The earliest surviving live radio broadcast in Australia is not a political speech or a news story. It is the ABC live call of the 1932 Melbourne Cup, won in a surprise flourish by a three-year-old stallion named Peter Pan. The second-oldest live recording is coincidentally from the same November day: commentary of a boxing match held in front of a rowdy crowd. I heard these gems on the National Film and Sound Archive’s centenary offering Who Listens to the Radio?, hosted by NFSA chief executive Patrick McIntyre. It has a treasure-trove of potential but, like so many other institutional podcasts, fails to deliver fully on its promise.
One big surprise is just how unAustralian the earliest commentators sound, with accents so British they might as well have been broadcasting straight from Buckingham Palace. Apart from a single show – a 1930s comedy called Dad and Dave from Snake Gully – radio accents did not become truly Ozzified until the 1970s. “Now you’ve got people like me,” broadcaster Wendy Harmer remarks, cheerfully describing her own voice as “brakes on a tram”. Then she adds, “I guess the challenge coming along is to see how we embrace other accents on radio. I don’t think we’re quite there yet with how we deal with that and the way that we listen.”
She was right. The series singularly failed to reflect the multicultural remit of Australian broadcasting. It neglected to mention First Nations people or Indigenous broadcasting at all until halfway through the fifth and penultimate episode. That was devoted to “community broadcasting”, shoehorning Indigenous Australians, the queer community and Australians speaking other languages into one massive, generic other. It’s an abject lesson in how, if earlier failings are not explicitly addressed, an orthodox chronological approach can end up reproducing and reinforcing historical marginalisation.
Another tricky listen is the National Gallery of Australia’s Artists’ Artists. It’s definitely a red flag when a podcast’s name is impossible to say gracefully, and it’s a bigger issue when the podcast’s name makes no sense when heard, rather than read. This conversational series asks luminaries such as Bridget Riley and Julie Rrap to discuss their favourite works from the NGA’s collection with host Jennifer Higgie. With such interesting guests this should have been a wildly exciting listen, but the sparks fail to fly.
The conversations feel stilted, with the artists giving lengthy answers that sound scripted. The problem lies in concept and execution: this approach is so safe, so planned, so controlled, that it falls flat. Art on the radio has always been a hard sell and this podcast doesn’t cater to those listeners who are unfamiliar with the NGA’s massive collection. It made me ashamed of my lack of knowledge and I ended up feeling less, rather than more, informed.
There’s a literary equivalent that actually comes straight from Buckingham Palace. The Queen’s Reading Room, launched by Queen Camilla’s literacy charity, allows listeners to peek into the bookshelves and bedside reading stacks of famous authors. The charity says it has topped book podcast charts in Australia, Canada and Britain but – as a voracious reader and sometime royal voyeur – I felt royally cheated.
The Queen consort herself is missing in action. The 23-minute episode featuring author Ann Patchett has a miserly 29 seconds of Camilla, who is seated next to a distractingly noisy fire. She uses her half-minute to share her view that it’s “sometimes very useful to re-read a book”. In another episode, she reveals some audiobooks have brilliant narrators, while others have “atrocious” ones. Camilla’s tiny segments are standalone microaggressions in banality, often unrelated to the rest of the episode. Perhaps it’s for the best that her role in the podcast is so minimal.
The authors – often muffled by bad sound quality – are left talking to themselves, punctuated by bursts of pomp-and-circumstance music. To give them their due, the writers are a delight, but they struggle with the burden of carrying the whole show. We learn that Sir Ben Okri adores Rilke’s poetry, that Patchett has never managed to finish Middlemarch – she yearns to and is sure that it would be one of the best books she’s ever read, if she could just get past page 300 – and that Ian Rankin and Santa Montefiore are secretly addicted to Jilly Cooper’s horsey romps. I could sense Camilla champing at the bit to be allowed to just indulge in a long, juicy gossip with Jilly Cooper, and to hell with all the others. That almost certainly would have been a more revealing, and entertaining, reflection of the Queen’s actual reading room.
My favourite podcast monarch is drag queen Courtney Act, who hosts Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection. Courtney Act first made her name competing on Australian Idol and RuPaul’s Drag Race, but here she is tasked with guiding us through the queer stories told by works of art in the NGV collection. In terms of its mission, it’s similar to Artists’ Artists, but this time it works.
One reason is the set-up: Courtney Act interviews a curator to provide the necessary context before we meet each of the featured artists. Queer works because no knowledge is assumed and each work of art is described in detail without condescending to the audience.
It also works because of the unfettered enthusiasm of the guests, such as curator Ted Gott describing Henri III’s 16th century court of mignons (cross-dressing courtiers) and artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger discussing how hard it is to sell paintings of gay women having sex inside cars. Courtney Act is an engaged and thoughtful interviewer and we get to hear her in the act of discovery, thinking out loud. It gives us the delight of eavesdropping on actual conversations that don’t sound scripted.
When I worked for the BBC World Service there was a category of stories we’d term “worthy but dull”. Those three words cover so many institutional podcasts, which often sound bloodless and sterile, as if they’ve been made by an army of consultants ticking items off a checklist. Podcasts that work are those that sound like a labour of love, over-brimming with ambition and experimentation and – above all – passion.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
July 13, 2024 as “Institutional grey”.
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