‘A Great First Cause in Colonisation’: Early Radio, ‘Transceiver-Listening’, Gender and Settlement in Australia

Abstract

Historical acoustemology allows us to contemplate practices and meanings of non-Indigenous listening in Central Australia and determine how they aligned with processes of settlement. In the 1930s, a new form of listening emerged among remote non-Indigenous women. Modern communities of female transceiver-listeners used radio for two-way communication and networking, and feminist broadcasters quickly picked up the model, undermining pessimistic analyses of early Australian radio and female listeners as passive consumers. But writers integrated transceiver-listening into a narrative of nation that sought to colonise remote Australia with and through white women listeners, and linked transceiver listening to a pervasive metaphor of ‘inland silence’ that was conceptually deaf to Indigenous presence. Transceiver-listening also usurped forms of communication involving Indigenous people, putting up barriers towards them just as it lowered others. Transceiver-listening had powerful yet complex impacts on modernising remote life, feminist broadcasting, and the settlement of the Australian interior.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ernestine Hill, Flying Doctor Calling: The Flying Doctor Service of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson and the FDS, 1947).

2 Ibid., 97.

3 James G. Mansell, “Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present, and Future,” Music Research Annual 2 (2021): 1–19. On acoustemology, see e.g. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and K.H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–136; Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, “Introduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. Novak and Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1–11; and Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

4 On Central Australia or Centralia in an early tourist context, see e.g. James Goulding, Centralian Tourism: The Early Years (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). On the history of what became the Flying Doctor Service, see e.g. Kay Batstone, Outback Heroes: 75 Years of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (Melbourne: Lothian, 2003); Rodney Champness, Outback Radio: From Flynn to Satellites (Mooroopna: Champness, 2004). On the history of the Northern Territory Aerial Medical Service, see e.g. Brian Reid, “The Origin and Development of Aerial Medical Services in the Northern Territory,” Journal of Northern Territory History 16 (2005): 55–63.

5 Works on non-Indigenous historical acoustemology include: Paul Carter, The Sound in Between: Voice, Space, Performance (Sydney: New South Wales University Press and Strawberry Hills: New Endeavour Press, 1992); Diane Collins, “Acoustic Journeys: Exploration and the Search for an Aural History of Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 128 (2006): 1–17; Amanda Harris, “Hearing Aboriginal Music Making in Non-Indigenous Accounts of the Bush from the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media, ed. Harris (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 73–97; Andrew Wright Hurley, “Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Australian Exploration,” Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 2 (2019): 155–70; Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Ian Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1995). For some examples of Indigenous acoustemologies in Central Australia, see e.g. Yasmine Musharbash, “A Short Essay on Monsters, Birds and Sounds of the Uncanny,” Semiotic Review 2 (2016): 1–11; Georgia Curran, “Bird/Monsters and Contemporary Social Fears in the Central Desert of Australia,” in Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters, ed. Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 126–42. For more on sonic environment and hearing in Central Australian Indigenous communities, see also Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, “The Silence of the Donkeys: Sensorial Entanglements Between People and Animals at Willowra and Beyond,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 3, no. 1 (2021): 114–31.

6 See e.g. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the motif of silence, see e.g. Andrew Wright Hurley, “Eerie Sounds, Then and Now: Listening in to Mid-Century Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapes,” Journal of Australian Studies 46, no. 2 (2022): 211–26.

7 On the sounds of modernity, see e.g. Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon, Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound (Canberra: ANU Press, 2007); Josephine Hoegaerts and Kaarina Kilpiö, “Noisy Modernization? On the History and Historicization of Sound,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 7 (2019): 610–18. The timeframe of aural modernity, as applied to Europe and America, does not directly apply in Australia, with Diane Collins asking whether some modern “keynotes” can be traced to earlier points in time, such as the loud Gold Rush: Diane Collins, “A ‘Roaring Decade’: Listening to the Australian Goldfields,” in Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity, ed. Damousi and Deacon, 7–18.

