Nine Years of Life on the Line

9 years, 8 seasons, 2 miniseries.

290 podcasts, 211 veterans, 17 video episodes.

Over 2 million downloads.

Life on the Line Podcast turns 9 years old today. For the original team behind the podcast - Thistle Productions - our mission to tell veterans’ stories goes back 16 years, to ‘For School and Country’.

We’re proud of our work as the first Australian podcast interviewing military veterans: from 20 WWII veterans to veterans of peacekeeping operations and the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; from Victoria Cross recipients Mark Donaldson VC and Dan Keighran VC to General Sir Peter Cosgrove; from Special Forces soldiers and combat medics to stokers, engineers, pilots and signallers.

It has been an honour to record the life stories of such a wide variety of veterans, some of whom are now sadly no longer with us. We have always refused sponsorship and advertising; this has been a passion project to give back to our veterans. Half of our team have served or are serving, half are proud civilians.

For our first three years we released episodes in seasons twice a week, then weekly, then fortnightly. For the past three years it’s been more ad hoc as the team behind the microphone juggle competing focuses in our lives. What has been wonderful to see is so many other podcasts - run by veterans and civilians - taking up the cause and also interviewing veterans. We’re heartened to see so many more stories being told, and we take some pride in helping kickstart this in Australia.

While we don’t have plans to record new episodes for the foreseeable future, never say never. Meanwhile, our library of episodes is available wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, our website and many via the Australian War Memorial (seasons 5 and beyond: we are getting them there!).

Thank you for listening over the last 9 years, and Lest We Forget.

-the Thistle Productions team