Central Queensland University

Macca All Over: Playing at “Bushies”

Unit 57005 Research Dissertation

Submitted by Kenn Iskov C94008320

Submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements

for Course CQ11 M.Litt in Cultural Studies

Supervisor: Dr Andrew Wallace

25 November, 1997

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................... 3

BACKGROUND .................................................................................................................................................... 3

THESIS ................................................................................................................................................................ 4

CHAPTER 1: THE PROGRAM DESCRIBED ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

A TYPICAL PROGRAM: ....................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

CHAPTER 2: THE AAO AUDIENCE ........................................................................................................ 17

DEMOGRAPHICS................................................................................................................................................ 17

THE NATURE OF THE AUDIENCE ....................................................................................................................... 18

CHAPTER 3: RADIO AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON .................................................................... 20

HISTORY OF THE ABC ...................................................................................................................................... 20

High Culture/Low Culture ........................................................................................................................... 21

Industrial Aspects ........................................................................................................................................ 22

ABC Charter ................................................................................................................................................ 23

RADIO TECHNIQUES ......................................................................................................................................... 26

Voice ............................................................................................................................................................ 26

Flow ............................................................................................................................................................. 28

Talk Back Radio ........................................................................................................................................... 29

The Text of Talk Back Radio ........................................................................................................................ 30

CHAPTER 4: ACCOUNTING FOR AAO ....................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

ANTECEDENTS TO AUSTRALIA ALL OVER ......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Literary: The Bulletin Radical-Nationalist Project ........................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.

Radio: The ABC Children’s Hour-The Argonauts ......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Radio: The Prairie Home Companion ............................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.

Radio: Russ Tyson’s Hospital Hour................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.

CHAPTER 5: PLAYFUL CONSTRUCTIONS .......................................................................................... 38

CARNIVALS, FOOLS AND BARDS ....................................................................................................................... 40

PLEASURES OF RE-ENTERED TERRITORY .......................................................................................................... 42

PLAYING AT BEING AUSSIES ............................................................................................................................. 43

CONCLUSION: PLAYING AT BUSHIES ................................................................................................ 45

APPENDIX 1: AUSTRALIA ALL OVER PROGRAMME LOG 23 FEBRUARY 1997 ........................ 3

APPENDIX 2: AAO AUDIENCE DEMOGRAPHICS ............................................................................. 53

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.

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Introduction There’s a radio show that Australians all know

‘bout explorers and shearers and drovers

And stories so grand, of this vast timeless land,

And they call it Australia All Over

Theme song from Australia All Over.

Background

The popular Radio program, Australia All Over (AAO), has been broadcast on Australia’s

non-commercial government-funded radio system, the Australian Broadcasting

Corporation (ABC), for over two decades. The program with its host, Ian McNamara

(“Macca”), regularly draws a listening audience of around 1.7 million1 who follow the

program for four and a half hours on Sunday mornings on over 200 networked stations,

and internationally on Radio Australia.2 The wide-spread popularity of this rurally

oriented program is striking in Australia, given its highly urbanised population.

McNamara, an economics graduate, initially worked for the national broadcaster in the

industrial relations department and performed as a musician with Col Joye and the Joy

Boys. The original AAO was a pre-recorded program carried to a minuscule country

audience on the ABC’s regional network with Mike Broadhurst as host3. When Broadhurst

1 Figure provided by the AAO office, 12 Dec, 1996. This is an increase from the figure of 1.2m quoted by Wanda

Jamrozik “Drawl-Back Radio” The Guide, supplement to The Sydney Morning Herald, Mon, May 4, 1992, p. 7S. See

appendix 1 for tabular data provided by the ABC. The 1.7 million figure is derived from adding 706,000 urban AAO

listeners to the 70% of 1.4million total rural network listeners who tune to AAO giving a total of 1,686,000 listeners,

and then adding an allowance for Radio Australia.

2 Richard Ackland in “Radio Daze”, The Guide, supplement to The Sydney Morning Herald, Mon, May 31, 1993, p. 7S.

Not all are delighted with the program however. In a letter to the editor of The Guide, a Michael Jensen rails against

the “banality” of the program and opines, “The ABC could do worse than axe this subsidised ego-trip and feed the

funds into quality programming on 2BL”.

3 Ian MacNamara, Australia All Over (Vol 1), Sydney: ABC, 1992, p.1.

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went on long service leave in 1981, McNamara was invited to host the program. AAO

continued in that format for another five years with several hosts. McNamara returned to

the program in 1986 with a change to a live broadcast and increased transmission coverage

to the metropolitan areas. This latter expansion provides for the vast majority of the

Australian population who are inescapably urban an opportunity to appropriate the

program as their own.

The program rehearses a nationalistic discourse which celebrates gentler rural past - a

golden era of closeness to the bush, civility, simplicity and optimism. However in this

idyllic vision it is apparent that many of the social components of contemporary multi-

cultural Australia are marginalised. AAO is not primarily a critical program. No single

segment of society is actually scorned (except Americans); they are simply ignored

(Asians, Aborigines), or reinscribed in traditionally patriarchal ways (women). The

program objects to foreign investment and ownership, opposes development and privileges

the country over the city. Yet there is a distinctive humour that clusters around tall tales

(frogs coming down in the rain, snakes swallowing other snakes) that is reminiscent of Bill

Wannan’s humour in the old Australian Post pictorial magazine.

Thesis

Discussions of nationalism have been prominent since the decade of the eighties in

Australia. The popular project of Alan Bond to win the America’s Cup, the popularity of

Australian music and film stars in America and the UK and commercially successful films

such as the Mad Max series and Crocodile Dundee have all served to surface discussion

and analysis of Australian nationalism.

But the antecedents for Australian Nationalism are to be found much further back. Graeme

Turner observes:

5

Australia All Over has reconstituted the 1890’s Bulletin and put it to air. It

offers us a trip back to a time when Australians saw their culture as

fundamentally rural, when the digger was the archetypal hero and war the

defining masculine/adult experience, and when the Lawson-Furphy blend of

the bizarre and the sentimental provided the core source material and the

appropriate mode for shared reminiscences.4

This dissertation proposes that the narrative of national identity mobilised in AAO

manifests, in Turner’s words, the “…power and continuity of the old nationalism, as well

as the sweep of differences … accommodated by its successors…”.5 This continuity

however is proffered in a playful mode and is appropriated by the desire of sophisticated

urban Australians over whom the program exercises little hegemony in the shaping of their

day to day economic existence. Turner acknowledges that traditional masculine bush-

centred nationalistic discourses, “…maintain the capacity to revive and resituate

themselves within a changing Australian identity.”6 AAO is an expression of such a

resiting of the earlier nationalism in a wide-spread media-based entertainment- oriented

vehicle.

The Radical Nationalist Mythology of the turn of the century is recycled by Australia All

Over to an audience that is primarily urban and middle class. However, the old

nationalism strains under the pressure of changing social conditions in Australia. Towards

the end of the last decade of the nineties, AAO airs a broader selection of people, including

aboriginals, but the views they offer tend to remain close to the general ethos of the

4 Graeme Turner, Making it National (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994), p.11. Tim Rowse, in his review of Turner,

(UTS review, V1, No.1., p.169) concludes that Turner’s view is that the nexus between big business and government is

the principal source of dated nationalistic discourses. Yet Turner’s comment on AAO is a reminder that the media also

continue to also recycle the traditional discourses. In AAO, however, such discourse is appropriated in an entirely

different mode to the that of the older Bulletin project, as I will seek to demonstrate.

5 Turner, 1994, p.10.

6 Turner, 1994, p.9.

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program. Turner allows for the inclusion of later elements into the nationalist mythology.

The inclusions in AAO however are largely cosmetic in contrast to the significant shifts

shown in Australian films such as The Heartbreak Kid and Strictly Ballroom. These

productions incorporate multicultural and urban elements in ways that AAO does not come

near.7

There is a shift however between the earlier radical nationalism of the Bulletin, and the

later recycling of the notion in AAO. The “radical nationalism”8 of the Bulletin had a

larrikin and forward looking socially constructive edge9, whereas AAO is uniformly

retrospective in its aspirations. While there are overtly political elements in AAO, they

tend to be minor issues relating to already resolved matters such as metrication, daylight

saving, and the dismantling of the rural rail infrastructure. There is a sort of harmless

‘crankiness’ about the program such as might be expected from an elderly bachelor uncle.

As such the program has a playfulness about it that diffuses the conservative nature of the

nationalist ideology that is rehearsed.

Yet the program is inescapably reactionary. Current social debate on issues such as

Aboriginal land rights, multiculturalism and economic rationalism are not major markers

of discourse on AAO. The issues on which any strong opinion is offered are consequently

fairly unlikely to alienate the audience. The program soothes and reinforces traditional

7 Toby Miller in his review of Turner’s National Fictions in Continuum comments, “Turner is often associated with a

straight forward cultural nationalism. Why this should be I have never understood, since his support of this position is

always conditional and careful, and posted in very open ended terms.” “When did Australia Become Modern”,

Continuum, Vol 8 no2 (1994)

8 See James Walker in “Defining Australia” in Gillian Whitlock and David Carter. Images of Australia: An Introductory

Reader in Australian Studies. (Brisbane: UQP, 1992), p.14. for a helpful discussion on the emergence of “radical

nationalism” as an attempt to differentiate Australia from English colonialism. The project developed in some

contradictory ways, as exemplified by the founding of the Jindyworobak club for poets by royalist and poet Rex

Ingamells. The University of Newcastle Dept. of Humanities webpage for Course 102: Australia in the 20th Century

notes “The Jindyworobak movement emerged in the 1930’s as part of nationalist concern to found an Australian

culture free from colonialism”. This they sought to do by invoking aboriginal imagery and word usage in their works.

Yet Ingamells was to go on to write two books supporting the monarchy on the occasion of the 1954 visit of Queen

Elizabeth to Australia.

9 Turner observes that in the early decades of the bulletin, “…the hated figure of the ‘fat capitalist’ crops up at every

point, from the cartoons to the leaders.” 1994, p.15.

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values and aspirations. Unlike talk-back radio hosts such as John Laws, McNamara does

not actively construct a particularly confrontative or critical program. The primary

emphasis is on the gentle pleasures of rural life—animals and simple activities

remembered from a recent past, woven into a vision of how life could be again. The

program and its constituent parts are more fully described in the first chapter.

The Audience that appropriates the nationalism of AAO is unique in the media landscape

of Australia. Anderson sees national consciousness as resulting from an imagined

community “conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship”.10 The sense of identification

of the AAO audience is manifestly evident by callers in their often mentioned sense of

pleasure, and expressed gratitude to MacNamara for providing the program. The nature

and demographics of the AAO audience is further explored in Chapter 2.

