'Colour must breed out in time': listening to whiteness in "Blue Hills"

In the mid-twentieth century radio played an important role in the construction of Australia’s ‘imagined community’. It transcended spatial boundaries and fostered the development of what Joy Damousi called a ‘listening self’, where listeners were forced—or freed—to imagine the pictures to accompany the sounds and words they heard ‘on the wireless’. So how did Australian audiences of the 1950s respond to author Gwen Meredith’s representation of Aboriginality and whiteness in her long-running ABC radio serial "Blue Hills"? In a controversial storyline, Meredith depicted a romance between Anderson Roberts and Sally Howard, a romance that was threatened when it was revealed, with great gravity, that Anderson could not marry Sally because he was a ‘quarter caste Aboriginal’. However, the romance ended happily in marriage when an anthropologist from Sydney University informed Sally that ‘colour must work out in time ... a throwback is a biological impossibility’. Through a detailed examination of this storyline, and the diverse reactions to it, this paper will reveal the ways that "Blue Hills" constructed a normative ideal of whiteness in 1950s Australia. It will also explore the possibilities of ‘listening’ to whiteness through audience responses to this serial.