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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374428 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Voice and its Doubles
Media and Music in Northern Australia
By Daniel Fisher
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7442-8
CHAPTER 1
Mediating Kinship
Radio's Cultural Poetics
Never has there been a genuine cultural institution that was not legitimized by the expertise it inculcated in the audience through its forms and technology.
— WALTER BENJAMIN, "Reflections on Radio" (1931)
Switch on the radio, twist the dial, and tune in your local Aboriginal station, and whether you are in Sydney (Koori Radio 93.7 FM) or Brisbane (4AAA "Murri Country" 98.9 FM), Alice Springs (8KIN 100.5 FM) or Broome (Radio Goolari 99.7 FM), you'll soon hear radio requests, music directed by a caller to friends and family, often given voice by a DJ who relates their message word for word, transmitting terms of endearment as reported speech. Aboriginal Australians from across the country draw on radio to address kin with messages that bring together intimate speech and music on a public stage. On Sundays one can tune in to The Mary G. Show coming from northern and western Australia, in which radio personality Mark Bin Baker takes on the persona of an Indigenous auntie, Mary G., to field requests and greetings from listeners across Australia and to spin the sounds of country music and Aboriginal rock bands. Mary G.'s flirting and innuendo with male callers and her constant willingness to entertain requests and send dedications garner Mary G. a national audience, one she has cultivated through request-based programming for more than a decade. In Darwin, capital city of the Northern Territory, radio producers at TEABBA host a weekly request show that seeks to link the bush communities of Australia's Top End with the hospitals and prisons of Darwin's suburban sprawl. In southeast Queensland, 4AAA continues its long-standing practice of producing a three-hour program dedicated to requests. That program, like many others, began life as a means of allowing incarcerated Aboriginal men the opportunity to speak to their families. Such radio programming remains significant even today, when mobile phones and online social media might supplant radio as cornerstones of Indigenous communications infrastructure.
Indigenous call-in request shows are such a routine and expected feature of radio programming that they practically define the medium in Australia. These programs provide a foundational framework for audio broadcasting and, understood by their producers in terms of the kinship connection they enable, are frequently said to be the functional raison d'être of Aboriginal radio. In these terms such programs are where Indigenous broadcasting achieves what Theodor Adorno called ubiquity (2009: 93), an idea that draws together the formal, expressive standardization of commercial radio with its mediated dispersal, its capacity to be everywhere but also nowhere in particular. For Adorno this taken-for-grantedness in spatial dispersal perhaps occludes how ubiquity also depends on repetition and reproduction, and as he tropes the standardized broadcast of symphonic music against the repetition of the advertisement, both gain a kind of power in their reduplication. Request programs, however, are also a place where Indigenous Australians exercise a particular expertise, in Walter Benjamin's (2015) terms, displaying a practical mastery in bending broadcast technologies to the politics of kinship. Understanding radio's significance in Indigenous lives, unpacking how radio sound comes to matter so deeply to people, depends on grappling with this imbrication of kinship and broadcasting, on understanding the specific expertise that lies at the heart of Indigenous radio's ubiquity.
The institutional and technological network such programming animates consists of sizable Aboriginal radio stations in a half dozen cities, and smaller Indigenous broadcasters and retransmitting facilities in another hundred remote settlements and country towns. And while these latter occasionally operate autonomously to produce local programming, they also link together by means of satellite networks and telephone relays, frequently convening a national, intra-Aboriginal audience for shared broadcasts. On each broadcast one hears the sounds of country music; one always hears family members addressing one another as kin in requests that both evoke and transcend geographic and institutional distance; and each program relies on digital technologies of sound production and the material technology of satellite and telephone networks to shape its signal and to address a broad, intra-Aboriginal audience. These programs address populations whose frequent movements across Australia follow institutional routes; through hospitals and prisons, government-sponsored conferences, and ritual and ceremonial gatherings, and across geographically dispersed networks of kin. And it is this dispersed, heterogeneous, and mobile population that becomes, in the address of radio DJs, "all one mob." The networks I describe here are thus less about the communication of information and more about the manifestation and revivification of Indigenous distinction and difference through the rubric of kinship relatedness, a mode of imagining mediation that has, over the past two decades, come to characterize radio itself, turning broadcasting technologies toward Australian ends. The transduction of vocal and musical sound by radio technologies accomplishes then the mediation of mediation, an amplification of kinship address and reference in a sonic, mass-mediated, densely technologized, and reflexive form.
