Radio Redfern, 26 January 1988

Emma Cupitt

Abstract: Aboriginal community–controlled radio station Radio Redfern was a critical site in the protests that took place in Sydney on 26 January 1988 against the Australian Bicentenary celebrations. This article focuses on a 17-hour recording of Radio Redfern’s broadcast on that day. It explores the important role that Radio Redfern played in the protests as a means of organising and as a site of protest itself. At the heart of the politics of the protests was the idea that Indigenous people had survived the onslaught of invasion and the ongoing attempt by the settler colonial project to eliminate and assimilate them. Radio Redfern – a station made by the community, for the community – is testament to this survival, which can literally be heard in the ‘liveness’ of the many voices one hears in the recording. The article seeks to understand the Radio Redfern recording in its full significance as a radio and an aural source. To do this requires not only a close-listening to the content of what is said, but also a closer listening to how things are said; how they reverberate in other speeches; to what other sounds can be heard; the multitude of voices; and the silences.

It’s Linda Burney on Radio Redfern – 88.9 on your FM dial. Black heart radio, community radio getting it out to the people. Welcome to all those people who are just hitting town, moving into our radius where you can pick up Radio Redfern. You’re not to turn it off for the rest of the week, right through until the 27th because it’s going to be the very important lynch pin in getting the message out.¹

Radio Redfern’s studio at 27 Cope Street in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern was busier than usual in January 1988.² Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across the country were arriving in Sydney to protest³ the Australian Bicentenary celebrations planned for (so-called) Australia Day. Along with other local organisations, the community-controlled radio station was an important resource as a communication hub and a vital source of logistical and political information. Firmly rooted in the Redfern Aboriginal community in both a geographical and a cultural sense, Radio Redfern provided a physical and an intangible meeting place. Throughout January 1988, it broadcast interviews with Indigenous leaders; played Indigenous music that often had an explicit political message; provided updates on events that were happening as part of the protest; advised listeners on what they could help with, such as transporting food and people; issued urgent appeals for assistance; and, in an era before mobile phones and social media were ubiquitous, helped put people in touch with one another through shout-outs to family and friends.

This article focuses on a 17-hour recording of Radio Redfern’s broadcast on 26 January 1988. These recordings were made by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) as part of its Slice of Life Project, which recorded content from Australian television channels and radio stations broadcast on 26 January 1988. Radio Redfern did not give the NFSA its master tapes (if these existed); rather, the recordings were probably made by an NFSA staff member tuned in to the radio station.⁴ Some recordings follow on from one another immediately, while others begin after a 5–15-minute pause.⁵ Listening to the recordings in their chronological order from the early morning to late that night, they paint an aural picture of the day as it unfolds.

Linda Burney’s statement above is not quoted from the 17-hour recording that the rest of this paper focuses on; rather, it is recorded in the documentary 88.9 Radio Redfern.⁶ This raises a question of how useful it is to focus on a single source in historical writing. In researching Radio Redfern’s participation in the protest of 26 January 1988, I read widely to try to understand the history of Indigenous politics and activism of which it was a part; the history of Indigenous peoples’ uses of radio, and especially community radio; the history of Radio Redfern and the Redfern community; and the organising behind the 1988 protest of the Bicentenary celebrations. This research informs but does not overshadow my main focus on Radio Redfern’s broadcast on 26 January. As many notable microhistories show, it can be revealing to focus on a single event or a single perspective in order to pay very close attention to the details of the event or the source, while other events and perspectives remain in the background.

The date 26 January 1988 is significant in the broader history of Aboriginal politics and as such it deserves to be revisited from as many angles and perspectives as possible. No single history can encompass its many dimensions or ways of interpreting it. The perspective provided by Radio Redfern is important on a number of levels. First, because the station played an important role in the protests as a means of organising and as a site of protest itself. There were several different themes that underpinned the politics of 1988, including ‘Black history’. However, the Radio Redfern broadcast reveals a particular focus on three issues: Indigenous survival; pan-Indigenous solidarity; and the ongoing campaign against deaths in custody and police violence against Indigenous people. At the heart of the politics of the protests was the assertion that Indigenous people had survived the onslaught of invasion and the ongoing attempt by the settler colonial project to eliminate and assimilate them. Radio Redfern – a station made by the community for the community – is testament to this survival, which can literally be heard in the ‘liveness’ of the many voices one hears in the recording.