8 Collins, “A ‘Roaring Decade’,” 9. See also Collins, “Acoustic Journeys”; Hurley, “Whistling the Death March.”

9 Collins, “Acoustic Journeys”; Hurley, “Whistling the Death March.”

10 On gun reports, see e.g. Diane Collins, “Startling Reports: Gunfire as Social Soundscape in Early Colonial Australia,” in A Cultural History of Sound Memory and the Senses, ed. Joy Damousi and Paula Hamilton (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 109–22; Andrew Wright Hurley, “Reports, Silences and Repercussion: Wondering about the Ballistic Biography of the Leichhardt Gunplate,” Rethinking History 24, nos. 3–4 (2020): 543–60.

11 On Gold Rush sounds, see Collins, “A ‘Roaring Decade’.”

12 On one early motorist, see e.g. L.W. Parkin, “Madigan, Cecil Thomas (1889–1947),” Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, ANU, published first in hardcopy 1986), https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/madigan-cecil-thomas-7455 (accessed February 2, 2023).

13 Carter; Collins, “Acoustic Journeys”; Hurley, “Whistling the Death March.”

14 On this process in other settings, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

15 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

16 On the gender of station masters, and their everyday existence, see Ernestine Hill, The Territory: The Classic Saga of Australia’s Far North (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1952), 118.

17 Ibid., 137.

18 Ibid., 111. Vortex shedding is an audible oscillation in pressure as the air passed over the (non-streamlined) wire. See also Eve Pownall, The Singing Wire: The Story of the Overland Telegraph (Sydney: Collins, 1973).

19 Lesley Johnson, The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio (London: Routledge, 1988), 70; Robert Henderson Croll, Wide Horizons (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1937), 58–61.

20 Croll, 61.

21 See e.g. Dora Pech, A Hermannsburg Love Story: Dora’s 1935 Journal, ed. Ruth and Eric Fiebig (Fulham: Fiebig, 1996); Eleanor Hogan, Into the Loneliness: The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates (Sydney: New South, 2021), 190. Compare Croll, 58–61.

22 Johnson, 28.

23 Johnson, 28–29, 193–94. On wireless nationalism in Europe, see also e.g. Simon J. Potter, Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 79, and ch. 4.

24 Johnson, 194.

25 Leigh Edmonds, “Wireless Waves as Cultural Glue: Tethering the Bush and the City in Western Australia Between the Wars,” Media Politics and Identity 15 (1994): 92–109.

26 Johnson acknowledges that broadcasting might have developed in different ways, with urban left-wing commentators like E.R. Voigt arguing in the 1920s that it could be a more democratic medium if it involved a true talk-back (i.e. telegraphy) functionality. However, the underlying principle of non-competition between telegraphy and broadcasting and other factors quickly made urban and regional wireless into a one-way medium, Johnson asserts, that restricted listeners into a limiting domestic space.

27 See e.g. Jeannine Baker, “Woman to Woman. Australian Feminists Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s,” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 93 (2017): 292–308; Catherine Fisher, “Broadcasting the Woman Citizen: Dame Enid Lyons’ Macquarie Network Talks,” Lilith 23 (2017): 34–46; Catherine Fisher, “World Citizens: Australian Women’s Internationalist Broadcasts, 1930–1939,” Women’s History Review 28, no. 4 (2019): 626–44. On gender and Australian broadcasting, see also e.g. Kylie Andrews, “Don’t Tell Them I Can Type: Negotiating Women’s Work in Production in the Post-War ABC,” Media International Australia 161, no. 1 (2016): 28–37; Justine Lloyd, Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC and ABC (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020). See also e.g. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Christine Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

