Description
NFSA's Australasian Sound Recordings Association conference: theme: Reflections on “Deadline 2025”: The Past, Present, and Future.Abstract: This paper seeks to revisit traditions of radio performance and ‘features’ as they once flourished at the ABC throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s. These traditions risk being almost entirely silenced or forgotten in the ABC’s history due in part to ongoing weaknesses associated with the current archive (NAA and ABC collections), including access restrictions and the limitations specifically of the metadata of the Radio Program Archive. Responding to the themes of this year’s conference, the sound archives of the ABC may well be endangered if they remain as analogue magnetic tape recordings, but if they cannot be easily located and re-sounded for researchers and wider publics, they risk another and just as decisive road to oblivion. By focusing on one program I produced independently for the ABC in 1996, and its sounding and silencings in the collection, I hope this presentation can offer a small opportunity to re-connect to the larger hidden history of ABC radio and its traditions of cultural and literary production which characterized the national network, now ABC RN, until the early 2000s, and yet are barely audible today. This presentation involves re-play and recital of Antonin Artaud’s infamous and censored work, ‘To have done with the judgement of god’ (recorded 1947 ORTF, France, first broadcast ORTF 1973), and the recounting of three distinct archival interventions (ORTF 1947/Farabet 1973; ABC, Madsen 1996; and Bandcamp, Madsen 2025) across time and continents. This recording’s history and presence in the ABC and NAA’s archives as a recovery and as an annotated broadcast of a work which still disturbs and even shocks audiences, is of great interest in and of itself, but here it might also alert us to the role played by the ABC as safe haven for material and artists, thinkers and performers that might be considered risky or radical – certainly unorthodox. This re-sounding of one ‘monster’ of a recording in the history of radio speaks to an obscured part of our national radio story; it also delivers that repressed and singular voice from the vaults, silenced but now freed to be encountered and comprehended anew, communicating with as much sense as non-sense.
| Period | 30 Oct 2025 → 31 Oct 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | SAE University College Sydney, ASRA |
| Degree of Recognition | International |