Speechification

Continuing my attempt to disorientate the Northern hemisphere - or at least its Speechification listeners - with tales of dry, distant lands, here’s another fine ABC Radio National doco. This one follows in the footsteps of W.O Hodgkinson, who led the last government funded expedition into Australia’s Simpson Desert in 1876, attempting to find the source of ‘Pituri’, a valuable native narcotic. Tracing the journals of Victorian explorers is a well-worn format, but almost always fascinating. This one no exception, and pitched in front of an evocative soundscape.

Hindsight: Along the Pituri Trail [mp3]

My offering for the Christmas season at Speechification may be a little different to that of my friends in the North, though I’m sure a few ex-pat listeners have also experienced Christmas in Australia and found the experience enjoyably surreal. Padding through a mall in shorts and flip-flops, past a queue for Santa, while ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow …’ plays over the tannoy. The last time in snowed in the centre of Sydney was 1836.

It’s wonderfully hot over the festive season in Australia, and much of the place shuts down for a couple of months, as the peculiar circumstance of an imported European culture introduced to the local climate means that summer holidays coincides with Christmas. Most civilised. So I’m writing this from Brisbane, where I’ve decamped for the week from Sydney, and the overwhelming experience ‘up here’ is sub-tropical heat and humidity. (As I type, its still 28 degrees at 11pm and a rather well-fed cockroach just scuttled past the keyboard.) ABC Radio National broadcast a great documentary about the cultural experience of heat as part of the Australian landscape about a year ago, which I’m reposting here as my belated contribution to the Christmas week at Speechification. Hope you all have a bloody hot New Year.

ABC Radio National: Hindsight: The long hot summer - heat [mp3]

A wonderfully atmospheric doco on the lamed vav tzaddikim, the 36 beings who keep the world turning according to Jewish tradition. There’s a lovely associated photo gallery here, featuring photos by Todd Weinstein, and nice sound work from sound engineer Russell Stapleton.

ABC Radio National: Radio Eye: Double Life [mp3]

Imagine how a tabloid newspaper would’ve handled this story: primary schoolteacher turns sex-worker in small town in regional Australia.

Yet despite the title, this ABC documentary is deftly handled (cough), occasionally moving, sometimes funny, and full of the easy complexity of real life. It’s followed by another programme on related matters: Sydney’s notorious Kings Cross/Darlinghurst scene of the 1950s, and this show has a little more sauce. As you might expect, there are a few sexual references here.

Radio Eye: The Only Hooker in the Village [mp3]

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation still aren’t scraping the bottom of the Barrell, though my puns now are. Here’s another set of documentary features from producer Tony Barrell, who’s moving on from Auntie (yes the ABC is also known as Auntie.) Three shorter programmes, again showing what a master of the form he is. Nothing as darkly compelling as ‘Tokyo’s Burning’ here, but the first, ‘Ambiguity Okinawa’, also explores Japanese culture to great effect. The kind of programme that makes you want to read books about the place, then visit, eat the food, talk to local taxi drivers, and listen to the music. Actually, the music I’ve been a fan of for a few years, and this piece uses it wonderfully.

The other features are ‘The Valentich Mystery’, on the fall-out from a notorious disappearance over the Bass Strait in 1978, and ‘That was Then and So is This’, a light-hearted piece broadcast in 1999, on the media’s obsession with the year 2000. Remember that?

Radio Eye: Ambiguity Okinawa, The Valentich Mystery and That was Then and So is This [mp3]

I think I’ll keep rolling out the Barrell as long as the ABC keep rolling them out of their archives. Here are two shorter, lighter pieces. ‘Smoker’s Corner’, from the mid-90s, was made as something of a counterpoint to the campaign to ban smoking from public places but is light-hearted and full of characters. Then ‘Three by three’: a more impressionistic piece about trios, triples or thirds - in this case the cricketing position of ‘third man’ (brilliant idea to get a Noo Yoiker to explain the rules of cricket, contrasted with a sonorous Henry Blofeld and the music from the film ‘The Third Man’), the mysterious third eye and the equally mysterious ’70s telly conspiracy known as ‘Alternative 3′.

Radio Eye: Smokers Corner/Three by three [mp3]

Another gem from producer Tony Barrell (hear also) of ABC Radio National here in Australia. This is a quite astonishing documentary, winner of the Prix Italia (the Oscars of radio), largely concerning the allied firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. It was broadcast in 1995, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the attack.

It’s utterly sobering, and a beautifully, sensitively crafted bit of documentary. The sound design is brave, almost experimental, and though shows its age occasionally there are some audio elements that near take the breath away.

Yet they never get in the way of the narrative, which is compelling, gruesome but also enlightening in numerous ways. The sorry history of airborne bombing of civilians is wound through the story, including the earlier attacks on Hamburg and Dresden. And when you hear these acts of bombing described as perhaps the cruellest acts of WWII - a war that had more than its fair share of cruel acts - then their significance is clear.

Radio Eye: Tokyo’s Burning [mp3]

Radio National recently dusted off a few archive programmes to mark the work of producer Tony Barrell. I’ll post a few of the shows here, for sure. This one’s a beauty - on the life and work of photographer Edward Muybridge, and thus the nature of time. Some charming moments, not least a few shards of Philip Glass cross-fading into the sound of a train. But also some mind-boggling insights into time itself, from scientists and skateboarders. An absolutely lovely piece of work.

Radio Eye: The Space Between Time [mp3]

The Ken Nordine is worth the price of admission alone. Actually so is the Patrick Gibson/Laurie Anderson piece at the end.

The Night Air: Museums [mp3]

Thoroughly entertaining memoir of the events of May ‘68 in Paris, London, New York and San Francisco. From David Zane Mairowitz, who was both there and can recall enough of it to vividly conjure it up for us. Some fabulous archive footage, some hilariously frank, half-remembered incidents.

(Bonus points for starting with the beautiful, sparkling tones of ‘Dark Star’, double-bonus for some interstellar Syd-era Pink Floyd in the middle, and triple-bonus points for a raucous splash of Albert Ayler at the end.)

Radio Eye: My 68 [mp3]