28 Hill also only rates a minor mention in Ken Inglis’s landmark study of the early ABC, Ken Inglis, This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932–1983, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006). She is not mentioned at all by Johnson. Born Ernestine Hemmings, Hill (1899–1972) is less well known today, despite Eleanor Hogan’s recent double biography (with Hill’s sometime collaborator Daisy Bates as its other subject. The following biographical sketch derives from Margriet Bonnin, “A Study of Australian Descriptive and Travel Writing, 1929–1945” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1980), 22–28; M.R. Bonnin and Nancy Bonnin, “Hill, Mary Ernestine (1899–1972),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/biography/hill-mary-ernestine-10503/text18637, Meaghan Morris, “The Great Australian Loneliness’: On Writing an Inter-Asian Biography of Ernestine Hill,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 35, no. 3 (2014): 238–49; and Hogan. Daisy Bates (1863–1951) was a legendary (and controversial) figure who lived for many years in close vicinity to Indigenous people at the Ooldea siding in South Australia, providing welfare to them. She wrote many articles about Indigenous people and, with the extensive collaboration of Hill, published The Passing of the Aborigines in 1938.

29 Flynn was a clergyman and he played on the fact that national imaginaries often have a religious dimension, including in the Australian setting: Ann Curthoys, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology,” Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 61 (1999).

30 For a descriptive account of radio use in remote Australia, see Champness. For instances of how mission stations, such as the Finke River Mission, used the technology, see e.g. Anon, “Blacks Fascinated by Pedal Radio,” News (South Australia), May 13, 1940, 6.

31 Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 33. The last quote following Baldwin Spencer. For sidelights on Indigenous messengers and their work ancillary to transceiver-listening, see e.g. Clyde Fenton, Flying Doctor, 3rd ed. (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1992), 163.

32 Anon, “Pedal Radio Gives News,” News (Adelaide), November 7, 1947, 1; Anon, “Broadcasts Over Pedal Radio,” The National Advocate (Bathurst), October 17, 1944, 2.

33 By 1954 it was 180,000 annually: Anon, “Pedal Radio Anniversary,” The Age, June 18, 1954, 4.

34 Anon, “Pedal Radio Reports,” The Daily Telegraph, November 25, 1940, 9.

35 Anon, “Pedal Radio Anniversary,” The Age, June 18, 1954, 4.

36 Hill’s only son Robert, born in 1924 shortly before she assumed the surname Hill, is understood to have been the son of R.C. Packer, the Managing Director of Associated Press, and Hill’s wanderlust, which became more restless from 1931, may have sprung partly from that liaison. See generally Hogan.

37 Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness, rev. ed. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991).

38 Other writers included Ion Idriess and Bill Harney. See e.g. Bonnin. See also Russell McGregor, “Excursions through Emptiness: Interwar Travel Writing on Northern Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 41, no. 4 (2017): 421–34.

39 Meaghan Morris, “Panorama: The Live, the Dead and the Living,” in Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture, rev. ed. (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 40–79, at 51.

40 Morris, “The Great Australian Loneliness.”

41 Hogan, 89.

42 Carol Ferrier, ed., As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 183.

43 All quotes from Morris, “Panorama,” 51.

44 Morris, “Panorama,” 51.

45 Hogan, 178.

46 See e.g. Ernestine Hill, “Women of the Dead End,” The ABC Weekly, August 17, 1940, 43, which was placed next to an article (by another writer) called “Let’s Talk of Clothes.” On her writing for The ABC Weekly, see generally Hogan, 178–80.

47 Morris, “The Great Australian Loneliness,” n.p.

48 Although it had previously had a female Commissioner, the Commission was now mandated to include a woman. See generally Inglis. On Hill’s predecessor, Commissioner May Couchman, see e.g. Michael J. Socolow, “Comparing Australian, British, Canadian, and U.S. Broadcasting: The 1934 Radio Reports Compiled by Australian Broadcasting Commissioner E.M.R. Couchman,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 28, no. 1 (2021): 86–106.

49 Inglis, 109.

50 Hogan, 189.

51 Hill resigned due to ill health springing from concern about her son’s conscription, and in exasperation at the administrative load that came with the job and hampered her many writing projects: Hogan.

