Radio as Popular Education

Abstract

Radio in its early years sought to transform the daily lives of the working population in Australia. It set out to reorganise and remould the character of their lives and to reconstitute how they thought about themselves. In this sense radio contributed to a more general move to change the nature of the workforce in the 1920s and 30s in Australia. It performed an 'educative' and 'formative' role, in Gramsci's terms, as part of 'a collective pressure [which] obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.'.1 The increasing importance of large scale manufacturing industries was effecting major changes in the economic structure of Australian society and demanding a new type of workforce, a workforce more adapt able to the assembly Tine and the new organisation of labour processes, Struggles occurred in the workplace over attempts to transform the nature of the work experience, the most notable being the fight against moves to introduce efficiency methods into the New South Wales railway workshops. But the synchronisation of labour required by industry was being organised by other means as well. The changes in the everyday lives of the working population being wrought by radio formed part of an onslaught to form new habits, new daily rhythms and new experiences of the relationship between 'work' and 'life'.2 An examination of the manner in which radio set out, formally and informally, to 'educate' listeners?in the traditional sense?reveals some of the processes involved in that remodelling.