Speechification

I hadn’t heard of serial hoaxer and comedian Campbell McComas, who died a few years ago. But, timed around April 1st, Radio National broadcast a great belated introduction to McComas, comprising dusty old recordings that still showcase a sparkling wit. McComas performed as a bogus after-dinner speaker thousands of times from the ’70s onwards, pricking the pomposity of the professional class with the audience often in on the joke - but often not, and sometimes bewildered and outraged. Often very funny.

Radio Eye: Thank you for having me (but I think you’ve been had) [mp3]

Australia is increasingly seeing itself as an Asian country, switching focus from the US and UK to the giant markets on its (extremely large) doorstep. This is certainly a good thing, enabling a rich cultural exchange (as well as untold riches in trade too of course). Yet it can sometimes be an uncomfortable relationship, and this programme is sometimes an uncomfortable listen accordingly. It concerns the contemporary so-called ‘yellow fever’; or rather the nature of white Australian men who are persistently drawn towards ‘Asian women’. Some of the attitudes on display here are more neanderthal than oriental, you have been warned.

Masako Fukui, the producer and narrator, bravely puts herself in the frame too, wondering if she might even be part of the problem, but also “fearful that there won’t be much left of me … if I rid myself of my exotic identity.”

It’s not necessarily the most academic investigation of a slice of psychology that could either be fathoms deep or impossibly shallow, yet it’s a frank, sometimes funny, exploration of a particularly awkward genre in human relationships.

(Oh, and the ABC are syndicating the exemplary and moving Don’t Hang Up, as you’ll hear on the end. Remember, you heard it first(-ish) at Speechification. Don’t touch that dial etc and so forth.)

Radio Eye: The Madame Butterfly Effect (mp3)

The ‘Summer Season’ on ABC Radio National - for it is summer down here below the equator, hello! - essentially means a chance to repeat a load of old shows while everybody goes on holiday. Which is fine by me. This show’s had a little bit more effort applied, though. They’re lovingly compiled finds from deep, deep in the archive.

‘Scope’ was a magazine show, running from 1958 to early 1976, “under the guidance of ‘frequently-dishevelled, wild-eyed’ producer, Donald Ingram-Smith” it says here. Each week tackled a particular theme, and rather delightfully this show from 1967 focused on ‘Communication’ itself. Stand by for lots of rapid-fire cut-up fragments, talk of Telstar, the bleep-bloop of barely digital computers, and some great, groovy library music. These semi-nostalgic ‘reviews’ are set up by one of the show’s original presenters, Barry Anthony, who has an absolutely corking radio voice (here, simply drenched in reverb for maximum effect). Honestly, it’s so dated that you wander whether it is in fact some kind of elaborate hoax. Let’s assume it isn’t. It both serves as self-parody and is good value either way.

The Night Air: Reviewing Scope: Communication (mp3)

After listening to the little Will Self gem on walking from La Guardia airport into Manhattan, with some serendipity this piece turned up on ABC Radio National shortly after. It’s also about walking, but a very different kind of walking, and a different kind of storytelling for that matter. Centred around four different voices telling walking stories, it’s a slightly pretentiously based around Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, rather unnecessarily, but it’s worth it for the stories. It’s also interspersed with vignettes - of great marches during the ’30s depression, a bit of Iain Sinclair and Laurie Lee - and beautifully recorded, as ever.

Two stories are told by a student tracing her walk following the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and an itinerant street performer from Poland, who wanders around from city to city. (I’m less interested in him, but I know that’s largely due to my own deep-seated - but entirely reasonable I think - prejudice against street performers.)

But it’s the other two voices that really capture the ear. The softly-spoken casualty of the music industry is fascinating - a great storyteller. Having left behind a life that had become debauched and empty, he ends up trudging alone through the bush for 3 months, the walking helping to strip his life back to its absolute core. He describes it as feeling himself unravelling, only stopping when he begins to find a little too much in common with the old bushmen of the fences out in the border country of Australia, who would be alone for months on end. They used to say that when they started putting two plates down for dinner, it was time to come in.

Then another great character, an inmate talking of life in prison - the notorious Long Bay in Sydney - and the seemingly endless walking around the prison yard. 3km of solitude - “gangster laps” - punctuated with stolen banter, every day. Or of hearing the footsteps of a new cellmate echoing down the corridor. He’s great. “I mean, that’s all you’ve got left … your walk and your word.”