52 Anon, “Flying Doctor Busy at Cordillo Downs,” Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), January 13, 1944, 1.

53 Hogan, 189.

54 Ion Idriess, Flynn of the Inland (Exile Bay: ET T Imprint, 2020 [1932]); Fenton.

55 See e.g. Fred McKay, Alf Traeger: The Pedal Radio Man (Brisbane: Boolarong Press, 1995); John Healey, “Memoirs of the Pedal Wireless Man, Part 1,” History SA, Newsletter of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 149 (July 2000); Batstone; Champness; Pauline Payne, “Alf Traeger and the Pedal Radio,” Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 46 (2018): 85–98.

56 Henrietta Drake Brockman, “An Epic of the Air,” The West Australian, November 29, 1947, 4.

57 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 64, emphasis added.

58 Idriess, 183.

59 Johnson.

60 Payne, 90–91.

61 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 66.

62 Ibid. These also became known as “Galah Sessions,” see Payne, 94.

63 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 97.

64 Ibid., 100–01.

65 Payne, 91.

66 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 98, 97.

67 Idriess, 197.

68 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 113, 114, 113 (emphasis added).

69 Quoted in Baker, “Woman to Woman.”

70 The gendered addition was not discussed in the Reserve Bank’s ‘reveal’: https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2019/mr-19-02.html (accessed January 24, 2024).

71 It also sustained a partly countervailing discourse of wireless internationalism too; see Potter.

72 Henrietta Drake-Brockman put it forcefully in her gendered review of Flying Doctor Calling: “That a woman should make this record [of the Flying Doctor Service] is right, too, for it is the women of the outback to whom this service means most,” 4.

73 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, v, emphasis added.

74 Ibid., 85. See also Richard Venus, “Powering the Mantle of Safety,” in 19th Australasian Engineering Heritage Conference Proceedings (Mildura: Engineers Australia, 2017), 478–510, at 490.

75 Curthoys, 1–19, at 7.

76 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 56.

77 Quoted in ibid., 54. See also Flynn’s 1919 words, quoted in Venus, 480.

78 For Jesus’ miraculous healing of the deaf and mute man, see Mark 7: 31–7.

79 McGregor, “Excursions through Emptiness.” See also Adam Gall, “Ernestine Hill and the North: Reading Race and Indigeneity in The Great Australian Loneliness and The Territory,” Journal of Australian Studies 37, no. 2 (2013): 194–207.

80 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 136.

81 Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia (London: John Murray, 1938). On the ‘dying race’ theory, see Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australian and the Doomed Race Theory: 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

82 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 103.

83 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre (accessed 28 Feb 2024). For a recent account of the impact of the massacre on non-Indigenous opinion see Catherine Bishop, Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ: Australia’s “Mission Girl” Annie Lock (Adelaide: Wakefield Press 2021), 179–96.

84 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 103, 5.

85 Ibid., 103.

86 Ibid., 67. See also Hill, The Territory, 117, on Indigenous people’s earlier role in conveying telegrams from telegraph stations to their addressees.

87 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 66.

88 Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 29.

89 McGrath, 64, 49 (the latter quoting a 1928 report by Queensland Protector of Aborigines, J.W. Bleakley).

90 On relations between the missus and Aboriginal domestic workers, see e.g. McGrath, 49–103.

91 Hill, Flying Doctor Calling, 66.

92 See e.g. Anon, “The Week’s Best-Sellers,” The Daily News (Perth), November 29, 1947, 6; Anon, “Tastes in Books were Changing,” The Sun (Sydney), December 14, 1947, 11.

93 Quoted in Anon, “History,” The Royal Flying Doctor Service, https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/about-the-rfds/history/ (accessed February 10, 2024). See also Anon, “Queens Visit of Great Benefit to Commonwealth and Empire,” The Townsville Daily Bulletin, May 22, 1954, 2; Anon, “Princess Given Australian Book,” The Herald (Melb), November 15, 1947, 7.