Best Australian True Crime Podcasts: From Casefile to the Backpacker Murders

Australia punches above its weight in true crime podcasting. A country of 26 million has produced some of the most listened-to, most awarded, and most consequential podcasts in the global genre.

The reasons are partially cultural — Australia has a complicated relationship with violence, isolation, and the limits of the law in a vast country — and partially due to the exceptional quality of Australian investigative journalism. Here's what the country has produced that's worth your time.

Casefile: The Gold Standard

Casefile is, after Serial and Crime Junkie, probably the most listened-to true crime podcast in the English-speaking world. Its anonymous host — known only as "the author," a deliberate choice that keeps attention on the cases rather than the host's personality — narrates each case with meticulous research, measured delivery, and production quality that rivals any true crime in any medium.

Cases span Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond. The research standard is consistently high. The tone is cinematic without being dramatised: you feel the weight of what happened without the podcast lingering on graphic details for effect.

For listeners who want excellent narrative true crime without comedy or celebrity hosting, Casefile is the answer.

Rating: 9/10 — One of the best true crime podcasts ever made

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Teacher's Pet: Investigative Journalism That Changed Australian History

Teacher's Pet is one of the most consequential true crime podcasts ever produced.

In 2018, The Australian newspaper's journalist Hedley Thomas began investigating the 1982 disappearance of Lynette Dawson, a Sydney mother whose husband — former rugby league player and physical education teacher Chris Dawson — had been having an affair with a student.

Lynette Dawson disappeared in January 1982. Chris Dawson's teenage girlfriend moved into the family home shortly afterward. For 36 years, Dawson was never charged.

Thomas's podcast — which featured interviews with witnesses who had never spoken publicly, examination of previously overlooked evidence, and sustained public pressure — contributed directly to a 2018 arrest and a 2023 conviction. Chris Dawson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 24 years.

It is a landmark in Australian journalism.

Rating: 10/10 — One of the most important podcasts ever made in the genre

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Australian True Crime

Australian True Crime, hosted by Meshel Laurie and Emily Webb, covers Australian cases specifically — a useful counterpoint to the American dominance of the genre. The research is solid, the hosting is accessible, and the case selection focuses consistently on stories that don't get enough coverage outside Australia.

For listeners who specifically want Australian cases and want something more accessible than Casefile, this is the right choice.

Rating: 7/10 — Consistent and reliable

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The Australian Cases Every True Crime Fan Should Know

Australia's most significant true crime cases are underrepresented in international podcast coverage. These are the ones worth knowing:

Ivan Milat and the Backpacker Murders

Between 1989 and 1993, Ivan Milat murdered at least seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest south of Sydney. The victims — most of them international travellers hitchhiking on Australia's east coast — were found buried in shallow graves. Milat was convicted in 1996 and died in custody of cancer in 2019.

The case terrified an entire generation of Australians and essentially ended hitchhiking culture in the country. His nephew, Matthew Milat, later murdered a teenager in the same forest in 2010.

The Snowtown Murders

Between 1992 and 1999, John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and James Vlassakis murdered eleven people in South Australia — some of them people Bunting considered paedophiles, others killed for other reasons. Some victims' bodies were dissolved in acid in barrels of salt. The case is often called the Bodies in the Barrels murders.

It is one of the most disturbing crimes in Australian history, not least because of how long it continued while the perpetrators lived among their victims' communities.

The Beaumont Children

On 26 January 1966, three children — Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont, aged 9, 7, and 4 — disappeared from Glenelg Beach in Adelaide. No bodies were ever found. No one was ever charged. The case remains Australia's most famous unsolved disappearance and changed Australian childhood permanently: before the Beaumont children, young children in South Australia routinely travelled independently; afterward, that era ended.

The Beaumont children remain Australia's most haunting mystery.

The Wanda Beach Murders

On 11 January 1965, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt — both 15 — were murdered on Wanda Beach near Sydney. Both had been sexually assaulted. No one has ever been charged. The case has become a defining Australian cold case.

Casefile Presents produced an excellent examination of this case, and it remains one of the strongest arguments for sustained podcast investigation of historical Australian crimes.

Lindy Chamberlain: A Dingo and a Miscarriage of Justice

In 1980, Lindy Chamberlain reported that a dingo had taken her baby, Azaria, from the family's tent at Uluru. She was convicted of murder in 1982 on forensic evidence later shown to be flawed. She was released from prison in 1986 and fully exonerated in 2012 — 32 years after the event.

The case is one of the most prominent miscarriages of justice in Australian history and raises profound questions about how evidence is interpreted and how female suspects are treated.

Why Australian True Crime Has a Distinctive Character

Several factors give Australian true crime its specific flavour:

Geography. A country the size of the continental United States, with most of its population concentrated in coastal cities and vast uninhabited interior. The outback creates investigative challenges — remote crime scenes, bodies that decompose quickly in extreme heat, limited witness populations — that American or British crime doesn't.

History. A country founded as a penal colony, where the rule of law was initially exercised by convicts and their guards. The relationship between Australian institutions and the communities they serve has always been complicated.

Isolation. Australia's distance from the rest of the world meant that for much of the 20th century, international criminals could disappear there. Ivan Milat targeted backpackers partly because they were isolated from their home communities and their disappearances were harder to investigate.

Indigenous experience. Australia has a profound problem with violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls — a problem that receives insufficient attention in mainstream true crime. This is a significant gap in the Australian podcast landscape.

Summary

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