On another level, the recording reveals much about radio as a medium of communication. From as early as the 1930s, when it was an emerging technology, Indigenous people have been using radio, especially community radio, in creative and highly political ways.⁷ Understanding the full historical significance of the recording requires attention not just to the content of what is said, but a closer listening to how things are said, how they reverberate in other speech acts, the other sound – or aural landscape – that can be heard, the multitude of voices, and the silences. The recording is an aural source that only delivers its full meanings when one examines it as such. Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher argue that ‘radio is never a single technology’, since ‘it gains force and traction according to wider formations of meaning, politics, and subjectivity’.⁸ Seeking to explore the layered meanings of Radio Redfern’s broadcast on 26 January 1988, this discussion places it in its historical context(s) and refocuses attention on what radio is and does as a communication medium and, more specifically, what this Aboriginal community radio station is and does. In this way, the broadcast has meaning both for the history of the protest on 26 January 1988 and for ways of thinking about radio as a medium of communication.

Histories of the 1988 protest in Sydney – including the immense grass-roots effort that was required to transport, feed and house participants from outside Sydney – have been recorded elsewhere, notably in Aboriginal activist Kevin Cook and historian Heather Goodall’s book Making Change Happen, which collates oral histories and personal insights from people who participated in the Boycott and especially those who helped organise it.⁹ Radio Redfern’s involvement in the protest has also been captured in the documentary 88.9 Radio Redfern.¹⁰ However, a close analysis of its broadcast on the main day of the protest, 26 January, and the part it played in the protest has not yet been undertaken and this paper aims to redress that.

In the last 50 years, oral history has revolutionised the discipline by providing new insights into stale histories based on written sources alone and by bringing to the fore voices that were previously absent. For these reasons, the practice of oral history can be considered one of the most important means by which social and cultural change has been achieved in this period. By contrast, other forms of aural archives – recordings of sound, either in textual descriptions or in audio formats that were not recorded with the explicit purpose of creating an oral history – have been underutilised.¹¹ While there is a growing scholarship of histories of radio across the world, scholarship on the ways Indigenous people in Australia have engaged with radio has been largely limited to the disciplines of anthropology and communications.¹² Moreover, historical considerations of Indigenous peoples’ use of radio seem disproportionately small when one considers the history of its use. One of the issues, of course, is that few archival or historical recordings of radio broadcasts exist. That makes Radio Redfern’s 17-hour recording from 26 January 1988 particularly special.

The politics of survival

… brings to mind the philosophy that we have to be portraying, the March ’88 committee and people who are going to be there today portraying and that’s the celebration of our survival. There’s nothing in the coming of the white man that Aboriginal people can celebrate and we would argue that any fair-minded Australians wouldn’t find anything in the arrival to celebrate because it marked the beginning of genocide, destruction of the earth and destruction of culture, and the bringing of hurt, pain and misery, and disease to Australia.¹³

It was Chris Kirkbright’s voice that Indigenous people in Sydney woke to on the morning of 26 January 1988. Kirkbright, a Wiradjuri lawyer active in land rights campaigning, was part of the March ’88 Committee that organised the protest.¹⁴ He presented from 6 am to 9 am that morning, projecting a nervous excitement and articulating the political agenda for the day ahead. Listening closely to Kirkbright’s representation of the politics of the protest, especially to the specific vocabulary and phrases he uses, helps to locate his political messages in their contexts. The protest in 1988 drew on a long history of Indigenous activism and political discourse. As Kirkbright’s morning broadcast demonstrates, this discourse circulated in many forms, including in popular music, oral histories, public speeches and newspapers. The radio broadcast presents the colloquial meaning of the protest’s politics. It is colloquial, first, because it is primarily a spontaneous oral communication that often relies on words and phrases already circulating with meaning in the relevant political discourse. Second, because Kirkbright conveys not just his personal views but attempts to represent a stance that unites the protesters.

