Four Corners (1961 - current)
Current affairs program
Weekly x 60 minutes
Series synopsis:
ABC TV’s weekly national current affairs program that reports on events that shape Australia, broadcast weekly on Monday nights at 8.30 pm with repeats throughout the week on ABC 2.
Curator’s Notes:
Four Corners began on 19 August 1961 as Australia’s first national current affairs program, beginning as a magazine-style show, often with interviews conducted by its original presenter, the urbane Michael Charlton. It remains the ABC’s flagship television current affairs program, attracting the very best television journalists to its ranks. These days it has expanded into a 45 minute, issues-driven program, distinguished by the fine research of its investigative journalists combined with the techniques of skilled documentary filmmaking.
Four Corners aims to tell stories that widen the public debate around cutting edge issues. The program is often controversial and frequently leads, rather than follows, public opinion. Stories range from the plight of Australians caught up in natural disasters and war zones around the world to the struggle of Indigenous Australians for equal rights or the hardships of living in the bush.
Titles in this series
Four Corners – Aiding or Abetting 1983
It’s 1983 and President Ferdinand Marcos is president of the Philippines. Australia is donating $80 million of bilateral aid to the Philippine Government. The question is, how is this aid being spent? The Australian Government is accused of lining the ...
Four Corners – American Dreamers 2003
As the world waits for the inevitable invasion of Iraq, Jonathan Holmes takes us to Washington, where the Neo-cons have at last come into their own. The tragedy of 9/11 has allowed their radical views about American foreign policy to ...
Four Corners – Blue Death 1988
Wittenoom was home to more than 20,000 people who worked in the mining and processing of blue asbestos from 1944 until the mine closed in 1966. But blue asbestos is a killer and now, years after the mine closed, people ...
Four Corners – Car Wars 2006
Australia has one of the highest rates of car theft in the western world, so investigative reporter Chris Masters, explores how this has happened by talking to all interested parties of the car industry from the smash repairers to the ...
Four Corners – Far From Care 2006
This episode of Four Corners looks at the quality of health care on offer for Australians living in remote and rural areas – the world class health care for people in major cities is not available for people in the ...
Four Corners – Fixing Cricket 2000
When Hanse Cronje admitted that he’d taken money to throw matches, the world of cricket was thrown into crisis. Then it was disclosed that players and officials had known for years that matches were being fixed, while the cricketing establishment ...
Four Corners – French Connections 1985
An extraordinary docudrama created by reporter Chris Masters and producer Bruce Belsham about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour and the death of a Portuguese cameraman who happened to be sleeping on board. The boat was scuttled, ...
Four Corners – Inside the Circle 2005
In NSW, Aboriginal people are just 2% of the population and yet make up 20% of the prison population. Something is being done to change this terrible statistic. It’s a new system to deal with Aboriginal offenders who come up ...
Four Corners – The First Program 1961
The very first broadcast of Four Corners went to air on Saturday 19 August 1961. There is no record of the program as it went to air but what remains is a compilation tape of the items that made up ...
Four Corners – The Kilwa Incident 2005
The disturbing story of a massacre, its cover-up and a UN investigation and report that implicates an Australian mining company working in the far reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This fabulously wealthy country was once the Belgian ...
Four Corners – We’ll All Be Rooned 1982
Reporter Jim Downes takes us into the wheat belt in the marginal country of Coonamble, near Dubbo in NSW. The outback is now entering its fourth year of drought in this land of boom and bust. This time, the drought ...
