Jennifer Bowen

‘A Clamour of Voices: Negotiations of Power and Purpose in Australian Spoken-word Radio from 1924 to 1942′ (PhD in History, 2019).

This thesis views the history of early radio in Australia through the prism of its spoken-word output to argue that broadcasting was shaped not just by commercial interests and government bodies but also by the engagement of a diverse set of people concerned to communicate their ideas with fellow citizens. Their degree of purpose and access to power varied such that their active involvement with radio, a site of negotiation, exposed tensions around authority, control, and modes of representation in public life; radio was a shared space of mutual encounter in which broadcasting itself became a matter of public debate. The urge to be heard in public persists to the present: contemporary movements engaging with media can look to the initial campaigns around radio as an originary moment whose strategies and objectives, successes and failures are illuminating today.

Supervisors: Professor Joy Damousi, Professor David Goodman