin Hayes - 'Rare vagrants' is the ornithological term for them. The Australian pelicans that blew into the Far North last summer. They came across the Tasman on a westerly air current, and they've set themselves up on a river near Dargaville. Locals say pelican sightings have been increasing steadily over the last few months.But it remains to be seen whether the blow-ins will be staying with us permanently or not. Kevin Hayes is a member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand in Tiki Punga, just North of Whangerei.
2:20 The Aboriginal Strike - Claire Bowes of BBC Witness - In 1946 Aboriginal workers on sheep farms in Australia went on strike to demand better pay and conditions - and release from a life of virtual slavery. Claire Bowes has been listening to the stories of some of the strikers recorded by Australian film-maker David Noakes in 1987 all of those featured are now deceased.
2:30 Reading - Ian Johnstone reading Episode 6 of 'Dance of the Peacocks' by James McNeish.
2:45 Feature Album - Unplugged - Eric Clapton (1992)
3:10 Feature Author - Bank Robbery For Beginners - Anthony Prince - As far as botched bank robberies go, what New Zealand born Anthony Prince from Henderson did in the ski town of Vail Colorado is a text book case of what NOT to do, on a cold March morning in 2005.
Anthony was raised in Byron Bay, and he and his mate robbed a bank where they were customers. They wore their name tags, spoke with Australian accents, took pictures of themselves with some of the $132 thousand U.S. dollars they stole, and tried to escape by going to an airport heavy with security.
They were called the dumb and dumber robbers, a title he's come to terms with, when they got caught the next day. Anthony Prince spent 4 and a half years in an American prison where he had plenty of time to think about why teenagers can sometimes make very bad choices.
He's written a book called Bank Robbery For Beginners , A Story of Criminal Stupidity and Its Very Serious Consequences
3:30 Kiwifruit Testing - Alison Ballance - The kiwifruit that you see in supermarkets at the moment were picked back in autumn, when they were still very hard. Since then they've been stored in special conditions that are designed to keep them in perfect condition until they arrive in your kitchen ready to eat. Alison Ballance heads to a Plant and Food Research lab where scientists are preparing fruit for a specially-trained panel of kiwifruit-tasting experts, who will be comparing the new 'sweet green' kiwifruit variety kept under two different storage conditions.
4:06 Neil Miller and Vicki Hyde are on The Panel - we'll talk about Syria, and the backdown by the leaders of the West. What we can do to improve our road safety, there's a National Traffic Conference on in Rotorua, after a weekend where hundreds of drivers got pinged by speed cameras on back roads.... and to how much avail? Do you want to have live entertainment on planes? Richard Branson thinks you do. The Labour party warns about possible cost over-runs with the Sky City Convention Centre so that's a topic we'll return to on a day when submissions are being heard in Auckland. The living wage, and the asset sales referendum, we'll discuss those too.