Radio, one of the most widespread of twentieth century media, continues to serve the ends

of the cultural invention of AAO11. Australia All Over, as a widely disseminated radio

program, offers a re-invented national tradition which creates a sense of belonging to a

stable and simple nation. This nationalism is received in a playful and imaginative mode

by its listening audience. The size and passion of the listening audience evidences the

power of this constructed national community. The actual social world inhabited by the

AAO audience is modern and largely urban, and indicates that there is a playfulness in

their pleasurable appropriation. It is significant that the program airs on the weekend,

when people play.

10 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. Revised Ed., London: Verso, 1991, p.7.

11 The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) estimates that more than 1.7 billion

radios are now in use in the world-nearly one for every three persons. Radio receivers are not, however, evenly

distributed; three out of four are located in the industrialised nations of Europe and North America. Nevertheless, the

diffusion of radio-broadcasting has been swift and is continuing. In 1960 only 7 percent of the world's nations had one

radio for every five people; in the 1990s a majority had. “Broadcasting”, (Australian Infopedia 2.0, Sydney: Softkey

International, 1996).

8

Benedict Anderson suggests that in the modern world everyone has a nation, in the same

way that everyone has a gender. Nationalism is no child of grand theory, but rather arises

from an ‘emptiness’ that calls forth a sense of belonging to some particular politico-

geographic-linguistic community. The emergence of modern print languages provided the

material cause of nationalisms. The vehicle for the promulgation of the nationalism of

AAO is the modern technology of radio. In accounting for the AAO phenomena, radio is

ideally suited to this task as Chapter 3 seeks to demonstrate.

The AAO program as a vehicle for recycling the old nationalism does not appear de novo,

but has identifiable antecedents which account for its shape. The Old Bulletin nationalism

has already been mentioned as providing the material content to the program. Some earlier

radio programs are proposed to offer the formal shape to the program. The antecedents are

described in Chapter 4.

The Old Bulletin nationalism is appropriated by the AAO audience without the determined

commitments of the Bulletin readership. The playful pleasure of appropriating the

nationalism proffered by AAO is dealt with in more detail in Ch 5.

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Chapter 1: The Program Described

A feature writer for a Sydney newspaper media supplement, The Guide, writes,

…Australia All Over juggles call from everyday people with country, folk

and classical music, compositions built around bird calls, letters read

aloud, odd snatches of sound effects, poems, all of it identifiably Australian.

Its like an aural old-style Bulletin, deeply patriotic, insisting on a collective

Australian experience quite different from the collective experience of any

other nation.12

A typical AAO program runs for four and a half hours on a Sunday morning, and is a

bricolage of news, weather, interviews, listener’s calls, novelty music, and information

about congenial events such as family reunions, “back to’s”, music festivals and train buff

gatherings. Regular segments include “Why I live where I live” (inevitably a rural

location—almost never a capital city suburb), and letters from listeners carried about in a

large sugar bag and rifled through by “Macca” when in need of a brief filler.

McNamara’s assistant, Robyn, is the cheery foil for Macca’s asides, interjections and

occasionally diminishing remarks. Robyn plays a Steele Rudd “Mother” to McNamara’s

“Dad” She is always compliant, ever helpful, never overweening — he, forthright,

authoritative, occasionally pompous and self-deprecating. Robyn reads the weather and

rainfall reports at great length in a manner reminiscent of the litany of rural place names

heard daily on the old ABC Country Hour.

12 Wanda Jamrozik, “Drawl Back Radio”, The Guide, Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 8th May, 1992, p.8. It is worth

noting the Bulletin theme here adumbrates Turner by a couple of years.

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Callers phone in “reverse charge” (nothing so new fangled as toll free 1-800 numbers) and

offer Macca and the listening audience snippets of curiosity from their experiences,

sometimes recent or else remembered from the distant past. They identify themselves

uniformly, (“Hello Macca, this is Jane calling from Oodnadatta, we are on our way around

Australia in a Kombi Van...), have something interesting to say and, if sufficiently

engaging, will be become a part of Macca’s coterie of repeat callers. Presumably a well-

disciplined staff screen calls and coach successful callers in appropriate opening phrases.

Production values are such that “dud” callers do not get through to bore or alienate host or

listener.

Several key “stings”13 and musical jingles stitch the program together, ranging from a

Grandmotherly “Well, I like it” to Digger Revell’s “Get on with it, Macca” or the Waratah

girl’s Choir singing “I am, You are, We are Australian.” Familiar sound bites such as

these serve as markers in a syntagm of anticipated program categories.

The program celebrates birds, gumboots, unusual creature behaviour, urban Australians

touring the outback, woollen garments, trains, cricket, and castigates daylight saving,

politicians, Americanisms, and the demise of rail and the corner cafe. It celebrates

Australianness in novel songs (“Gumboots”, “I made a hundred in the backyard at mum’s”,

“I am, you are, we are Australian”), but does not access the traditional Country and

Western music subculture extensively. Reg Lindsay and Slim Dusty and the likes are not

often mentioned, but recycled Australian rocker Digger Revell (complete with acquired

American “twang” in his accent) is heard regularly. This accent is one of the paradoxical

elements that indicate a certain “leakiness” in the program’s attempts to applaud all that is

Australian and censure cultural accretions from dominant cultures such as the US.

13 A sting is a brief sound bite - musical or spoken - that marks a program transition in a radio broadcast.

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MacNamara is the “Peter Pan” of Australian radio with his perpetually youthful delight in

the cultural artefacts that are the substance of his program. There is an occasional

reference to his Mother14, but this general absence of family permits the audience to

inscribe Macca as their own kin. In this way Macca is far from being an isolate in the

cultural milieu of his program. On the contrary, his minimalist personal social context

allows him to become everyone’s son, brother, or mate.

The popular appeal of AAO is inextricably linked to the studied down-home production

values and the intimate “G’day Mate” narrative style of the host. McNamara shuffles

papers, goes off-mike in search of items, breaks off mid-sentence to pursue another train of

thought, makes frequent asides implicating the individual listener in an almost

conspiratorial intimacy, like children whispering plans in front of parents.

These program features callers from around the country segments such as “Why I live

where I live” and calls that cluster into informal categories such as precocious children,

truck drivers, captains of ships at sea, organisers of significant local events such as “back

to’s”. Regular Calls are taken from Australians overseas who are having a good time but

missing Australia. Often a studio guest is interviewed and offered extended time to discuss

their interests. (Most of whom are not big-name stars in the wider media scene). Live

interviews are also featured from on-location broadcasts. These are largely spontaneous,

and are typically shorter than the studio interviews.

Music features prominently in the program. Highly visible are “Bush” Songs celebrating

rural life such as Jim Lowe’s Bogan Gate.15 However novelty songs having no obvious

connection to the program ethos such as Silver Bells Yodel16 are also often heard. Also

14 Ian McNamara, Australia All Over. (Sydney: ABC Books, 1992), p.4.

15 Ian MacNamara. Macca On Air: A Musical selection from Australia All Over. (Audio Cassette, ABC Music, Cat #

7243 8 54639 4 5. (Track 8, Side 1.

16 Mary Schnieder on Macca On Air, (Track 10, Side 2).

12

popular are callers with tall tales along the lines of the old Bill Wannan stories, but with

naturalistic explanations. A perplexing situation is posed, such as the fish falling in the

rain in outback locations. Various opinions are solicited from listeners, including some

“tall tales” and finally a sober and factual solution proposed. AAO is a thoroughly modern

(as distinct from post-modern) program in this regard.

Ranging across these regular program segments are a variety of themes covering such

diverse interests as: frogs, birds - especially magpies, trucks - makes and technical

specifications, trains - especially steam, gumboots, rainfall and weather patterns, sport -

mainly cricket, wool - uses of wool and sale of the wool stockpile, country cafes, localities,

opposition to non-Australian names for sporting teams, opposition to daylight saving,

opposition to dismantling of rural rail services, grumbling about plastic bank notes,

grumbling about the metric system and advocacy of “Buy Australian” campaigns.

Several times a year the program goes on the road and is generally broadcast from a rural

location, often in association with some significant local event such as the celebration of a

milestone in the life of an organisation. The local ABC station provides the technical

facilities for these events from places as diverse as Coolgardie, Quambone or Byron Bay.17

Another regular feature in the construction of the AAO audience is a series of end-of- year

concerts at ABC facilities in capital cities. These outside broadcast and concert events

permit a sense of personal identification with the values and ethos of the program. They

engage the audience in a measure of both personal relationship with McNamara (“I met

him…!) and elicit a commitment of their time and money to AAO that further establishes

the program audience as a quasi-community of shared values.

17 In 1994 there were 6 Location Broadcasts, 8 in 1995, and 5 in 1996. MacNamara, 1997., p.202

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A Typical program:

See Appendix 1 for the full program log for Sunday 23rd February, 1997. This is a studio

originated program such as usually emanates from the ABC’s Ultimo centre. Analysis of

the program yields the following count of items:

Program item No of times occurring

Music: Songs and instrumentals 14

ABC News breaks 5

Weather Reports 2

In Studio interview 2 (Jim McIllroy, film producer)

(Nadine Lovell, artist)

Callers 15

Letters 13

Poems 2 “Christmas is different in

Cairns”

“After the Flood” from

The Language of Oysters

Promo’s for this and later programs 4

Community news 3 Mostly by Robyn

Invitation to call, gives phone No. 5

These data indicate the variety and range of material covered. Very evident is the

anchorage of the program to the repetitive recurrence of ABC news. In other and shorter

programs the news serves as a bookend to the particular content of that program—the news

simply marks the passage of time. Because of the extended length of AAO and its

character as a personality driven program, the news functions differently. It is embedded

in the flow of the program and serves to legitimate it. The news leaks into the less weighty

content of the AAO program and lends it status.

The mix between outside callers and in-studio interviewers in interesting. There is much

greater opportunity for the program producer to select the studio guest and therefore to

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avoid unexpected eruptions of conflicting discourses that is possible from callers. In return

for such docility, the guest is afforded a much longer exposure on air than telephone guests

are given. Consequently there are 2 studio guests compared to 15 telephone guests.

The music is clustered in the early hours of the program with nine items in the two hours

between 6 and 8am, and only five in the last two hours. The listening audience doubtless

grows to its maximum size in the later hours of the program, so maximum opportunity is

afforded for listener interaction when the audience is at its largest. With fewer listeners in

the earlier hours, music can be more extensively used to make up the program content.