Oh and make sure you stick around for the short bonus feature: some bloke convinced ABC Radio National to give him a series on looking for decent pubs in the middle of nowhere, called “Where can I get a drink around here?”. So here he is, in the middle of nowhere indeed, but in a town briefly transformed for the race meeting that rolls in once a year. Just listen to the voices.

Radio Eye: Two feet and a heartbeat (mp3)

A war-time story of the 1942 campaign for the Kokoda Track, (relatively) well-known in Australia as the battle that turned back the Japanese advance south in World War II. The large and well-equipped Japanese army had got within 40 miles of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea and then part of Australia. With air raids on Darwin in Australia’s north and a cheeky if ill-fated intervention by two Japanese subs right into the heart of Sydney’s harbour, Australia was riven with fear of invasion from the north (Watch out for Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming epic Australia, set at this point).

This fine, straight-ahead historical documentary tells the story of the herculean efforts by Australian soldiers in lugging artillery by hand up the near-vertical sides of the Ioribaiwa ridge, in conditions that were described at the time as the most inhospitable on Earth. A famous victory, told here with many first-hand accounts from the soldiers involved - who are a predictably characterful bunch. But it’s a victory that was barely marked at all at the time, with a shameful lack of recognition from the US commander-in-chief, General Macarthur, and Australian counterpart, General Blarney, who in a now-infamous incident, accused his troops of being “running rabbits” in a formal address on the parade ground. Thankfully this story redresses the balance.

What’s also interesting to my ears, other than the epic story, is how the sound design for the reportage has changed over 60 years. The music, and tone and pace of the presentation, accompanying those original war-time reports is predictably jaunty, a fully Western orchestral war-time pomp, laden with a sense derring-do and nationalistic fervour - not that far removed from the sound of shows like Dick Barton. Now, the ABC reporter’s voice is perhaps appropriately quieter, considered and reflective, and the accompanying music is more of an atmospheric ambient backdrop of sombre washes and percussion-driven pulses, inflected with a kind of ethnomusicology-meets-Café-del-Mar sense of the surrounding tropical environment, perhaps - not ‘Western’ at all, in its symbolism, and certainly devoid of pomp.

Equally, it should be noted there is no representation of a Japanese presence here - and thus not part of contemporary attempts to present balanced views of these campaigns and experiences - but this is still a gripping story, well-told.

Hindsight: The Guns of Ioribaiwa (mp3)

Kate Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ is an enjoyable historical novel based around the sporadic, often violent settlement of the Hawkesbury River outside Sydney, as the penal colony expanded out into the bush. Based on Grenville’s family history, the story is pitted with the deep dark scars that epitomise those early brutal years of white Australia. Grenville’s novel more or less stops as this wonderful documentary starts, which explores the more recent past, present and future of the river. Today’s Hawkesbury is both tourist attraction and development opportunity, yet still winds through the all-encompassing Australian wilderness and is also still home to the traditional practices of oyster production, only slightly evolved over the last 200 years. Indeed, in the same place as the aboriginal practice, which dates back tens of thousands of years, the remnants of which are still visible in the vast middens along the shore.

We hear from old timers at the trade, born in humpies on the river - one in particular has a wondrous way with a story and a voice to match - and learn how the oyster production has recently been decimated by a ‘foot-and-mouth equivalent’ for oysters, a mysterious new disease called QX. There’s speculation here that the water quality has been hit by the double whammy of increased sewage from new development and the 15-year drought on the river.

But fear not, listen to the end and we hear it isn’t all eco-disaster. This is also a beautifully produced bit of radio - impressionistic field recording, oral history interspersed with poetry (which I don’t usually care for, but here works perfectly), and little or no presentation or narration. Just gentle nudging of interviewees and a meandering edit that propels history down the curving river. The sound recording is wonderfully evocative. Over the backdrop of insects, birds and the river gurgling through mangroves, listen for two sounds in particular: the metal-on-shell clink of grading the oysters and the lapping of water on the underside of the shallow skiffs. Wonderful stuff by the sound engineer, Steven Tilley.

