Voices from the Air Read Free

Indonesia.
    Talbot Duckmanton was the last ABC war correspondent appointed in the Second World War. He reported on the first Australian trials of Japanese war criminals at Morotai.

Chapter 1
BEGINNINGS
    W hen the ABC was created as Australia’s national broadcaster in 1932, radio’s ability to deliver voices from the air was still a modern marvel, little more than a decade old.
    The wireless revolution was a wondrous technical sleight of hand that had wiped away the poles and wires of the telegraph: ‘The wire telegraph is a kind of very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and he is meowing in Los Angeles. Radio operates in exactly the same way, except there is no cat.’ 1 More than anything, radio was the ‘magic medium’ of communication in which sound and the human voice were delivered, instantly, to a mass audience.
    In the years immediately following the launch of the ABC in 1932, music dominated the commission’s radio broadcasts, and information programs such as talks, specialist programs and news took up only about a quarter of the air time. 2 However, in the times of crisis and war of the 1930s and 40s, radio communicated immediately and directly with a public thirsty for information, it was an essential source of news, and it brought the sounds and voices of the great and terrible events and human dramas of the time into millions of homes.
    Governments knew the power of radio to communicate and to connect with the public, and world leaders increasingly used it to talk directly to their people and to the rest of the world. The voices of political leaders heard on radio had an immediacy, a force and a personal appeal beyond that of the printed word, and created a new dynamic for leaders in shaping the events of the time. Radio was a powerful tool for persuasion and propaganda, as well as a means to inform and entertain.
    In its first year, the ABC appointed a London representative, Arthur Mason, who sourced music, cultural and entertainment programs from the BBC, arranged visits by musicians and talks by leading figures. Through the London office and the broadcast relationship with the BBC, the ABC broadcast talks by British political leaders, from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who apologised for not having the time to ‘put some polishing touches’ on his speech, to Labour leader George Lansbury, who gave an ‘ardently socialistic confession of faith’, and leading Conservative politician Lord Lloyd, who argued for longer air-time.
    Efforts were made to attract leading thinkers and literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, not always with great success.

    Dear Sir, Mr Bernard Shaw asks me to say that as he has never visited Australia, and has not made any special study of it beyond its remarkable backwardness in dramatic culture. He does not feel qualified to undertake a broadcast, though he is much gratified by the invitation. Yours faithfully, Blanche Patch, Secretary. 3
    Within a few years the ABC was rebroadcasting speeches by leaders including Adolph Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, President Roosevelt and others.
News from Abroad
    In the beginning, the ABC broadcast a limited amount of news from the newspapers. The newspaper proprietors saw radio as a rival and, at first, the ABC was restricted to using two hundred words of news from the papers each day and to broadcasting bulletins well after the papers had hit the streets.
    The ABC appointed its first journalist in 1934 and a federal News editor, Frank Dixon, two years later. Dixon built up a small team of journalists and began to expand the sources of news, though the papers and other constraints still limited the ABC’s news role. Australia’s geography, so far from the centres of world power and sources of news, and the tensions and turbulence of the 1930s, meant that reliable news from overseas was critical to the ABC news service.
    During the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the ABC