The (incomplete) recording of Kirkbright’s broadcast begins mid-sentence with the political agenda of the boycott. According to an article in Land Rights News, a coalition of groups in Alice Springs had decided on the theme ‘We Have Survived’ in order ‘to give a constructive direction to the anger and outrage felt throughout Aboriginal Australia’ and to recognise the ‘continuing resistance to all forms of suppression’.¹⁵ Moreover, ‘Many speakers at the meeting pointed out that protest on its own, with no clear aim in mind, could divert the energy of the national movement’.¹⁶ Instead, effort was to be channelled towards something more productive. The focus on celebration reclaims ‘celebration’ for Indigenous people.

Kirkbright invokes the ‘survivors’ with the use of a collective ‘we’ that encompasses all Indigenous people and distinguishes them from non-Indigenous Australians. He rejects non-Indigenous Australia when he says there is ‘nothing’ for Aboriginal people to celebrate in the arrival of the First Fleet. This is indicative of a new Indigenous politics that sought to distinguish a nationwide Indigenous community from non-Indigenous Australians.¹⁷ As an alternative to the colonial idea of Aboriginality, survival was emphasised as a historical experience shared by all Indigenous people. ‘Survival’ also drew on an international discourse that had emerged from the 1960s with an outpouring of Holocaust survivor testimonies, especially in response to the Eichmann trial in 1961.¹⁸

While celebrating survival was the main theme of the protest, mourning was also an important aspect of the day. Later in his broadcast, Kirkbright describes 26 January as ‘a day of celebration and mourning. The two can go together; in some blackfella way they will, that’s for sure’.¹⁹ By making 26 January a day of mourning, as well as celebration, protesters were drawing on previous iterations of mourning as protests against national memorials. In 1938, on the occasion of the Sesquicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet, Aboriginal people, led by William Cooper, held the first ‘day of mourning’.²⁰ Then, in 1970, when a bicentennial re-enactment of Captain Cook’s arrival was staged at Botany Bay, Aboriginal people and their supporters gathered on the north head of the bay to throw wreaths into the water. This was a gesture of grief for all they had lost in the wake of Cook’s arrival there 200 years earlier.²¹

Kirkbright also has a message for non-Indigenous people. He appeals to a core value of Australian identity – the egalitarian ideal of the ‘fair go’ – to implicate ‘any fair-minded Australians’ in denouncing the Bicentenary celebrations. Another example of Indigenous use of the idea of ‘fairness’ can be found in a narrative told by Aboriginal man Hobbles Danayari to anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in the early 1980s.²² Danayari was from Yarralin in the Northern Territory and his narrative recounts European invasion of the land, using Captain Cook as a metonym for the invaders. He tells Rose: ‘Now Captain Cook didn’t – givem fair go people.’²³ Here he draws on the European Australian moral of ‘fairness’ to explain why the invasion was wrong. As Rose argues, ‘In addition to stating the wrong in Aboriginal terms, Hobbles also specifies it quite clearly in European terms’.²⁴ Historian Kelly Jean Butler also writes about the enduring use of ‘fairness’ to appeal to the morality of Australians in regard to the historic injustices suffered by Indigenous people. She highlights ‘fairness’ rhetoric in two famous speeches by former prime ministers: Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology and Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Address.²⁵ She argues that Rudd and Keating use ‘fairness’ to call on Australians to ‘witness’, or recognise, past injustices inflicted on Indigenous people, since the term appeals to an Australian notion of ‘good citizenship’.²⁶ Kirkbright uses the word in a similar way to Danayari, Rudd and Keating in order to make non-Indigenous Australians responsible for recognising how inappropriate the bicentennial celebrations are and to encourage them to consider solidarity with Indigenous Australians.