Radio Eye: The Oyster Farmers (mp3)

A little gem of a documentary this, the kind of thing that quality speech radio does so well. A complex tale of Australia’s mishandled post-war future drawn from the politically-charged world of R&D into alternative energy sources.

For a few decades after WWII, Australia was the world leader in solar energy research. You might imagine that a sun-kissed nation - if not a little sun-battered - might well find itself in this position. But as with many aspects of the 1950s and ’60s, WWII was the catalyst for this techno-centric R&D effort.

As a result, by the 1970s, 30% of houses in Perth had solar water heaters on their roofs. And yet now the figure is more like 1 in 20 and Australia’s solar energy industry is effectively insignificant. What happened? As the wonderfully named Annabelle Quince relates in this story sewn together with archive clips and quotes from those involved then and now, Australia appears to have lost its way due a murky combination of pressure from the fossil fuels industry and governments, particularly those of John Howard, all too keen to pull investment out of relevant research.

So, the principal players in solar energy end up being Japan, Germany, China and California, often using tech developed by Australian scientists, who had to follow the research money overseas. (It’s one area, ironically, in which Howard has decided not to follow US leadership, where the Department of Energy has massively supported renewable energy research.)

Rather topically, Australia heads to the polls this week, with much opinion suggesting that Howard’s time might be up. The bleak view, however, is that both main parties are simply proposing ‘band aid’ solutions when it comes to renewables, without thinking ahead. Yet there is huge opportunity there.

As contributors point out, Australia is not only asset rich in terms of coal and uranium but also sun, wind, bio-mass and tides. One speculates that the North West of Australia could become an energy exporter to the world; indeed that Australia could be one of the cleanest and greenest countries in the world, quite different to its current position. And learning from the lessons implicitly suggested by this little docco would probably help get Australia there.

ABC Radio National: Rear Vision: Solar Energy in Australia (MP3)

Here’s a contribution very kindly sent to us by Mr Dan Hill:

ABC Radio National’s annual Boyer Lectures has been running for over 40 years now, and are essentially the Aussie equivalent of the BBC’s Reith Lectures. So the format is a respected public thinker given free rein to discuss ‘Big Ideas’, across a wide range social, scientific or cultural issues. Last year’s saw the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia explain macro-economics and the notion of stability. Lest that seem a little dry, the great writers Peter Conrad (2004) and David Malouf (1998) previously contributed two brilliant series on the Australian identity, for instance. And I’d pay good money to hear architect Robin Boyd’s 1967 series on ‘Artificial Australia’ dug out of the archives.

This year sees Professor Graeme Clark present a series on ‘Restoring The Senses’, which he describes as: “highlighting the importance of our senses, and how they can be restored with bionics.” Forget Steve Austin for a moment, for Clark was a key figure in the inventor of the actual bionic ear, and then the new field of ‘Medical Bionics’, which aims to develop bionic eyes too, as well as spinal cords and nerve systems for touch and movement.

In his first lecture, and perhaps given the almost unimaginable capabilities of the human sensory system, Professor Clark feels the need to frame what follows via a quick circuit of the complex history of entwined relationships between science and theology. He eventually makes his own position clear - a preference for a supernatural creator - and while I can’t personally reconcile that with science, it’s still an interesting set-up.

But moving on from the spirit world, the real joy of this is in hearing the charmingly avuncular Prof Clark talk about the incredible range of delicacy within the senses. It’s a subject I find fascinating, and particularly when he touches (o-ho) on the non-visual senses. It’s chock full of great factoids, like “the number of possible activation states of the brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe”, or “the softest sound that we can hear moves the ear drum 1 billionth of one millimetre, or one-twentieth the size of a water molecule.” Learning that the eye can respond to a range of intensities from one to a mere 10 billion, compared to the one to one trillion for hearing, it It backs up my own belief that vision is overplayed today, in the league table of the senses. Check out the unheralded importance of the thumb too.

There’s way more he could go into here - further reading in Juhani Pallasmaa’s ‘The Eyes of the Skin’, Joy Monice Malnar & Frank Vodvarka’s ‘Sensory Design’ or Mirko Zardini’s ‘Sense of the City’ - and so far he doesn’t seem to be addressing contemporary research suggesting there are actually 17 senses. He’s only got 6 lectures to play with, after all. But we’ll see. Or hear, rather.

The MP3’s here.