The networking of Indigenous radio broadcasters begins, however, with the sudden expansion in the 1980s of Australia's satellite broadcasting capabilities. In 1979 the Australian government established a national broadcasting company, AUSSAT. Until its privatization in 1991 AUSSAT served as the national satellite broadcasting corporation, managing Australia's investment in forms of orbital communications infrastructure. Its first satellite, the AUSSAT A1, was launched from the space shuttle Discovery in 1985 and commenced operations that same year, joined later in 1985 by AUSSAT A2 and in 1987 by AUSSAT A3. Together the footprint of these satellites stretched across some of the most remote and difficult-to-reach areas of central and western Australia. These events were a cause of concern in Australia, as many began to worry early on about the negative consequences that might accompany the introduction of satellite broadcasting across remote Australia, and their potential to displace local languages through English-language, mainstream Australian (and American) programming (see Ginsburg 1994; Molnar and Meadows 2001; Michaels 1994; cf. Batty 2003; Featherstone and Rennie 2011). This led to efforts to prepare and protect Aboriginal people from what many saw as a tidal wave of English-language, commercial programming that would swamp the small, localized languages and cultural practices found across the remote Northern Territory and western Australia.
The advent of satellites and the commercial broadcasting they would bring also instigated the employment of American anthropologist Eric Michaels, who conducted research with the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory from 1982 to 1986, working closely with Warlpiri man Francis Kelly in a series of videotapes produced in accord with forms of local social organization and demonstrating how Warlpiri people might produce a distinctively Aboriginal television (see Michaels 1994; cf. O'Regan 1990; Molnar and Meadows 2001). In addition, the commonwealth government commissioned a report on possible responses to the impending introduction of satellite broadcasting, Eric Wilmott's Out of a Silent Land (1984). As Faye Ginsburg has suggested (1993), Indigenous control over satellite networked broadcasting gained further traction in practical terms through the actions of Indigenous media activists themselves. CAAMA, for instance, then largely a radio and music initiative in Alice Springs, successfully proposed to take on regional Indigenous television broadcasting and subsequently established the Imparja TV service, while urban activists in Townsville and Sydney, whom I describe in more detail below, turned to community radio legislation to establish local, terrestrial stations and began to advocate for such control more broadly. In part informed by Wilmott's report, in part by the ongoing work of Kelly and Michaels, and in part by a series of radio and video experiments at CAAMA in Alice Springs and in community stations in Townsville and Sydney, remote Indigenous participation and production became the preferred response to these events.
Following the suggestions of Out of a Silent Land, from 1987 remote Indigenous communities began receiving equipment under a governmental scheme designed to counter the imposition of English-language broadcasting. The Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (henceforth BRACS) aimed to provide remote communities with the capacity to produce and insert their own programming, lending them control over the kinds of audio and visual media their communities consumed. By 1996, 103 communities in all had received equipment including a small video camera, radio microphones, and broadcasting gear. Yet none of this gear came with training or local infrastructure, and it occasionally arrived in a remote community without any prior warning: Governmental support for the program's implementation, then, was haphazard and ad hoc. Soon, however, a new generation of satellites (the Aurora series) began broadcasting, and with the amplification of broadcast reach they brought from 1992 came a second program, the BRACS Revitalization scheme, which aimed to upgrade and repair equipment and train local people in its use. As part of this second scheme a series of eight Remote Indigenous Media Organizations were granted funding. Many of these organizations, however, had already been incorporated under the Aboriginal Councils and Association Act (1976), including CAAMA in Alice Springs, as well as TEABBA, which was incorporated in 1989 to assist remote communities of Arnhem Land and the Daly River region with training and technical support for the BRACS equipment they had begun to receive. Between the early 1980s and early 1990s, then, a satellite-based Indigenous broadcasting infrastructure took shape around Australia.
This story, grounded in technological investment, corporate institution, and governmental policy, provides one narrative through which to grasp the emergence of remote Indigenous broadcasting. And while it may be hard to overstate the impact of the AUSSAT satellite services on the worlds of remote Indigenous Australia, these developments are not adequate to account for the durability and distinction of Indigenous broadcasting in Australia, the ways it draws and holds together a technological infrastructure, an institutional network, and a series of conventions and meaningful expressive forms to which kinship has become central. This chapter analyzes this mediatized Aboriginal domain, exploring the productive interaction between these forms of satellite-networked broadcast media and the geographic dispersal of kin networks. In part, I show that radio's significance for Aboriginal people has been overdetermined by the charged value of Indigenous kinship in Australia. Following a century of state policies that removed children from their communities and families, and after several decades of activism and public debate on the meanings of those policies in the present, "Aboriginal kinship" labels a contentious, politicized focus of postcolonial governmentality and public discourse — one that for Aboriginal people raises specters of familial loss and the violent rupture of cultural belonging. As I describe more fully below, Aboriginal kinship has also taken center stage in new, publicly charged debates over how, and to what extent, the Australian state should effectively govern Indigenous family life.