The informal and live segments of AAO rehearse much of the imagery of the old Bulletin

radical-nationalist project with its celebrations of the bushman, shearer, boundary rider and

with little reference to the more diverse aspect of Australian culture that are the lived

experience of most of the listening audience. Even in McNamara’s celebration of the

Greek cafe owner, of whom there seemed at least one in every significant rural town and

suburb, Greek ethnicity is tokenised into its monoculturally defined location, along with

the Italian or Chinese market gardener, the Indian door to door merchant, the Afghan

camel driver, or the Aboriginal stockman. Macca rarely interviews representatives of

multicultural Australia, and they rarely phone in. The attractive pleasure of AAO

constructs a cohesive 1950’s audience of Caucasian Australians.

However in the some segments of the program a more diverse construction of Australian

society of proffered without criticism. The 1996 Macca On Air album features the song I

am, You are, We are Australian18 which surfaced as part of the 1987 bicentennial

celebrations as a means of seeking to construct a unitary national consciousness out of the

diverse elements of society. As noted by Turner, that project was flawed in that it

18 Composed by former Seeker Bruce Woodley. ©Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

15

“leaked” alternative possibilities of the nations, and failed to capitalise on the opportunity

for advancing reconciliation, equality and justice.19

Nevertheless the attempt was made and lives on in such songs:

Chorus

We are one, but we are many,

And from all the lands on earth we come.

We share our dreams, and sing with one voice,

I am, you are, we are Australian.

(Didgeridoo under, male solo sung by Macca)

I come from the Dreamtime, from the dusty red soil plains.

I am the ancient past, the keeper of the flame.

I stood upon the rocky shore, I watched the tall ships come;

For forty thousand years I’ve been the first Austral-i-an.

(piano)

I came upon the prison ship, bowed down by iron chains.

I cleared the land, endured the lash, and waited for the rain.

I’m a settler, (woman) I’m a mother’s boy.

(duet) on a dry and barren rock.

A convict, and a free man,

I became Austral-i-an.

(Solo: woman)

I’m a daughter of a Digger, who sought the one I loved.

The girl became a woman on a long and dusty road.

I’m a child of the depression, I saw the good times come.

I’m a bushie, I’m a battler, I am Austral-i-an.

Chorus (Choir)

(Choir) I’m a teller of stories, and a singer of songs.

I am Albert Namatjira I’m feted coast to coast.

I am Clancy on his horse, I’m Ned Kelly on the run.

I’m the one who waltzed Matilda,

I am Austral-i-an.

From the hot winds from the dessert, on the backside of the plains,

I’m the mountain and the valley, I’m the drought and flooding rains.

I am the rock, I am the sky, the rivers when they run,

The spirit of this great land,

I am Austral-i-an

Chorus.

19 Turner, 1994, p.92.

16

The song in instructive in the way in seeks to appropriate aboriginal and women’s

interests, but fails to incorporate the multi-cultural facets of Australian contemporary

society. Post-war immigration, the Snowy Scheme, and east Asian immigration would

seem likely candidates for inclusion. In however a limited fashion, the song is illustrative

of the ways larger social concerns leak into AAO through the industrial aspects of radio

production. Such intrusions are relatively minor however. Most of the music celebrates

less inclusive ideas.

The song, Macca on a Sunday Morning, penned by McNamara himself is a litany of

knock-about masculine pleasures and place names. The lyrics describe the listening

audience as Macca himself constructs it. It mentions: the Iron Whyalla, tractors,

harvesters, steelworks, Speed, Mudgee, Dingo Bay, Coolamong, Winton, “Freo”, The

Rock (not Ularoo!) and “The Alice”. In the midst of the song a startling segment of a call

from a listener is played to the backing of the bush band:

I was married twice, and both my wives died. The first one went out pickin’

mushrooms and they poisoned her. The second one died of concussion—

’cause she wouldn’t eat the mushrooms!” (wheezy chuckle) …Sorry.

With the “sorry”, there is an attempt to claw back the implications of this tale of domestic

violence to a more socially responsible stance by the caller’s recognition of the need for

apology, but the overall tone of the story and the song is inescapably rustic and “blokey”.

This is in more in keeping with the overall masculine and rural construction of national

identity that AAO generally rehearses than the broader sensibilities that occasionally find

their way into the program.

17

Chapter 2: The AAO Audience

Demographics

Audience demographics provided by the ABC for AAO in rural Australia and the five

major cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) offer some interesting

perspectives (see Appendix 2).

In general, the AAO audience is comprised of 1.4 Million listeners: 706,000 in the five

major cities, and about 1 Million on regional stations. (Figures for Radio Australia are not

available, but would be relatively minor). Of the regional audience, 50% live in the

smaller cities and major towns. Consequently rural and outback listeners in fact constitute

the minority of the audience (25%).

The audience is well educated. In the five city population, 46% have tertiary or trade

education; among regional listeners the figure is 42%. Listenership is balanced evenly

between male and female in the 5 city audience but includes slightly more males in the

regional audience (54%). In the city audience 41% are in white collar occupations, rising

to 51% in the regional sample.20 In the city sample 85% are over the age of forty years

whereas in the regional data only 62% are over forty. This suggestss that the regional

audience includes a significantly greater proportion of younger people. They possibly are

attracted by the traditional nationalism offered by the program as well as its relevance to

their lived experience.

In both data sets, 95% speak only English which demonstrates a traditional white Anglo-

Celtic audience. Given that Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds constitute

20 This figure is somewhat surprising, and may reflect differences in the way occupational preferences were described in

the two surveys. One would have anticipated the higher figure in the city.

18

20% of the population, the AAO Audience is constructed largely without the accretions of

immigration policy since World War II, and certainly without recent Asian immigration.21

The AAO audience described empirically is urban, Anglo, gender neutral, educated and

tends to middle class. This is in distinct contrast to the persona of the quintessential

Australian constructed by AAO who is rural, mobile, male, and relatively unsophisticated.

He is driving a train, truck or ship, speaks with an exaggerated Australian drawl, eschews

the values of urban Australia, and scorns the figures of authority in the community,

whether in government or big business. He is the “little Aussie battler” forging his

existence in the face of overwhelming and scarcely identifiable powers who are determined

to ruin the Australia he knows and which is passing, but longs tosee reinstated.

The question arises (to be discussed in the next chapter) is “Why does this audience,

materially so distant from the nationalism purveyed in the program, consume it so avidly

Sunday by Sunday?”

Before dealing with that question, it is necessary to make some remarks on the nature of

audiences and how they appropriate texts of which AAO is a fascinating example.

The Nature of the Audience

It has been observed that there is in fact no such thing as the audience to an electronic

media program. To speak of the “Home and Away” audience, or the "Australia All Over”

audience is to speak of a fictional entity. There is no socially cohesive body of consumers

who uniformly appropriate the program and construct a unified field of meaning from it.

Individual listeners in their own contexts are capable of constructing meanings at variance

with or different in distinct ways from that intended or assumed by the producers. The

21 One in every five Australians was born overseas and half of those come from a country where English is not the first

language. Together with their Australian-born children, Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds comprise

one fifth of the Australian population today. “Australia: Culture”, (Australian Infopedia 2.0, Sydney: Softkey

International, 1996).

19

uses and gratifications approach to audience studies suggests that “…the audience has a

complex set of needs which it seeks to gratify in the mass media.”22 This posits an actively

involved audience, not passively receiving programming but actively creating meaning in

service of personal and social needs located in the lived contexts of its members.

The AAO audience seems to me to decompose into at least two distinct and unequally

sized portions, the smaller of which is closest to the assumptive world of AAO and

receives the construction in as a realist fashion. These receive the program as a

representation of the world as it is and ought to be; to be retained by opposition to the

wreckers in government, the cultural and economic imperialists abroad, and the “un-

Australian” components of society who do not share the “correct” ethnicity and

socialisation. The other and larger component of the audience, which is the focus of this

paper, is composed of those urban and more sophisticated listeners who appropriate the

imagery in a playful and pleasurable way, constructing a world which can be entered and

re-entered regularly as relief from the chosen and experienced worlds of their daily lives.

22 John Fiske. Introduction to Communication Studies, (2nd Ed., Rouledge, London, 1990), p.151.

20

Chapter 3: Radio as a Cultural Phenomenon

History of the ABC

The ABC has been involved in Australian broadcasting from the very earliest days in the

1930’s. Today it represents one of four sectors of Australian radio broadcasting which

make use of both AM and FM bands. The others are: the commercial stations, the Special

Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the Public Radio stations. Within this diversity it is the

idea of the nation that undergirds the ABC. It is the national broadcaster, and yet its

audience is “decomposed” into demographic groups by age, region, and cultural tastes.23

Peter Goodall notes that the ABC in its formative years was in a filial and colonial

relationship to the BBC. Scarcely an ABC Annual report has been produced without

referring to the BBC.24 The original vision for the ABC was largely Reithian, flowing from

Lord Reith’s development of the BBC into a “service dedicated to the maintenance of the

highest standards in shaping public taste by the provision of information, education, and

entertainment”.25 The organisational structure of the BBC provided the model for the

forerunner to the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Company.26

The ABC operates a number of services: Radio Australia is a shortwave service to the

world with a listening audience of some 50 million people. Radio National is positioned as

‘thinking persons’ radio with social and political analysis to the fore. ABC Classic-FM is

the fine music station of the ABC, broadcasting musical “high culture” (in old usage of the

term culture) interspersed only with news breaks, and attracting 11% of the ABC audience.

Triple J is the youth oriented network. The recently formed Parliamentary and News

23 Miller in Cunningham & Turner, 1993, p.50

24 Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), p.121, quoting Albert Moran in

Images and Industry.

25 Tim O’Sullivan, et.al., Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. (2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 1994),

p.264.

26 Albert Moran. Stay Tuned. (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), p.7.

21

Network (PNN) popularly styled as News Radio has relieved the popular ABC stations

from their statutory responsibility to broadcast Australian Parliamentary proceedings.

When not undertaking this responsibility, PNN broadcasts continuous news.

The ABC popular stations are not specifically networked and are strong on news,

commentary, talkback, interview, and light music. They are known by the call sign of the

specific station (eg. 2BL) rather than a network name like Radio National. They also tend

to have more of a “star” system of announcers than the other ABC services.

The Regional Network broadcasts a composite schedule throughout rural Australia,

drawing programs mainly from the popular network and inserting local sport, news and

rural information such as rainfall figures and stock prices. About 50 stations make up this

service.

