Resounding silence: recovering the history of radio performance in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

In 2023 radio in Australia reached a milestone of 100 years. Radio plays and other related genres were almost as old, and certainly these forms were a prominent part of the broadcasting fare (commercial and public) on Antipodean golden age radio until the 1960s. However, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), founded as a Commission in 1932, is the one broadcaster in Australia to have sustained the production and dissemination of radio plays and a host of other performed or dramatized works of fiction and nonfiction from its inauguration to the present moment, although it must be acknowledged that audio fiction of any kind is rarely heard on Australia’s pre-eminent public service broadcaster today— even amongst its many podcasts. Yet, over the ABC’s history, these performative works and features have played a notable role within the broadcaster. Critically, radio drama and other forms of sound ‘play’, have contributed to Australian literary, theatre and international art and radio cultures in ways that are not well recognized. Most histories of radio in Australia, as well as accounts of ABC or literary/art culture in this country, neglect this substantial and almost continuously-produced field of activity. The archives of the ABC and its rich repository opens a portal to a different story nevertheless, even if historical soundworks are not easy to encounter. This chapter seeks to reinstate this hidden or lost history. Through re-sounding of moments in ABC development, traces of a dynamic playful and critical presence in the studios and ‘radiolabs’ of the past, the chapter also reveals the richness of this site for expression, commissioning and experiment, particularly as the ABC encountered and interacted with the international ecology of radio creation.