Just as he draws on the particular meaning that ‘fairness’ has in an Australian context, Kirkbright’s use of the word ‘genocide’ can be read as a provocative appeal to Australian consciences. According to historian Colin Tatz, the term ‘genocide’ had barely been used by Australian historians before the 1990s: ‘In the 1980s and 1990s, the developing preoccupation was with massacre.’²⁷ Historian Peter Read’s foundational research on the stolen generations in western New South Wales (NSW) was underway by the 1980s and an early use of ‘genocide’ can be found in his 1981 pamphlet on child removal written for a NSW government agency.²⁸ However, a mainstream public debate about whether genocide was carried out by Europeans against Indigenous people only came about after the 1997 publication of Bringing Them Home: The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, which contended that a genocide had occurred.²⁹ Kirkbright’s prescient use of ‘genocide’ indicates that, while it was not a common term being used in academic circles in the late 1980s, there was a vernacular use of the word within Indigenous political discourse by 1988. Tatz writes that the majority of Australians associated ‘genocide’ with ‘Holocaust’ and could not conceive of it taking place ‘here’.³⁰ By linking ‘survival’ with ‘genocide’, Kirkbright provides a historical reference point in the Holocaust to help people to conceive of Indigenous survival.

Kirkbright expounds on the theme of survival by reading articles that elaborate on the idea. One such article comes from Land Rights News and is titled ‘Larakia Message’. It records Wally Fejo’s speech at the Larrakia and Kahlin Compound Memorial Service that was held on 1 January 1988 in Darwin to mark 200 years of survival and to remember the suffering at the Kahlin Compound, where Indigenous children were taken after being removed from their families.³¹ The speech ends with the lines:

Little One (addressing Ambrose Tomlins junior) you go with the spirit of Larrakia [sic] and you face this world with everything that’s going to come your way, and you hold your head high, and you step out straight, and you keep straight words and you tell the world we will survive. And we will continue to survive.³²

Kirkbright’s oral rendition of these written articles exemplifies radio’s potential to provide a mixed medium of communication. Historian Alessandro Portelli argues that, ‘For several centuries now … writing and orality have not existed in separate worlds. While a great deal of written memory is but a thin veneer on an underlying orality, even illiterate persons are saturated with written culture’.³³ Radio Redfern’s broadcast on 26 January is suffused with ‘written culture’ that enriches an already dynamic medium with new meanings and new ways of being ‘read’. Presenters like Kirkbright use this potential of radio, among others, to explore and promote the political message of the protest.

In addition to reading articles that reference Indigenous survival, Kirkbright plays political songs by Indigenous artists that draw on the same political discourse. After outlining the Boycott’s philosophy as a celebration of Indigenous survival, Kirkbright plays the song ‘We Have Survived’ by Aboriginal band No Fixed Address. This song and several other songs (many also by Indigenous artists) make up a repertoire of political music for the protest that was played repetitively on Radio Redfern throughout the day. Later, when he signs off, Kirkbright recites the song’s lyrics to remind people why they are marching. These lyrics include the lines:

Cause we have survived, the white man’s world

And the horror and the torment of it all.

We have survived, the white man’s world

And you know, you can’t change that.³⁴

The close ‘reading’ (or ‘listening’) that I have done of Kirkbright’s spoken broadcast (and not a transcript of it, which does not exist) can be applied to written texts as well; however, the oral nature of the source encourages engaging with it in ways that focus on the colloquial or the vernacular. What at first listening sounds like a straightforward description of the political agenda of the protest is, upon closer listening, a rich intertextual account that draws in pre-existing and circulating rhetoric and political actions. Moreover, the way Kirkbright addresses his audience encourages an identification with the political agenda he is setting out. I will continue to use this method of close listening to individual speech throughout the article as I delve into other aspects of Radio Redfern’s unique perspective on the protest and what the day’s broadcast tells us about the medium of radio.

