‘A Great First Cause in Colonisation’: Early Radio, ‘Transceiver-Listening’, Gender and Settlement in Australia

Abstract

Historical acoustemology allows us to contemplate practices and meanings of non-Indigenous listening in Central Australia and determine how they aligned with processes of settlement. In the 1930s, a new form of listening emerged among remote non-Indigenous women. Modern communities of female transceiver-listeners used radio for two-way communication and networking, and feminist broadcasters quickly picked up the model, undermining pessimistic analyses of early Australian radio and female listeners as passive consumers. But writers integrated transceiver-listening into a narrative of nation that sought to colonise remote Australia with and through white women listeners, and linked transceiver listening to a pervasive metaphor of ‘inland silence’ that was conceptually deaf to Indigenous presence. Transceiver-listening also usurped forms of communication involving Indigenous people, putting up barriers towards them just as it lowered others. Transceiver-listening had powerful yet complex impacts on modernising remote life, feminist broadcasting, and the settlement of the Australian interior.