It is these last two services — the popular city stations and the rural network that

principally carry the Australia All Over program to a vast (for Australia) listening

audience. The program also airs on Radio Australia. The Radio Australia segment of the

AAO audience is likely to made up mainly of modest numbers of expatriate Australians

seeking a nostalgic contact with their homeland. The program would be largely

impenetrable to most non-Australians.

High Culture/Low Culture

Moreover, the ABC constitutes a field of meaning to its audience as the principal mythical

symbol in information and culture circulating in Australia. As such it has an enormous

significance to the Australian public beyond its actual listening audience.27 Many

taxpayers may never listen to the ABC, but are content that they have an authoritative

27 Such symbolism is continuously promoted by the ABC in publicly positioning itself via the current “It’s your ABC”

campaign and the earlier “7 cents per day” campaign. A broad base of community support is essential to securing

ongoing Government funding without recourse to seeking advertising revenues. The current Mansfield report and

associated debate is representative of this ongoing redefinition of the ABC to its public. See the discussion in

Cunningham and Turner (1993, p51f).

22

quality voice serving the “national interest”. Consequently the “high culture” symbolism

of the ABC is sustained in the time honoured Australian characteristic of friendly banter by

designating the Corporation as “Auntie”.28

While the ABC has been a prime contributor to a construction of a high culture in

Australia, particularly through the operation of the ABC symphony orchestras in the

capital cities, there was a simultaneous contrary emphasis with the ABC promoting dance

music and sport on its popular services such as 2BL and its sister stations nationally.29 The

meaning of the ABC as national institution was never monolithic. Richard Waterhouse

notes that “…the ABC played an important role in the construction of high culture in

Australia, but its contribution… was not straightforward in exacerbating the difference

between highbrow and lowbrow.”30 It is this contradictory role of the ABC that continues

to find expression in AAO in that the audience tends towards urban sophisticates while the

content in unabashedly lowbrow.

Industrial Aspects

With this diversity it is not surprising that, as the National Broadcaster, the ABC suffers

from the inherent contradictions of servicing the very diverse interests of the citizens of the

nation. The ABC constructs a largely sophisticated audience.31 AAO is carried on the

lighter networks as opposed to the “Reithian” sensibilities of Radio National.32 Yet even

on the lighter metropolitan stations the audience is still an urbane population. Toby Miller

portrays average ABC listeners as well educated, liberal, broad in taste, and as active

28 Ironically the same popular designation as used by the British for the BBC. The cultural cringe lives on.

29 Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788.

(Melbourne: Longmans, 1995), p183f.

30 Waterhouse, 1995, p.184.

31 An argument could be mounted that Triple J functions in relation to the commercial rock stations in an analogous way

to the relationship between the other ABC services and the commercials. ie. It services the discriminating and thinking

“high culture” element of the youth audience.

32 Albert Moran “ABC radio networking and programming, 1932-1963”, (Stay Tuned: An Australian Broadcast Reader.

North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992). p.57. The Reithain impulse was to use radio to lift the cultural appreciation of

the listening audience.

23

responsible citizens in their self-understanding.33 It is these people in large numbers who

make up the listening audience of AAO which in format, production values, content, and

style approximates more the amateurish and user-produced style of Public Radio than other

ABC programmes.

With these simplified production values, AAO is unique among the diverse range of ABC

programmes, which normally appropriate to themselves a position of superior

professionalism in their on-air presenters and the technology which undergirds their

programs.34 AAO uses the same technology but “dumbs it down” so that the program

appears to be the product of amiable amateurs. In contrast to the routinised automated

task of the DJ on commercial music radio, McNamara is able to resist this industrialisation

and, like public radio, is able to define himself in opposition to such professionalism.

Miller et al. observe that such oppositional broadcasters “…are able to initiate their own

forms of self-presentation.”35 MacNamara is able to uniquely position himself in his self-

presentation. He is known for and by his idiosyncratic self-presentation, as a lover of brass

music, trains, and other personal interests. These, along with his doggedly amateurish

delivery gives him an enormous influence and audience appeal that other presenters try to

achieve within the confines of the expectations of “professional delivery”.

Given that the program clearly stands in distinction from other ABC productions, to what

degree does AAO fulfil the obligations of the ABC charter?

ABC Charter

The charter is grounded in the idea of the nation and supported by arms-length funding

arrangements by the National Government. This national audience is “decomposed” into

33 Miller in Cunningham & Turner, 1993, p.59

34 ABC technical services, for instance, developed the computerised digital D-Cart panel equipment to replace older

banks of tape machines for playing station ID’s, program information, etc. This leading edge technology has been

marketed to the world by the ABC.

24

regional and sectional interests for much of the Corporation’s programming output. In

AAO, however the audience becomes a unified mass in a way that embraces the

description “national” as no other program, ABC or commercial, can do.36

The functions which Parliament has given to the ABC are set out in the Charter of the

Corporation (s6(1) and (2) of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983).

Portions relevant to this discussion are listed below with specific parts highlighted in

boldface.

6 (1) The functions of the Corporation are-

1. to provide within Australia innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a

high standard as part of the Australian broadcasting system consisting of national,

commercial and community sectors and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, to

provide-

1. broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and

inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian

community…

The charter clearly anticipates programming will have consequences for nationalism and

requires that ABC programs contribute. However the charter fails to recognise the

multiplicity of available nationalisms within Australia, and makes no attempt to privilege

one over another. Such privileging is inescapable, however, and the idea of the nation

inherent in AAO runs counter to that in the bulk of ABC programming.

35 Toby Miller, Niall Lucy and Graeme Turner. “The Production Process: Radio” in Cunningham and Turner, 1993,

p.167.

36 Toby Miller. “The Media Industries: Radio” in Cunningham & Turner, 1997 p.58.

25

The ABC’s Editorial Policy Document, Cultural Diversity requires that, “Representation of

the widest range of cultural experiences issues and perspectives should be intrinsic to all

programs.”37 The breadth of this requirement ought include AAO, but it is not apparent

that this occurs at all. Callers are almost universally white, Australian accented rural

people or rural aspirants. While Philip Adams travels to remote Northern Australian

locations and risks interviews with traditional aboriginals whose Kriol is barely

understandable to urban ears, MacNamara traverses similar geography without extending

beyond the ethnic borders of his constructed audience.

There is a preferred meaning of the nation evident within AAO that is at variance with

most of the rest of the programming emanating from ABC studios, and at variance with the

policy that shapes the output of other programs. This anomaly is recognised by the AAO

producers in the cassette liner for the Macca On-Air Cassette. The note for the song A

Dutchman’s Laments observes, “We don’t have a Multicultural or Cultural Diversity

Policy at Australia All Over.” This is a self- conscious construction of a unitary

Nationalism that strains against the formal policies of the ABC. Perhaps nothing succeeds

like success, and ABC have been unwilling to enforce the policy of the charter in the case

of AAO.

The Mansfield report on the ABC released in January 1997 proposes that the ABC charter

should be revised to enshrine a commitment to servicing regional Australia. Services to

this sector of the audience are currently well provided and appreciated, but are not

demanded in the current charter, and so could conceivably be the subject of future budget

cuts unless so protected. Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, is reported as proposing

AAO as a model of efficient use of resources to provide service for regional listeners at

37 Downloaded from the ABC’s World Wide Web site: http://abc.net.au, 2 Mar, 1997.

26

low cost. Australian reporter, Stephen Lunn, quotes Fischer as saying, “The ‘Macca’

program is produced by a tiny team but it still covers 57 rural stations for five hours”.38

Radio Techniques

The work done by John Potts identifies the ways in which radio functions in society. The

elements of radio: its sound, timing, the announcer’s voice all combine to engage the

listener in ways that require no further organisation by the listener. The interplay of music,

speech and special effects combine to sustain the listener’s engagement over extended

periods of radio programming.39 In the case of AAO this sustained engagement can run for

up to the full four and a half hours of the program’s air play.

Voice

Radio is seen as a “warm medium” in which the characteristics of the announcer’s voice is

the determining factor in forming bonds with the audience. As Potts observes, “Voices on

radio comfort the listener, they soothe, they seduce.”40 The radio voice of AAO host

McNamara is the antithesis of the earlier cultured BBC English on ABC stations. The

AAO voice is a populist construction not unlike Bob Hawke’s studied flat nasal accent

which belied his Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford education. Hawke positioned himself as

the worker’s politician over against the clipped tones of opponent Malcolm Fraser whose

public voice inscribed him as one of the privileged landed gentry.

The BBC provided the precedent for the “house style” of speech used in early ABC

broadcasts. The rubric was that “Every announcer employed by the Licensee shall be of

good education, style and personality, and possessed of clear enunciation as far as possible

38 Stephen Lunne, “Fischer Salutes Support for the Bush”, The Weekend Australian Newspaper, Jan 25-26, 1997, p.12.

39 John Potts, Radio in Australia. (Sydney: NSWU Press, 1989), p.9.

40 Potts, p.100

27

free from any characteristic dialect.”41 This authoritative ABC voice, measured for

freedom of dialect against the BBC’s Oxbridge voice, eliminated any trace of any

authentically Australian accent on Government stations for nearly half a century (with the

exception of some sports commentators). The sozialen Welt addressed by such a voice was

clearly “high brow” and defined how ABC broadcasting was perceived by the listening

public during this period. In recent years a more recognisably Australian radio voice has

prevailed on ABC airwaves, but the delivery and accent of McNamara stands clearly over

against that softening of speech requirement. Macca’s accent is pure vernacular “Aussie”.

His voice is empathetic, cajoling, familiar, and entirely sympathetic to the matching tones

of those who call into the program.

Radio can utilise sophisticated signal processing to deepen bass tone in announcer’s voices

for added air of authority. My sense from hearing McNamara live in concert and hearing

his off-air voice is that little or no processing is used, and that he does not adopt an on air

voice different from his natural speaking voice. Such authority as he is accorded is

grounded not in a technologically tailored on-air voice, but in presenting an authentic

natural “Aussie” voice which positions him as an on-air “mate” rather than as power

figure. Considerable power does however inhere in this approach, potentially surpassing

that of more obvious on-air authority figures such as John Laws and Brian Wilshire and

others. Their authority is sustained by their more formal voice and purveying a forceful

and opinionated position. MacNamara can be equally opinionated, but his audience

listens not to be stirred, but to be soothed. His and their opinions overlap and reinforce

each other in a reassuring fashion.