Multivocality and solidarity

We march today from Redfern Oval; from Redfern Park for all the Kooris, Murris, Noongars, all the black fellas. And that starts at 11. Eleven o’clock at Redfern Park, next to Redfern Oval. And for all the supporters, for non-Aboriginal supporters, you go to Belmore Park, next to Central Railway Station.³⁵

27 Cope Street is less than 1 kilometre from Redfern Park where Indigenous people assembled before the march on 26 January. As the morning progresses and the beginning of the march draws closer, Kirkbright is joined at the station and on the airwaves by other presenters, activists and supporters. Listening to the recordings, it is clear that the broadcast shifts from Kirkbright’s single voice to a medley. Radio Redfern is not a univocal medium where one person speaks to an audience. Rather, the station is a political forum in which many voices come together and can be heard. This is significant because it expands our understanding of how radio can be used by communities, polities or solidarities – and indeed helps to constitute them. Moreover, Radio Redfern’s multivocality evokes the north/south, pan-Indigenous solidarity in its inclusion of voices from across the country. This solidarity was one of the most important features of the protest as Indigenous people from across the country came together for the first time. During Kirkbright’s broadcast, other organisers can be heard, including Cheryl Rose at 8:30 am who asks for all volunteer presenters to come down to the studio, and also Millie Ingram, an Aboriginal woman running for the NSW state election.

Kirkbright’s segment is followed by presenter Marie Bennett who is on air until the march begins. Bennett is in turn followed by Charlie Watson, an active member of the Brisbane Aboriginal community.³⁶ Although Watson is the primary presenter until well into the afternoon, the station still finds other ways to continue broadcasting many voices. The many different speakers on Radio Redfern can be thought of as a form of multivocality, which is a common feature in Indigenous writing and storytelling.³⁷ As anthropologist Daniel Fisher writes: ‘To listen to Aboriginal radio in Australia is to hear a broad range of voices.’³⁸

One way the station includes a diversity of voices is through the broadcasting of taped interviews with people on the march. Presenters from the station walked through the crowd, recording interviews (that is, vox popping) that were then relayed back to the studio on motorcycles, quickly edited there, and then aired.³⁹ The first tape is played at 11:29 am: Cheryl Rose interviews people at Redfern Park, waiting for the march to start. One Queensland man says that what he wants to come from the march is an ‘education for the white people’.⁴⁰ Another man says that ‘people have always thought that Kooris could not conduct themselves in a manner that was orderly; always thought that we were a violent people. I think today’s the day that we show them that we’re as good as anybody else, if not better’.⁴¹

The director of the Northern Land Council, John Ah Kit, was also interviewed early in the day.⁴² He describes the people from the Northern Territory who are preparing for the march around him, including the dancers who were to lead the march:

We have Arnhem Land people. We have Hodgson Dance, Roper River community, Duck Creek, and we also have the Peppimenarti dancers being organised by Harry Wilson. We have the Central mob all painted up and looking pretty magnificent. The Warlpiri. The Arrernte, but mainly Warlpiri and people from Tennant Creek, they’re all together.⁴³

Throughout the march, Watson returns to the topic of the dancers from the Northern Territory a number of times.⁴⁴ The march was notable for the way in which it brought urban and non-urban Indigenous people and communities together. In seeking to highlight the visitors from the Northern Territory, as well as the voices of Indigenous people from across the country, Radio Redfern presenters seem to be emphasising the importance of the protest for all Indigenous people.

Indigenous people from all over Australia tell the interviewers why they are marching and what they think of the march. Some interviews are with people from different Aboriginal organisations, including the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) and the Northern Land Council. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who was chair of the latter and, later in the day, would give a speech in Hyde Park, comments in an interview on the effect he hopes the march will have:

And try to get an answer back from rest of Australia, especially the government who runs this country, it doesn’t matter who they are but justice gotta be made through legislation, law changes and constitution and so on. We can talk about all those political things but I think rest of Australians are human beings just like us and there should be a human response after this march.⁴⁵

Yunupingu’s comment is interesting because it turns Indigenous rhetoric from earlier in the century – about desiring inclusion and equality – on its head. During the lead-up to the 1967 referendum, Indigenous people lamented that they were treated with the ‘flora and fauna’ and called for equal treatment as human beings.⁴⁶ However, Yunupingu reverses the idea by saying that ‘rest of Australians are just like us’. This sentiment is indicative of the new sense of collective identity that Indigenous people had fostered over the preceding decades, which culminated in this gathering in Sydney and can be heard in the recording. Yunupingu was a leading and high-profile spokesperson for Indigenous people at the time; however, most people interviewed were everyday people, not leaders, which demonstrates Radio Redfern’s commitment to giving a voice to all.