Today these links are further troubled by the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people incarcerated in Australia's prisons. In 2004, for instance, Aboriginal people made up approximately 21 percent of Australia's incarcerated population, but just over 2 percent of its total population (ABS 2002, 2004). In 2011, these numbers appeared yet more stark, with Indigenous Australians accounting for 26 percent of Australia's prison population, though now 3 percent of Australia's population (ABS 2011). A recent review by Don Weatherburn, director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, underscores that even in an era when the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Australian prisons is widely understood as a social justice issue and as manifestly inequitable, the numbers continue to grow:
The problem is getting worse. Between 2001 and 2011, the Indigenous imprisonment rate increased (on an age-standardised basis) by more than 51 per cent, while the (age-standardised) non-Indigenous imprisonment rate in Australia increased by less than four per cent. The ratio of Indigenous to non-Indigenous imprisonment rates rose from 10.2 in 2001 to 14.8 in 2012, an increase of more than 40 per cent (ABS 2012a, p. 56). ... We may reasonably suppose that many of those who do not have any contact with the criminal justice system in any one year have had contact with it in the past or will have contact with it in the future. (Weatherburn 2014: 3–4)
High levels of incarceration also affect children whose parents, grandparents, or elder siblings may be incarcerated, certainly, but these levels also directly index children's own encounters with the agents and institutions of Australia's criminal justice system. Weatherburn again digested the statistical evidence:
On an average day in 2009–10, only one in every 1886 Australian juveniles (0.4 per cent of young people aged 10–17) were in custody. The custody rate for Indigenous young people (1 in 146), however, was more than twenty-four times higher than the custody rate for non-Indigenous young people (1 in 3626). In 2009–10, Indigenous young people were being taken into juvenile justice custody at the rate of more than fifty a month. As with adults, the rate of entry into custody is increasing. In the four years to 2009–10, the number of Indigenous young people sentenced to a term of detention rose by 25 per cent. (Weatherburn 2014: 6)
One consequence of the mass incarceration of Indigenous Australians can be seen in the frequent separation by both geographic and institutional boundaries of Indigenous people from their kin and communities. Such incarceration plays a large role in the family histories and memories of many of my interlocutors, and also in Indigenous expressive culture, with young men penning songs about jail time and request shows seeking to gather together dispersed family members locked away in jail. As Weatherburn also notes, such frequent contact with prisons also means that the stigma that might accrue to a stint in jail for a white Australian is much less marked within Indigenous Australia. But it is the relation between kinship and incarceration that is so important for the history of radio and that I focus on here.
Making requests (and making request shows) are cultural practices through which the work of radio and the work of kinship turn into one another. "Linking people up" is what radio is held to do in northern Australia, and as such the technology resonates with a broader, two-decades-old project of linking up families, communities, and dispersed members of Australia's "Stolen Generations": those Indigenous people taken from their families and communities and sent as children to state institutions and foster homes over much of the twentieth century. It also resonates with media activists' efforts to link up incarcerated men and women with their families and communities. The idiomatic distinctions between these different senses of "linking up" are often erased in practical terms as radio producers and listeners create broadcasts that center on connections between spatially and institutionally dispersed kin. In the course of this productive erasure, radio request programs celebrate kinship connections, while kinship itself comes to typify the kinds of immediacy, intimacy, and connection that radio enables. Kinship thus (pre)occupies radio, lending the medium value within a politically charged history of Aboriginal loss and at a contemporary moment in which linking up has taken on a value of its own that my interlocutors often felt to be self-evident. In brief, then, this chapter analyzes the "comobilization" of broadcast media and kinship in northern Australia. The mediatization of kinship's mediation, I argue, enables its contemporary, recursive value as an icon of Aboriginal distinction and grants its ubiquity a metacultural character.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acronyms viiAcknowledgments ix
Prologue. Staging the Voice xiii
Introduction 1
1. Mediating Kinship: Radio's Cultural Poetics 43
2. Aboriginal Country 80
3. From the Studio to the Street 114
4. From Radio Skid Row to the Reconciliation Station 143
5. Speaking For or Selling Out? Dilemmas of Aboriginal Cultural Brokerage 182
6. A Body for the Voice 222
Conclusion. An Immanent Alterity 250
Notes 267
References 287
Index 307
What People are Saying About This
"The Voice and Its Doubles is a beautifully crafted theoretical and ethnographic tour de force that deeply engages with the rich universe of Indigenous audio media. Daniel Fisher guides us through experiences linking indigenous sonic expression and social relations that characterize radio, music, and activism in northern Australia. More broadly, this book asks readers interested in anthropology, media, and indigenous studies to think about what's at stake for indigenous cultural activists in the poetics and politics of voice, music, and their mediation in complex contemporary soundscapes."
"Continuously weaving ethnography and history with political and cultural analysis, The Voice and Its Doubles gives us a potent sense of voice as expressive agency and of media as an Indigenous 'weapon of the weak.' Daniel Fisher demonstrates his skill and commitment as both a multisite ethnographer of Indigenous Australia and a finely tuned critic of the Australian legacy of deeply vexed, racist, and bait and switch policies to subordinate the Aboriginal population. Fisher shows why the anthropology of voice is so critical to the anthropology of Aboriginality."