41 From M. Armstrong, Broadcasting Law and Policy in Australia. (Sydney: Butterworths, 1982), p36 . quoted in

Cunningham & Turner, 1999, p.157

28

Flow

The flow of radio is strategic in pacing the delivery of program elements in

synchronisation with the lived pace of the hearer. For example, Drive time radio is geared

for the listener to wind down after the stresses of the work day. In general, flow is

organised to arouse the listener’s anticipation and so keep them listening to the program.

Moss notes “Commercial radio is a seamless flow: the listener is stitched into it, but is

unaware of the stitching…”42

In commercial radio, the greatest enemy is silence. Program elements blend into each

other. The host’s voice carries over into the beginning of songs, and enters before the last

strains die away. A technical glitch resulting in a period of silence is highly undesirable in

most radio. In such unplanned silences, the listener is confronted with the need to think

and determine the meaning of the break in flow. At that point the listener may be lost—a

disaster for commercial radio. In contrast to this, AAO celebrates “unprofessional”

continuity—gaps, pauses, studio activity such as conversations, searching for papers—

which bleeds into the on-air flow, and intentional gaps between successive slow-paced

items. The program flow parallels the assumptive world of rural life: slow, arrhythmic,

unmarked by the frenetic human activity associated with the modern city.

Occasionally highly evocative speech images from callers are taped and regularly recycled

in sound bites that typically appear for a number of shows in the program introductions at

the top of the hour after the news. It is in fact difficult to sometimes distinguish between

recycled sound bits and live callers in the construction of program flow. This difficulty

gives a clue to the sophisticated and intentional crafting of the program flow that belies the

apparent chaos of the live production. The discourse of AAO is not simply happenstance,

but crafted and managed by the modern techniques of radio. The apparent arbitrary and

capricious nature of the program flow is not because the production team can do no better

29

(as with public radio), but because as a sophisticated team with state of the art technology,

they deliver a form of discourse that accords well with the rural and nationalist ideology of

the program.

Talk Back Radio

Typically, discourse functions to neutralise contrary readings. In standard radio

broadcasts, whether tending to information (Radio National) or entertainment (morning

drive radio), the program elements are stitched together to provide a smoothing-out of any

oppositional and contrary material. Talk-back radio provides a less predictable format in

which the discourse must be managed much more assiduously. The “seven second pause”

allows program management to kill any undesirable voices. This is necessary at one level

to prevent any calls that contain legally actionable comment getting to air. At another level

it allows the producer to maintain some semblance of control over the breadth of comment

permitted.

The degree to which this control is exercised will vary from program to program. Some

talk-backs hosts invite contrary opinion knowing that they are capable of overwhelming

the caller and their views by the weight of their own on-air personality. In these programs

the host functions as authority figure, driving the discussion along, provoking and

disagreeing and verbally sparring with his or her callers. These hosts rarely need to resort

to the “kill” button—they “kill” contrary opinion in a much more entertaining way in on-

air combat, and this for many listeners is the very appeal of the program.

The talk-back format of AAO differs in a number of ways from the popular Laws/Wilshire

style of program. MacNamara invites callers to introduce their own topics. He acts as

coach, occasionally agreeing, rarely contradicting. Though there is considerable freedom

for callers to set their own agenda, in the natural flow of the program the caller’s items

42 Potts, p.35.

30

nurture and develop the overall ethos of the program and sustain the contemporised version

of the old radical nationalism.

In contrast to commercial talk-back hosts, most ABC talk-back programs attempt to

engage callers from a variety of viewpoints. This pluralist liberal position does not require

the host’s authority to be stamped on every call. The production management of AAO is

vastly different to the freewheeling savagery of commercial talk-back radio, as well as the

pluralism of other ABC talk programs. Callers offer uniform perspectives that are adroitly

stitched into the AAO nationalistic discourse. Difference is celebrated only within the

narrow confines of the AAO world view.

The Text of Talk Back Radio

Talk-back radio programs are seen as a text in a cultural studies context. A text is here “a

group of signs organised in terms of various connections or similarities they are supposed

to have with each other.”43 Early analysis of cultural phenomena in terms of their

textuality assumed an intrinsic power in the text to mediate meaning to a receptor audience

in an undifferentiated manner. The text was all powerful in determining meaning, and

permitted the media to exercise hegemony over meanings allowed to the audience. A

more nuanced view recognises that there is in fact a polysemy intrinsic in texts which

permits a range of possible readings from that preferred reading which is received by the

majority of the audience. Contrary and even oppositional readings are possible. These

arise because of the intrinsic complexity of the interaction between the source of a media

text, the social construction of the text itself, and the freedom with which an audience can

select signs from the syntagm of the text in order to construct meaning relevant to their

own social context.

43 Tony Shirato. “Textual Analysis” in Study Guide for Cultural Theory, (Rockhampton: CQU, 1994), p.4-14.

31

A formal analysis of talk back radio is proposed by Higgins and Moss who modify the

earlier taxonomy of Halliday to propose three components to map talk-back discourse:

These are: Field, Tenor and Mode.

Field is the nature of social interaction—what is happening, Tenor delineates the

identifiable role structures in the interaction—who is participating, and Mode is the

symbolic organisation of the text of the interaction—how is the communication structured.

For AAO the nature of the social interaction, the Field, is the phenomenon of talk-back

radio; a species of two way communication overlayed onto a fundamentally one-way

medium. The Tenor encompasses the single individual: Ian McNamara as host, a vast

largely passive listening audience, an active portion of that audience who provide the

phone-in content, and a handful of selected live studio guests, who function like the callers,

but with extended privileges. The Mode encompasses at least three interacting

communications media: Live radio, talk-back telephone calls, and a few face to face

conversations either in the studio or on location. These factors describe the way in which

the AAO text is generated in an ongoing way for the consumption of the program’s

audience which is described in the next chapter.

I suggest that uniform discourse disseminated by AAO results from a combination of

efficient call screening by staff to eliminate oppositional voices, sophisticated program

production techniques,as well as the highly cohesive nature of the AAO audience from

which the callers are drawn.

32

Chapter 4: Accounting for AAO

Antecedents to Australia All Over

A reflective consideration of media and literary history suggests several forerunners to

AAO. The present program has picked up and recycled elements from these previous

media expressions. The foundational predecessor is the Bulletin magazine at turn of the

Century with its radical nationalist project. David Walker describes this project:

In essence radical nationalist were convinced that Australia had developed

a peculiarly powerful egalitarian tradition in which the virtues of the

‘common man’ (it was largely a male tradition) would guarantee that

Australia remained a vigorous democracy with a deep suspicion of

authoritarianism in all its forms.44

Literary: The Bulletin Radical-Nationalist Project

The Bulletin at the turn of the century was the self-proclaimed organ of Australian

Nationalism pressing for the end of British colonial rule. Founded in 1880, the magazine

became the literary vehicle for Australian nationalism and republicanism. The Bulletin

became “The Bushman’s Bible” but was “appreciated by thousands in the cities to whom

the bush had already become the symbol of nostalgic yearning for a pioneering past.”45

The Radical-nationalist project promoted by the Bulletin was itself no naturally emerging

nationalism, but a construction by literary aspirants in response to the rise of a socially

aware cadre of Australian born artists and writers at the turn of the century. They sought to

differentiate themselves and their crafts from the prevailing Eurocentric and specifically

British sensibilities that prevailed at the time in the colony of Australia.

44 David Walker, “The Writer’s War” in Joan Beaumont (ed), Australia’s War 1939-45. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996),

p140.

45 John Molony. The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia. (Sydney: Viking Books, 1987), p.175.

33

Peter Goodall observes that the pervasive influence of the “lone hand” bush worker was

constructed by the literary culture at the turn of the century. He writes, “Whatever the

extent of the real-life bushmen in the outback, the powerful myth of the Australian ‘bush’

was in many ways the creation of an emergent class of urban intellectuals.46

They sought to create an “imagined community”47 of mutual national interest in opposition

to the subservient colonial society in which they lived. The radical nationalist project

generated powerful myths at the expense of a broader social picture. In heralding the

digger and the bushman as heroes, they marginalised women, aboriginals and urban

dwellers.

James Walter observes that the bush became a distinctive rather than a representative ethos

suited to the radical nationalist project. He writes “…it entered the Australian

consciousness and became the Australian legend”.48 The legend became the stuff of

popular self conscious definition and was widely disseminated by Russel Ward in his The

Australian Legend. The image is that of the male rural worker, rather than the settler.

Stockmen, shearers, boundary riders, bullock drovers, figure in the legend rather than

squatters and land-owners.49 The image lives on in the naming of Queensland’s

Stockman’s Hall of Fame at Longreach. It is patently not the “Kidman” or the “Squatter’s”

hall of fame!

However despite the enduring power of this legend it must be recognised for the contested

construction that it is. The very notion of “national identity” is itself a construction, and an

imported one at that, originated in 19th century European quests to legitimate colonial

46 Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), p.90.

47 Benedict Anderson proposed the term in his definition of a nation: “It is an imagined political community - and

imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” in Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1991), p.7.

48 “Defining Australia” in Gillian Whitlock and David Carter, Images of Australia, (Brisbane: UQP, 1992), p.15.

49 Russel Ward,. The Australian Legend. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 1966), p.2.

34

expansionism. In Richard White’s much quoted preface to his Inventing Australia he

writes,

There is no ‘real’ Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is

an invention. There is no point in asking whether one version of this

Australia is truer than another because they are all intellectual constructs,

neat, tidy, comprehensive—and necessarily false. They have all been

artificially imposed upon a diverse landscape and population, and a variety

of untidy social relationships, attitudes and emotions. When we look at

ideas of national identity, we need to ask, not whether they are true or false,

but what their function is, whose creation are they, and whose interests do

they serve.50

The contestation of the category of national identity since White has led to a “constant

unpicking of the terms which previously constituted Australian identity—the figure of the

laconic Anglo-Celtic practical man of Ward’s classic articulation of the Australian legend

has become a lonelier figure”51 In a succession of newly manufactured images, women,

aborigines and non-Europeans have been discovered and incorporated into the nationalist

project. Initially these innovations were the work of the male establishment academics like

White, but now have broadened to include members of these groupings such as Kay

Schaffer, Sneja Gunew, Vijay Mishram and Mudrooroo (formerly Colin Johnson). Other

projects have eschewed any notion of national character and define Australian identity in

terms of contemporary pleasures of beaches, backyards and shopping centres.52 None of

50 White, Richard. Inventing Australia, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p.viii

51 David Goodman. “Australian Identity, Postmodernism and History”, in Dobrez, Livio, Ed. Identifying Australia in

Postmodern Times. (Canberra: ANU Bibliotech, 1994), p.49.

52 For example Graeme Turner,. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin,

1987), and John Frow and Meaghan Morris. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin,

1993).

