Invisible Heroes

If you spend your professional life planning the best ways to protect the community, how heartbreaking would it be when you can't protect the ones you love most.
Andrew Fletcher is a unit commander for the NSW SES. During last year’s bushfires, while he worked on the NSW mid north coast coordinating relief efforts in the region, his own son lost his home to bushfire on the south coast. Andrew has served in the armed forces, fought fires, floods, been on the scene at horrific road accidents on our rural highways, and through it all he has remained focussed and caring - in his own words.

In his spare time he's fought for recognition for WWI nurses from his hometown of Bathurst, and has dipped his toe into natural heritage with the team at Jenolan Caves. With a life so colourfully lived, his story is one not to be missed.

CREDITS
Guest: Andrew Fletcher
Host: Madeleine West
Executive Producer: Elise Cooper
Editors: Hannah Bowman and Elise Cooper
Audio Engineer: David Cooper

LINKS

When it comes to sex work, people have a lot of assumptions. And more often than not they are of a pretty negative or judgemental nature. But, when you take a closer look at the industry you can see that escorts are care givers in the same way that nurses or occupational therapists are. But they’re working within a field that has long been associated with shame and seen as something to keep behind closed doors.

CREDITS

Host: Madeleine West
Guests: Ellie & Tash
Executive Producer: Elise Cooper
Editors: Hannah Bowman & Elise Cooper

Although many of us may not notice, modern life relies heavily on forest products. Did you recently receive a package in the post? Was it in a cardboard box?  Is there a printed label on the cans of veggies in your pantry? 

Yet, when most people hear the word ‘logging’ they’d probably immediately think of deforestation and environment destruction.

Ross Hampton and Dean Kearney are two men whose job it is to make sure that the trees in this country that are cut down for everyday products, are done so sustainably. Ross is the CEO of the Australian Forest Products Association and Dean is from Forestry NSW. For this episode of Invisible Heroes Madeleine sat down with Ross and Dean, in the middle of a forest, to find out if there is even such a thing as sustainable forestry. 

CREDITS  

What does a Private Investigator actually do? What sort of person hires a PI? In this episode of Invisible Heroes I am speaking with Ken Gamble -  a professional cybercrime investigator and surveillance specialist with 30 years experience in the private sector.  

Most recently Ken has also been consulting with the family of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez. Theo disappeared 18 months ago in far northern NSW in the Byron Bay region. The then 18 year old vanished after leaving a Byron Bay nightclub at around 11pm on May 31st of 2019. Ken has been looking into the case on behalf of Theo’s family – and thinks there’s more to his disappearance than we have been told. 

CREDITS  

What are you doing to save the planet? Would you quit your big time job in the city and take up planting rainforests? That sounds like a fantasy, but it’s one that Michael Martin made his reality. Along with Maximo Bottaro the duo founded Reforest Now, an organisation whose mission is to grow and plant trees that will reforest cleared land in subtropical Australia and stand for generations to come. 
Their vision is to see this region as Australia's largest expanse of subtropical rainforest once again.  Maximo and Michael sit down with Madeleine in the middle of a rainforest to explain why their work is so important, and what everyday people can do to help.

CREDITS