How did a New Zealand-born horse become one of Australia’s most loved and enduring icons? Political cartoonist and columnist Warren Brown visits Melbourne Museum where the legendary Phar Lap – or at least his preserved hide – stands in a glass case.

Curator Elizabeth Willis explains why this big red horse won our hearts and the circumstances around his mysterious death.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

How did a lifeboat, left to rot on the shores of Gallipoli, come to have pride of place at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra?

Curator John White tells the story of this little boat’s tumultuous journey as Warren Brown helps us imagine what it was like for those first Anzacs on the day that helped forge Australia’s identity.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Football, meatpies, kangaroos and Thomson cars?

Herbert Thomson was the first person to design, build and market a wholly Australian-made car, 50 years before the first Holden.

Warren Brown talks to Matthew Churchwood, who has studied the steam car since 1995.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Surfing may well be a quintessential Aussie pastime but who introduced us to the modern-day art of boardriding?

Warren Brown gets the lowdown from former world champion surfer Midget Farrelly. He tells the story of Duke Kahanamoku, a champion Hawaiian swimmer, who showed Australians how to ride a wave at Sydney’s Freshwater Beach in 1914, using a board he built himself from a lump of local timber.

Huge, heavy and completely finless, the first Australian surfboard has pride of place in the local surf club.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

What is Australia’s greatest book? In the National Library of Australia there is a 743-page volume that could lay claim to the title.

It is Lieutenant James Cook’s journal, written on board the Endeavour during his trip down under in 1770.

Warren Brown leafs through these precious pages to discover Cook’s first impressions and trace the beginning of Australia as we know it today.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

CSIRAC was the first fully automatic electronic digital computer to be built in Australia. It was also one of the first in the world, so why didn't Australia become a computer superpower?

Warren Brown talks to Dr Peter Thorne, who worked on CSIRAC in the 1960s, and literally walks through the world's only surviving 'first generation computer' at the Melbourne Museum.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

How did bohemian artist Norman Lindsay, famous for painting provocative nudes, end up producing one of Australia’s best-loved children’s books?

Cartoonist James Kemsley reveals the legend behind the creation of the first great Australian anti-hero – Albert the never-ending pudding – as Warren Brown takes a look at Lindsay’s original illustrations at the State Library of New South Wales.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

If you were forced to leave your home forever, what would you take with you?

Vietnamese refugee Cuc Lam took family photos and jewellery but sacrificed one precious possession to buy a suitcase, now in Melbourne’s Immigration Museum.

Cuc Lam talks to Warren Brown about her journey to Australia and how this small red vinyl bag was a symbol of a new beginning in a new country.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Despite being one of the greatest Australian films ever made, the 1919 silent movie The Sentimental Bloke was almost lost to the audiences of today. So how was it recovered?

Warren Brown visits the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra to bring you this tale from the vault.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Donald Bradman’s status as an Australian icon is without question. But can just one of the bats he used to enter the record books sum up his unparalleled cricketing career?

Warren Brown pulls on the gloves and picks up the willow at the State Library of South Australia for his choice among the treasured Bradman bats on display in the Adelaide collection.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

If you were to nominate one painting as Australia’s greatest, what would it be?

Curator Barry Pearce of the Art Gallery of New South Wales explains why Tom Roberts’ Bailed Up would be a contender.

Warren Brown ponders the extraordinary lengths to which Roberts went to complete his famous artwork and how close we once came to losing this national treasure.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

In countless contemporary re-creations, convict clothing is patterned with lots of thick black arrows, but is that what convicts really wore?

Curator Bridget Berry shows Warren Brown a 160-year-old convict shirt, discovered in Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

One of the most poignant objects in the Australian War Memorial is the battered survivor of our worst-ever naval disaster. What happened to this liferaft and why is it so special?

Warren Brown talks to curator John White about this tiny, war-ravaged float from HMAS Sydney whose entire crew of 645 was lost when the ship sank after a mysterious battle off the West Australian coast in 1941.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Why would a Rolls Royce imported to Australia as an official vehicle for Queen Elizabeth's 1970 visit end up as a rally car?

Warren Brown visits the Fox Classic Car Collection in Melbourne to find out.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.

Most Australians know that Banjo Paterson wrote the lyrics to 'Waltzing Matilda' but who wrote the music?

And what does it have to do with a rather oddly titled song called 'Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself'?

Warren Brown tracks down the original handwritten score at the National Library of Australia, where curator Robyn Holmes reveals the story behind the chance collaboration that created our national song.

Investigating National Treasures with Warren Brown is also available for purchase from the NFSA Online Shop.