35

these innovations have been found necessary however in the ongoing AAO project. The

radical nationalism of the Bulletin constructed an audience of urban Australians eager to

consume the heroism and stoicism of the bush narratives in a self conscious effort to

redefine the nation over against the colonial masters. Australia All Over functions in a

similar mode to this with its urban radio audience appropriating the radical nationalist

narrative, not in service of political change, but as consumers of the pleasure provided.

Radio: The ABC Children’s Hour-The Argonauts

Indus 36, Agamemnon 15, these were the anonymous participants with Mac, Jimmy,

Susan and the Crew of the Argonauts Club —the girls and boys who “came out to play”

daily on the ABC popular and regional networks in the 1950’s. The program has recently

resurfaced to the public eye with the publication of a book detailing the processes of

production and a description of the audience, many of whom are now well known.53

The Argonauts provided golden hours for many of the baby boomers who now make up

the AAO audience. Already in that program they were being interpellated by an ideology

of community formation; then in the Children’s hour with mythological overtones; now in

AAO with nationalistic overtones.

Certain structural similarities mark both programs, chatty—sometimes silly— radio hosts,

and much program content built around audience response, albeit by only written

correspondence on the Children’s Hour in contrast to the immediacy of the phone-in

response used extensively in AAO. The Argonauts celebrated the observations of the

participants, constructed a strong sense of community with others of similar aspirations,

and like AAO, the success of the program was not contingent on the identity of the

audience participants, (indeed they were anonymous and known only by their ship’s

name), but on their knowledge. Contributors wove a web of shared knowledge about

36

Australian nature and life, and in so doing demonstrated the capability of radio to construct

a powerful community of shared interest.

Radio: The Prairie Home Companion

Garrison Keeler’s vastly popular and long running Saturday night live production was

broadcast for a decade on America’s Public Radio Network54 in the 1980’s. The format

included guest folk artists from a range of American and ethnic traditions, comedy

sketches, interviews and a rambling reflective monologue by Keeler about his fictitious

home town “Lake Wobegon”, populated by dour Norwegian Lutheran and Catholic

immigrants. Though there was no audience participation and interaction as with AAO, yet

the down-home style, the easy going relaxed approach of host Keeler, and the celebration

of rural and simpler values mirrors the similar ethos in AAO. The enervating

sophistication of Western industrial societies appears to have been ready for such tonics.

While the Prairie Home Companion is coterminous with beginnings of AAO and no direct

line of dependency can be traced between them, it seems to draw on the same sentiments

of nostalgia and simplicity. It diverges from AAO in that no strong nationalism was

apparent in that program. This observation could be explained by the US origins of the

program: The USA is unself-consciously ethnocentric to the point that all other cultures

must inevitably be lesser than its own. Patriotism is intrinsic to public life in the USA.

There is little of the angst of national self-definition that prevails in Australian public life.

With this significant difference, the Prairie Home Companion demonstrates the enduring

power of the myth of simplicity and rural values.

53 Rob Johnstone: The Golden Age of the Argonauts. (Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997).

54 The PBS is analogous to the ABC in some ways, offering “quality” programs relatively free from advertising. In the

“Companion” years, sponsorship was muted in the manner of sponsorship on Australia’s SBS. Lately the network has

been castigated as the “Petroleum Broadcasting Network” because of the increasing intrusion of corporate advertising.

37

Radio: Russ Tyson’s Hospital Hour

In the 50’s the ABC network carried an immensely popular program hosted by Russ Tyson

aimed at bring cheer to hospitalised listeners. The Hospital Hour focused on a specific

hospital locality, and carried greeting and musical requests from family and friends to

people in hospitals around the country. The program was a folksy assemblage of poems

and recitative pieces, interspersed with popular music which was largely chosen by

listeners. A notable feature of the Hospital Hour was the spin-off products that sustained

interest in the program beyond its actual airing. Over a period of time, Russ Tyson

published a series of large format hardback books with titles such as The Philosopher’s

Notebook, and The Philosopher’s Scrapbook. The contents were compilations of the

poems, doggerel and ditties, quotations, and songs that regularly aired on the program. In

this way, Tyson adumbrated the vast commercial spin-off of AAO in CD’s, tapes and

books. Similarly, AAO constructs and sustains its audience in its appropriation of the old

nationalism outside the time limitations of the Sunday morning air time by the use of

similar ancilliary communication devices.

In the radical nationalism of the early Bulletin magazine, AAO finds the content for its

ideological representation, and in the three radio programs mentioned can be found the

elements that provide the conceptual vehicle for the representation of that nationalism. In

each of these programs can be discerned populist elements that re-emerge in AAO and

serve to sustain the size of its considerable audience. While it is not possible in this study

to demonstrate if there are any straight-line influences from the Argonauts or the Hospital

Hour to AAO, it is evident that radio has a profound power to construct a community of

interest which can sustain a particular discourse in the service of, not merely retaining a

listenership, but advancing an ideology—whether it be of social nurture and support,

youthful self-discipline and exploration or nationalist ideology.

38

Chapter 5: Playful Constructions We are all drawn, says Veronica Brady “…into the process of culture, mass-media culture,

which flows all around us and through us, persuading us to consume, compete and console

ourselves with mostly mindless pleasures.”55 Culture is, in this context, not used in the

aesthetic sense but in the social and anthropological sense56 It is this undertanding of

culture that provides the context for the discipline of Cultural Studies. In earlier phases of

the Cultural Studies project the media was seen as all-powerful, exercising hegemony over

its audience in service of the dominant ideology. Higgins & Moss comment:

Marxist studies of the media, emanating from European traditions, and

predicated upon the notion of economic determinism, see culture as a

reflection of the “base”. Such analyses concentrate upon the ideological

role of the mass media in Capitalist societies .… they see mass media

acting as an infallible means of legitimating and maintaining hegemony.57

The media is one of the principal institutions for mobilising and deploying discourses of

nationalism. As print and TV media tend towards concentration of ownership, Graeme

Turner observes a tendency to address a national rather than a regional audience with a

consequent consensualising of editorial opinion.58 The AAO audience is intrinsically

national and this serves well the monolothic traditional nationalism which the program

delivers to it.

AAO mobilises a distinctive “retro” nationalism to its audience but without the fierce

emotional attachment to the nation that is evident in the emergent nationalisms of

55 Veronica Brady. Caught in the Draught. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), p.221.

56 Phrases from John Tulloch’s much repeated preface in Allen & Unwin’s Australian Cultural Studies series.

57 C.S. Higgins and P.D. Moss, Sounds Real: Radio in Everyday Life. (Brisbane: UQP, 1982), p.ix.

58 Turner, 1994, p146.

39

developing countries. There is a laconic/playful detachment in the way the nation is

appropriated by the AAO audience.

Higgins and Moss are representative of later thinking that sees mass media as creating

contested sites of meaning. The audience constructs meanings from the presentations that

can vary from the mainstream ideology. Shared beliefs are “created, presented and

represented” by the media and received in a variety of responses by the audience.59 The

preferred meaning adopted by the majority of the audience contrasts with oppositional

readings that other segments may construct.

In the AAO construction of national identity, much of the traditional “stockman” imagery,

or at least the values and experiences associated with this figure, are recycled to a largely

sophisticated middle class urban audience. The bulk of the AAO audience appropriates the

imagery in a playful and pleasurable way. To the extent that they detect any actual

behavioural or political consequences to the program, they can distance themselves from

those consequences by the device of recognition that they “play” at this version of national

identity.

They install themselves within it this identity by taking the great “Round Australia Trip” as

the pinnacle of pleasurable appropriation of the national identity offered by the program.

The experience is understood as a construction of an identity that one self-consciously

plays at. The Akubra hat left tellingly on the parcel shelf of the Holden Commodore or,

better still, in the four wheel drive is a marker of urban appropriation of the AAO

construction of this rural national identity.

59 Higgins & Moss, p. x.

40

Carnivals, Fools and Bards

John Docker proposes that the medieval fool permits the playing out of carnivalesque

imagination of society in a way that permits the “letting off of steam” in a relatively

harmless way60. Carnival is inescapably an activity of the masses, and permits the playing

out of fantasy roles outside the normally available possibilities offered and permitted by

the dominant elements of society. Carnival as an interpretive category offers a “…welcome

relief from the grim seriousness of ideological critique.”61 There is a sense in which AAO

allows urban Australians to play out of the fantasy role of the free and simple rural life—to

imagine an alternative world of rich pleasure without the obstacles and pressures of city

life.

Yet MacNamara himself does not play the destabilising and subversive role of the fool in

AAO. On the contrary, order and certitude are more the hallmarks of the program. Though

there is something of a carnivalesque air to it in the way the unusual is celebrated in frog

stories, gumboot dancers, snake swallowing snakes, spangled yodellers and Peter Allen’s

maracas, these elements are subsumed under the prevailing “common sense” style exuded

by McNamara.

Fiske & Hartley’s notion of Bardic function offers another way of seeing how AAO

functions. In their manipulation of language, bards work with the raw materials of their

societies and recycle them in ways that appear authentic. This succeeds “…because of the

professional prestige of the bard and the familiarity and pleasure we have learned to

associate with bardic offerings.”62 The Bardic function tends to be strongly reactionary,

60 John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994), p.171. Laleen Jayamanne calls for a moratorium on the category of carnival in Cultural Studies, the concept

having been overused. (in review “Unthinking Multiculturalism”) The UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing

V1, No.2, Nov. 1995, p.205).

61 Ruth Barcan. “A Symphony of Farts: Saul Alinsky, Social Activism and Carnivalesque Transgression”, (UTS Review:

Cultural Studies and New Writing. Vol. 1, No. 1, August, 1995), p.85.

62 Tim Hartley ,“Bardic Function” in O’Sullivan, Hartley and others., Key Concepts In Communication and Cultural

Studies, London: Routledge, 1994., p.25

41

which can be seen in AAO’s rejection of many of recent functional social trends such as

metrication. The program subverts mainstream ideology in its constant questioning of

social innovations such as daylight saving and metrication. Government is rarely

perceived to be on “our” side in the AAO construction of the social world.

MacNamara operates as a contemporary Bard, even down to his musical contributions to

the program. He twists the noses of officialdom on a range on relatively harmless political

issues. As a bard he wields the influence of a considerable professional prestige, both in

the size of his audience and the avuncular persona he offers to the audience. He makes

considerable use of power of the familiar in the program, through music, place names and

nostalgic recollections. AAO listeners embrace the pleasure offered by McNamara in a

consistent and committed manner. Rarely is there a caller who does not sign on or off

without an expression of deep appreciation for the program. The audience universally

agrees with the grandmotherly voice who declares in a regular sound-bite “Well, I love it!”

