Macquarie University’s Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley and Dr Jane Connors have initiated a project with the National Archives of Australia (NAA) to make the ABC’s history “more discoverable.”

The project, outlined at the Centre for Media History conference in Sydney this week, will “actively uncover and decipher” the 5 kms worth of shelved boxes containing the ABC’s historical records.

Not since Ken Inglis, the ABC’s first official historian, wrote the first volume of the national broadcaster’s history, covering the years from 1932 to 1983, has there been such an ambitious project.

The project, partly funded by an academic research grant, will focus on three categories of records: Advisory Committee records, Switchboard reports and Listener/Viewer correspondence. It is expected to generate be a book, journal articles, displays and curriculum resources, according to Griffen-Foley.

The records from the Sydney head office are stored at the ANA’s Chester Hill facility, while other records are kept in the Archive’s Canberra storage building.

The NAA has the paper archives and various AV materials from the ABC.

At the beginning of this project, less than 10% of the material was catalogued and available for research. The goal of the project is to unearth and access material that will “invigorate the ABC’s collection and foster engagement from media scholars.”

Emerging areas of interest for the researchers are the evolution of advisory committee roles, innovations in educational broadcasting, the ABC’s rural mission and audiences, social attitudes in the 1960s as captured in This Day Tonight and Four Corners, plus perspectives of youth culture.

Jane Connors told the conference, “there are many eternal themes in public broadcasting, internal divisions and internal cultural differences between division.” She plans to explore some of the themes through audience complaints, captured by switchboard reports and letters to ABC Management. As a former ABC program maker and manager, Connors says she “identifies entirely with the program makers and editorial managers who are the ones who get the complaints.”

One of her favourite complaints, unearthed so far in the early stages of this research, is a letter from a radio listener who said: “I don’t mind bad language, but just not while I’m gardening please.”

A key focus of Connors’ work will be “the ABC’s relationship with its audiences,” as well as investigating the “aspirations of the ABC program makers, and the expectations of management.”

Very little rural broadcast content was kept in the audio archives, so Connors will take particular interest in what remains, so that a picture of rural broadcasting can also emerge from the project.

In another CMH session, radioinfo’s Steve Ahern looked back at trends from Australian radio’s 100 year history and examined how they are relevant today.

“Last year I found myself, by chance, managing Australia’s first continuously operating broadcast radio station when it turned 100. It was a chance to celebrate radio in Australia and look back at historical trends to see how they can be applied today,” Ahern told the conference.

Ahern discussed his views on the important elements in building modern radio studios and identified what he thinks were the most important technical elements in the ABC’s new Parramatta studios: visualisation, streaming, social media segmentation, podcasting and the use of AI.

Historical trends he identified include:

• Technology Convergence: Microphones, electrical spark discoveries, receiver technology and radio transmission were all invented by various people over many decades, but Marconi, Tesla and other inventors put the pieces together to create a new technological medium.
• Marconi is “remembered for putting all the pieces of technology together and his other genius was marketing the new invention,” said Ahern, who has written about the history of radio in his text book Making Radio and Podcasts .
• If military benefits can be identified (eg, using radio for WW2 communications ) money and innovation will follow.
• Safety issues can stimulate innovation and also bring regulation (eg, ship to shore radios after the sinking of the Titanic)
• Commercialisation drives new business structures and advertising.
• Regulators seek to balance private profit and public benefit.
• Early radio ratings were measured by listeners sending a letter to the survey company to compile the lists of most popular programs. Media will continue to find innovative ways to measure audience reaction because that should be the key thing that drives change.

• With the introduction of sealed-set radios in the 1920s consumers soon proved that they would make the technology do what they wanted it to, not what the government or regulators wanted it to do. They circumvented the seals on the sets to tune into more stations without paying additional licence fees. The scheme was dumped in less than two years.
• The influence of newspapers that limited radio news outlets was finally overcome with the introduction the ABC’s news service and and commercial radio newsrooms.
• In the days of radio drama, foreign influence on cultural content through drama scripts from the US and UK was finally overcome as society realized that Australians should tell their own stories. After that Australian dramas and serials were developed.
• Role of women was influential on air during world war 2, but then women went back into the home and were not heard as much after that until community radio gave people a new ways to be heard on radio.
• Radio created ‘teenagers’ through pop music shows and personalized media (transistor radios). This helped radio reinvent itself to build new audience segments to combat TV.
• In the 60s Australians realised the importance of strengthening Australian culture through music, and put in quotas for Australian music on radio. It’s time for think about a similar approach for the new music technologies.
• The democratization of the means of production (cassette) and transmission (FM) brought about the birth of the third sector of Australian radio – community radio. Community radio is 50 years old this year.

Some of the trends are repeating in the new media environment, according to Ahern, who said we must learn the lessons of history in our decision making today.

“We’re lucky that we can see and hear many views on the news in our open society, we have to be vigilant that new platforms don’t limit our world view by contracting our news sources, we also need to listen to opinions we don’t agree with.

“The importance of Australian songs and stories is so important, with more foreign content available to us, we need to invest in and champion our Australian talent, like we did in the 1960s, so that our culture remains strong.

“Technological convergence will continue to bring innovations, but we need to understand how our audiences are using that technology, like they did with sealed radio sets. We should adapt our content and delivery after we really understand what we want, not just what the technology can do.

“To preserve our culture and make sure the ‘content pipes ‘are not dominated by foreign tech companies, regulation that helps strengthen our own media are legitimate policy tools  for public benefit.”

Ahern foreshadowed the publication of a new edition of Making Radio and Podcasts, which will include AI tools for audio, new studio technologies and an update on the latest trends needed for a successful career in the radio, podcasting and audio industries. It is expected to be released in the first half of next year.

In a session on copyright, Professor John Potts looked at historical copyright approaches, which favour an individual copyright holder and compared them to the current multimedia delivery and AI environment, which might bring a rethink of this legal approach.

He explored the idea of collective authorship, which could include for example the actors in a film, who often play a significant part in the creation of the final product, even though the scriptwriter and studios would traditionally hold the official copyright. Current approaches to copyright derives from “an ancient system,” says Potts, who used the example of The Illiad and Odyssey, which were probably written over decades by multiple authors, but were ascribed to Homer.

John Potts has also just released a new book called Future Fear, which discusses our present times and the role of the media in amplifying society’s sense of fear or optimism for the future.

Futures are conceived differently depending on how they are represented in different media according to Potts, especially our views on how technology will influence society.

“The space age of the 1960s was the last great period of technological optimism… climate change and other crises have brought pessimism… pessimistic media narratives are reinforcing this feeling.” The book tries to put the current pessimistic age into perspective.

Science fiction literature, movies and radio dramas reflected “a great belief in positive technological progress,” but there are also many examples of literature and media sounding warning bells which create fear and pessimism.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for example gives us the “moral warnings about technology” of the time.

Part of the media discourse about climate change is causing fear that is not “galvanising people into action,” but instead is forcing them into paralysis.

“It’s ok to be fearful but in our current context we also need some hope,” said Potts.