The Why I live where I live segment permits a celebration of locale that is subverted by the

contrary celebration of the great round Australia trip. The Why I Live…segment

celebrates mostly rural and obscure locations that have a particular richness of association

for the inhabitant who has called the program. They commonly speak of the attractiveness

of the surroundings, the friendliness of the community and their wonder at the variety in

nature around them. Locales vary, but the sense of place is strong. In contrast the Round

Australia trip celebrates the discovery of a range of sites around rural Australia that on the

surface might seem contradictory to the Why I Live… segment. Yet even while on the

move, the same virtues of outback life are valorised: simplicity, community, stark beauty.

It is not primarily any particular physical location that defines nationalism, but the

construction of Australia as a home that anchors it. Whether Australia is conceived as a

42

small slice of the local landscape, a distant international country, or a vast territory to

roam, it is home.

It is an irony that Peter Allen’s I Still call Australian Home has been adopted as a quasi

anthem for public occasions in Australia. It gives voice, not to the contented Australian at

home, but to the restless expatriate who is committed to incessant roaming. As a marker of

nationalism the song works only by a vast misunderstanding of its lyrics: He lives

elsewhere, (but still calls Australia home)! His attachment to Australia is largely

emotional and figurative. Yet even the resident Australian constructs a nationalism that is

figurative and emotional. There is no substantive nationalism awaiting adoption. Whether

from abroad, or in Australia, people select images and ideas from a range of possibilities

and, in concert with others, construct a nationalism amenable to their own lifestyle and

interests.

It is this desire of the audience for order and certitude that lends a paradoxical air to AAO.

On the one hand, the program celebrates the recent past with its simpler and more certain

social commitments, but also subverts and parodies the sensibilities of mainstream

Australian society in a number of ways.

Pleasures of Re-entered territory

Radio works by repetition. Contemporary music radio offers a relatively short playlist of

currently desired songs, repeated cyclically throughout the day. Turner describes the aim

as, “…not to bore or irritate listeners, but to inscribe their tastes into the program—

producing an affectionate recognition of the track and the listener’s own desire for it…”63

He observes that “…predictability is exactly what the audience wants from media texts.”64

AAO evidences the same repetitive structural dynamic. The songs used, the themes

63 Graeme Turner, “Media Texts and Messages” in Cunningham & Turner, p.338.

43

addressed, the sound-bites recycled, the familiar pattering of weather, rainfall, news

inscribe the listeners pleasures onto the program and allow them to re-enter the familiar

and reassuring territory week by week for the pleasures it offers. The pleasure of re-

entering a mythological world functions not unlike that experienced by the Argonauts on

the ABC Children’s Hour. A community of common interest is created which sustains

itself by repetitive immersion in the constructed reality offered by the radio program.

Playing at being Aussies

In Making it National, Graeme Turner’s chapter on “Looking to America” discusses the

effects of American Culture on Australian life.65 He analyses Movie World on the Gold

Coast, and describes the way in which Australian visitors play at being Americans on their

visit. Patrons immerse themselves in the gaudy activities which construct a timeless

idealised America. The sense of recognition that comes from seeing or being surrounded

by familiar characters from movies, stitches people into the illusion offered. Yet the

images proffered operate at multiple levels. The experience is rich because the patron

willingly enters in and participates in receiving the pleasure offered. At the same time

however the same patron is aware of the cracks in the construction of the image—

Australian accents of the characters leak through. Visitors willingly suspend anti-

American sentiments in order to embrace the pleasure offered. This is done knowingly and

with the suspension of any contrary oppositions such as anti-American views. The power

of the pleasure offered permits a playful acceptance of the ideology and myths of

Hollywood. These are accepted and enjoyed in a bracketed—off experience in which more

enduring life perspectives are be held in temporary suspension. The patron is not in any

psychological tension by this manoeuvre—the self is unchallenged by the appropriation of

the experience of “playing at American”. The patron has no intention to actually embark

64 Turner in Cunningham & Turner, p.340.

44

upon the lifestyle held out by the Movie World experience. It is a pleasurable and time-

contained construction, and experienced as such. The self is able to maintain the integrity

of more deeply held convictions and prejudices by appropriating the Movie World

experience in this fashion.

In an analogous manner I suggest that the AAO audience, appropriates the recycled radical

nationalism of the early Bulletin in a playful manner. For the sake of the pleasure offered,

the audience play at being rural Australians.

65 Turner, 1994, p.93.

45

Conclusion: Playing at Bushies The programatic statement defining AAO is in the opening lines of the theme song: The

program is about explorers and shearers and drovers, wandering male individuals, pitted

against the uncertainties of nature and life. If the audience is composed of urban people

employed in the everyday requirements of commerce, its heroes are from an earlier, less

circumscribed, construction of the quintessential Australian.

Alastair MacLachlan observes:

A whole range of studies has explained “The invention of tradition” in the

modern world, be it the creation of the bagpipes and tartan version of

Scotland by astute Manchester merchants, the Foundation myth of

revolution by the defenders of the third republic, or come to that, the

invention of the ‘bush’ mystique of Australia by Bulletin journalists before

and after federation. …cultural invention, it would seem, like nationalism,

is a particularly modern phenomenon66

In AAO the radical-nationalist project lives on. The same bush legends are rehearsed, but

without the radical political edge of opposition to Great Britain and the moneyed class of

pro-British conservatives in Australia. Oppositions in AAO are muted anti-American

sentiments. Given that the ability to imagine an audience is crucial to the processes of

radio, urban dwelling listeners have been coopted into the AAO project by constructing

them as an audience of rural aspirants67. In the light of Ian McNamara’s education and

professional background, AAO may be said to be (following Goodall) the creation of urban

intellectuals (Sydney based, economics graduate, McNamara) for a listening audience

66 Alisdair Maclachlan. “Some Comments on Colonising Nationalism.” Political Theory Newsletter (1995), 7, pp 57.

67 Toby Miller, Niall Lucy and Graeme Turner. “The Production Process: Radio” in Stuart Cunningham and Graeme

Turner, (Eds). The Media In Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 164.

46

largely consisting of urban intellectuals (ABC listeners), who appropriate the bush imagery

as a pleasurable means of playful redefinition.

John Colmer’s critique of the old Radical-Nationalist project is largely applicable to AAO:

The chief weakness of this body of writing lies in its unexamined

assumptions, its narrow range of reference, its tendency to draw on the

same repeated examples of national character or national literature, its

failure to recognise the wider historical context, its tendency to interpret

historical figures and texts unhistorically, confounding topical significance

with universal value, its didactic and doctrinaire tone.68

With its similarly narrow focus and didactic and occasionally doctrinaire tone, AAO is in a

measure of tension with the charter of the ABC.69

The power of the old radical nationalism was its capacity to portray a self-reliant Australia,

freed from the Colonial shackles of Great Britain and grounded in the masculinities of the

rural worker and the Anzac soldier. That power was never absolute. There existed

simultaneously alternative nationalisms which acknowledged the place of the landowner

pioneer and of rural women. For example, the pioneer legend portrayed European

settlement as an heroic conquest of the alien landscape. In support, J B Hirst quotes the

opening lines of Hudson’s poem The Pioneers, “We are the old world people… we

wrought, …moulded, …fashioned”.70 Yet it is primarily the bush legend that is recycled

by McNamara.

68 John Colmer, “Australian Cultural Analysis: Some Principles and Problems”, (Southerly, 34, 3, 1978), p246, quoted

in Whitlock & Carter, p.14.

69 See discussion in Ch. 2

70 J.B. Hirst “The Pioneer Legend” in Whitlock & Carter, p.205.

47

In AAO, the political urgency of the old Bulletin push has gone. The program seeks to

entertain rather than motivate to action. The old nationalism has had its teeth pulled and is

proffered as a household pet. AAO constructs an audience which playfully appropriates

the discourse of the program is while going about the business of late 20th century life.

The popularity of AAO is fuelled by the same sensibilities that make “retro” programming

so popular on music radio: Beatles, Van Morrison and Chicago provide a context of a

warmly remembered past. But no-one is actually producing that music again. So also

with AAO; few will actually inhabit the world constructed by the program, but they will

continue to listen and playfully enter the territiry, and find pleasure in the program.

The way historians approach issues of nationalism is subject to MacLachlan’s criticism

that, “…they succumbed to the spell of the particular, and assumed that their nation-

building narrative was—as it said it was—distinctive, unproblematic and natural. This is

no longer possible.”71 The same may be said of AAO. Within its own listening

community the nationalism offered may appear ‘distinctive, unproblematic and natural’. It

is self evident that within the broader ABC listening community, variant and contrary

nationalisms are prevalent. Yet meaning cannot be monolithically constructed even by the

AAO audience. AAO is something of an singularity within its own family of radio

broadcasting. It conveys an air of certitude to an audience who probably would not want

to take the AAO ethos as a daily lived experience, but are happy to play with it and enjoy it

as a weekend entertainment. The location of the program on weekends, at a time slot

which is unappealing to that segment of urban Australia who were partying at Clubs and

Casinos until dawn is suggestive of the intent of the producers. The candidates for the

71 Machlachlan, p.58.

48

AAO audience are suffering not from Saturday night hangovers but from the ennui of

living in Patterson’s “dusty dirty city”72

Further analysis of Australia All Over could seek to examine the appropriation of the

program by that minority of the the audience who do inhabit a lived world paralleling the

nationalism purveyed by the program. They provide much of the actual program content,

and their experience of it would likely not be a playful appropriation. These listeners

would likely endorse the policitical sentiments of the One Nation party and in fact hold to

the values and oppositions of the program in a fiercely committed way. For them the

formation of a community of shared values is a quite different experience to that of the

larger urban audience. These two segments of the audience would likely find little

common cause if forced to try to funcion as a socio-political unit. For the one, the AAO

nationalism is a deadly serious business with the future of the nation at stake. For the other

it provides a unique pleasure that binds the listener back to a construction of Australian life

that is flooded with nostalgic pleasure, but which must be sloughed off on the 7.48am

Monday morning train.

72 A.B. Paterson. “Clancy of the Overflow”, in The Collected Verse of A.B. Paterson. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,

1980), p. 10.

49

50

Appendix 1: Australia All Over Programme Log 23 February 1997

Item Time Description

1 6.10?? Digger Revell sings The Worlds Gone Crazy Cotillion with Macca singing along (badly)

2 Unannounced song

3 Another unannounced song

4 Singer Will Dobby, announced after song

5 Poem - Christmas is different in Cairns, (modified from “The night before Christmas in

Alice)”.

6 Phone Number given for people to call in on.

7 Call from 76 y.o. Milly? from Geelong, volunteer at air show at Avalon, Vic, discussion of

1400 other volunteers, nearly all “silvertops” (aged).

8 Letter from Dorothy, Warracknabeal, attended concert. Sent booklet “The Shire of

Warracknabeal”.

9 Song: The Rabbit Trapper Song

10 Call: Frank Callahan from Horsham. Previous artist on concert. Discussion of locality and

place names.

11 Song: Gary Shearston: “I’m a Riverena Drover”

12 Music: Guitar Boogie style (breaks in with dial in number)

13 6.30 ABC News

14 6.35 Introduces Robyn for the weather, chat.

15 Weather: Flood warnings, predicted temperatures for many regions and towns through

NSW,

16 Macca joins Robyn, news of events, reunions, Launch of historic ship James Craig

17 Music: Guitar solo with magpie calls.

18 Announcer: Sunday Mornings can be very educational Promo for AAO. Sound bite from

American lady. Banjo in background

19 Call: Crystal from Streaky Bay, from phone box, talk about weather, working as cook, many

previous jobs. Walks to work. More talk about weather. Compliments: Keep up the good

work

20 Letter from Clem Lane, written last year about song Yarraba Father was captain of the

mission station there

21 Song: Yarrabah Dennis Rose

22 Macca, names songs, warns about speeding on the road,

23 Letter from Joan, Bairnsdale, concern about wildlife killed by speeding cars.

24 Talks about Perth: clean, compared to Sydney, went Swimming

25 Call from Peter, truckie in Brisbane, watching sun come up. Refers to his home in Adelaide

talks about 40 degrees + heat. Talks about things seen on last trip - rail workers, Macca

“This is a lucky country” Talks about back-load of timber. This is first run to Brisbane,

sees a lot of the country, caught in rain at Gundawindy last week. Describes truck and the

noises Macca can hear. Obviously on mobile.

26 Song: Not Bloody Golf again. Announced after song

27 Telephone number given

28 7.30 ABC News

29 Call from Scott, Vet Currently in UK, last called from King Island. Talks about cost of

lamb in UK, Song “Macca in the morning under”, brought up and plays through.

(Presumably call has been taped from earlier show).

30 Discussion of Mobile Phones - critical of their penetration in society

31 Letter from Jean, Kiama Vic, re her round Australia trip. Cistern in caravan park full of

frogs! Result of first flood in 120 years

32 Phone Number given our for call-in

51

33 Letter from Neville - critical of Macca: (tongue in cheek - claimed picture of Robyn on

back of vinyl record, not identifiable).

34 Phone call from George, Tottenham in centre of NSW, re stolen tractor (Goes on at length).

35 Letter from Lonnie, Launceston, to request publicity for opposition rally “Hands off Kings

Park” and to request song “We the People” (as a kind of solidarity anthem. Park is being

offered at peppercorn rent to overseas developers).

36 Extended Discussion about outbreak of Hepatitis A from oyster farms - Sydney rock oysters

not what they used to be because of water deterioration. Andrew from NSW fisheries

speaking in the studio.

37 Call from Geoff King , re Aust. Woolgrowers assoc. launched last month to develop

marketing strategy from democratically elected body. Opposed to existing Wool Council,

and advisory bodies, leads to confusion for overseas customers. Lobbying for members,

promoting meetings in Vic and NSW.

38 Guitar instrumental: Macca promo’s later program segments

39 7.45 ABC News

40 8.00 Macca Theme song: There’s a Radio show, that Australians all know…

41 Sound /bite from Interview with woman about pollution and wartime rationing (probably

pre-recorded), music under.

42 More Theme Song

43 Good Morning: Reads excerpts from Book of Poems: “After the Flood”: from The

Language of Oysters by Robert Adamson to Oyster expert Andrew Derwent(#36 above).

44 “Good Morning” - Reads letter from Noel about Bunyah Nuts: He was cutting lawn in

Wodonga, Bunyah nut the size of a basketball fall on car bonnet.

45 Letter from Elanor about Sir Joh (Peterson) and latest scheme in the Bunyah mountains.

Also concerns about Politicians superannuation schemes.

46 “Good Morning” Phone number given out to invite listeners to call

47 Call from Michael, near Yass. Oppositional viewpoint to wool growers assoc. (#37)

Supports existing farmers organisations and arrangements. Moves into oppositional

discussion of Colonial Mutual apartment development at Circular Quay adjoining the opera

house. Macca: “Need more women in positions of power, making decisions”

48 Music: Wally’s Song (Roderick Smith, male soloist, country ballad style - about actor Wally

Melluish).

49 Discussion of films esp Aust. Films. “something you can relate to…”

50 Interview with producer Jim MacIllroy. includes letter from co-inventor of Armalite rifle, a

Melluish fan.

51 8.30 Weather Report: from Robyn detailed location report for NSW (3 min)

52 Community Bulletin Board - details of events

53 Phone call from Neil at Richmond, NSW

54 Voice over promo by Bob Hughes for next show from 10am.

55 Interlude: Orchestral Music with bird calls

56 Voice over Promo for the program with sound bites from previous shows. Concluded with

announcer’s tag: “Join the rest of Australia - with Macca - on Sunday morning”. Older

Lady “Well I love it”.

57 Recap of Michael at Gunning, Robyn gives details of local activities in an area, collecting

frog spawn!

58 Call from Ken at Mt Isa, reminisces about 1960 working in Germany met a man who was on

the German raider which clashed with the Sydney off NW WA. Was later sunk, rescued,

and interned in Australia for the war. Extended conversation about Mt Isa

59 Promo: Macca at Broken Hill next week for bushtucker BBQ fundraiser for SA flood

appeal.

60 Why I live where I live: intro and theme song

61 Letter from Chris & Bruce White, applauding program on Radio Australia short wave. Live

near Halidon(?) a railway stop from Loxton to Tailem Bend (in SA mallee region). Grow

Alpaca’s, promote them as suitable to Aust. conditions.

62 Letter from Elly Gunn(?) at Willowbark Mt Irvine, NSW talks about weed problem in area.

Request for memoirs of Lithgow Coop society - writing a book on it.

63 Letter from Victoria Point, QLD from Fay. Reminisces about prawning and fishing in the

Redlands area as a child.

64 Call from Kim at Launching Place, Vic. Request for help with son needing bone marrow

transplant. Asking people to put names on bone marrow donor register.

52

65 9.00 ABC News

66 AAO Theme “…they’re all out listening to Macca on a Sunday morning…”. Sound bite

with theme under: Lady talks about travelling around the beautiful country - urges others to

do it.

67 Good morning, introduces Robyn , Jim MacIllroy producer of Australian film Mr Reliable.

Christmas card from Mrs Coody(?) Deakin, ACT made from flannel flower.

68 Comments on people not writing these day. Mentions letter writer Jim Bourne who wrote

about “feral shopping trolleys” Speculates about having a web site or home page (tongue in

cheek?)

69 Tiwi(?) writes from Port Lincoln, Tuna spotter. Talks about difficulty of seeing fish with

cloud cover in recent days. Recently visited Croatia, heard little of Australia while there.

Offers to finish letter later

70 Mentions will read letter about gumboots later, but first take calls. Give number.

71 Call from Ron Bailey in Mt Victoria, NSW. talking about film Mr Reliable. Runs local

theatre, heard earlier discussion, called to inform that he will run it against advice of the

film distributor he deals with.

72 Brings producer Jim McIllroy into discussion about film

73 Brings Robyn into discussion about film. Macca enthuses about loving the Australian

accent.

74 Read letter from John Rees from Gympie. Gumboots story: visited NZ North Island Kauri

forest. Gives origin of the term “Gumboots” - Wellington boots used by workers extracting

ancient fallen trees from swamps for their sap and timber.

75 Song: Gumboots.

76 Discussion with Robyn of various items: Jack from Barwon Heads called to say the horse

“Macca” won the Ocean Grove cup recently. Another request for ex students of Narrogin

College in 1974 to contact organised of reunion. Crocodile farm reminiscences

77 Call from Claire Brook from YWCA in Melb, 86 y.o. patron of rowing regatta on Albert

park, in midst of the regatta.

78 Discussion with Jim McIllroy about future of Aust. film. Macca moves it into “Buy

Australia” promotion. Macca: “Overseas people come and take our dollars, and it’s nor

fair…”

79 Moves into discussion of Peter Allen’s replica maraca’s - one set now used as fish lures!

80 Jim McIllroy Moves discussion to idea for 4 part movie Australian historical series

81 Signs off Jim, promotes film again.

82 Takes call from Erica from Bell, known to Macca from links with Agricultural show, on

next weekend. Wants to talk about local craftsman made map of Australia out of oak for

award for best jam drop at show. Asks Macca for a name for the award. Reports on elderly

man in hospital.

83 Discussion about Macca’s like for Quambone. Likes it because of the sound, rhymes with

trombone.

84 Plays old jazz song featuring trombone Farewell to Harlem

85 Tells of meeting musicians in New York 20 years ago.

86 Introduces Nadine Lovell live in studio, painter living in the Kimberlies, with exhibition in

Sydney at present. Discuss rainfall, weather etc.

87 Call from Lisa, Stradbroke Island, Qld. Oyster farmer, discussion about oysters and

pollution, no problem on Stradbroke. Talks about techniques. Macca highlights need for

environmental care

88 Robyn on: talking to Lyn from Balmoral between Horsham & Hamilton, remembers

cartoon in the Sporting Globe listing Wally Melluish name as a cricketer.

89 Song I made a hundred in the backyard at Mums

90 Gives mailing address, thanks various people, advises program coming from Broken Hill

next week.

100 10.00 ABC News

END OF PROGRAM

53

Appendix 2: AAO Audience Demographics Rural data provided from an internal email from Audience Research to the AAO office.

This data was obtained in a late 1994 ABC survey conducted by the ABC. In the nature of

this survey, it may over estimate rural listenership by up to 30%. Consequently the

claimed “weekly reach” of regional ABC stations of 1.4 Million should be reduced by 30%

to yield an audience of 980,000.

An explanatory note is included below, followed by the data for the regional audience,

provided in the form of an internal email between ABC staff, then the data for the five

major cities, provided in the form of an spreadsheet.

54

ABC Regional audience data for Australia All Over - Aug/Oct 1994

55

56

This Five City Data is drawn from an AGB McNair survey of the AAO audience

conducted in July 1996.

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