Broadcasting the march

The Radio Redfern recording shows how radio can provide a closer, more direct, less mediated transmission of events than print media. This is most clear in Radio Redfern’s broadcast of the march on 26 January 1988. This broadcast demonstrates how radio’s representation of events can be almost temporally instantaneous and how the medium has the power to transport later listeners to a specific time and place, even decades after events have happened. Part of the power of this transportation lies in the inclusion of noise that is seemingly irrelevant though intermingled with sound that is more directly meaningful for the listener. Roland Barthes asserted that ‘art knows no static’, critiquing the ways in which historical narratives, in their representations of ‘real life’, remove any ‘extraneous’ elements.⁴⁷ Not all radio recordings include this so-called ‘static’; however, it is something for the historian to listen out for. While at times, the Radio Redfern recording is easy to ‘read’ – the politics are explained explicitly and the music expresses and reinforces this political meaning – for a large part of the recording there are ambiguous statements, ambient noise, noticeable silences and seemingly incongruous music. A close listening and critical analysis of the recording requires attention to meanings that are less obvious. The inclusion of ‘static’ in the Radio Redfern recording is what makes its insight into the day so intimate and so unique. Arguably, such a listening experience is more likely to be had from community radio, with its dispersion of perspectives and its effort to represent the community it is embedded in, as a physical place as much as a collection of people.

Radio Redfern was determined to capture the march for listeners as it happened. The most direct way the station broadcasts the march is through phone calls with Tiga Bayles, one of the founders of Radio Redfern and a key figure in Indigenous community radio, as well as a leader in land rights activism.⁴⁸ Bayles calls back to the studio during the march, making innovative use of mobile phone technology that had only arrived in Australia a year earlier.⁴⁹ Bayles, who is walking in the march, calls in every half-hour (or thereabouts) to update listeners on what is happening. In his first phone call, from Redfern Park, he says to Freddie Reynolds who is in the studio, ‘Well brother, this is deadly down here; looking real good. There must be 2,000 to 3,000 people down here at the moment’.⁵⁰

The excitement of the march is also captured in the ambient noise that can be heard in the background of Bayles’s calls. Bayles’s voice is usually, as Reynolds puts it, ‘loud and clear’ in the phone calls; however, there is always a thrum of excited voices in the background.⁵¹ Early in the march, Bayles asks Watson in the studio if he can hear the didgeridoos and clapsticks in the background.⁵² Watson tells Bayles, ‘We might just listen to that for a while’ and they fall silent to listen to the music and singing.⁵³

Bayles brings the march to life for Radio Redfern listeners with detailed descriptions. He describes the colours he sees: ‘Red, black and yellows everywhere ay. There’s a whole street.’⁵⁴ As the march proceeds from Redfern Park, along Chalmers Street, he conveys the mass of people around him, saying, ‘There’s a lot of people lining the streets’.⁵⁵ The most moving phone call comes as Bayles reaches the tunnel at Central Station. It becomes much harder to hear him and the crowd is very loud, cheering and chanting. He tells listeners, ‘You can hear the clapping and the chanting’, and he ‘just lets it play’; that is, he stops talking into the phone, so that listeners can hear the echoing sounds of: ‘Land Rights! [clap clap clap] Land Rights! [clap clap clap]’.⁵⁶ At one point, Watson asks Bayles: ‘Have you counted all the Aboriginal flags there?’ To which Bayles responds: ‘No, no, I couldn’t count ’em all; there’s so many. There’s just so many; couldn’t count ’em all.’⁵⁷ He does detail the many international flags and banners – including from Palestine, Ireland, Italy, Chile – he sees in Belmore Park when the Indigenous contingent of the march walks through the tunnel at Central Railway Station and sees all of the supporters awaiting them.⁵⁸

Witnessing police violence

During the afternoon, Radio Redfern’s recording provides a significant insight into one of the main intersecting political campaigns of the protest: the campaign against deaths in custody and police violence against Indigenous people. Throughout the day, Radio Redfern provides commentary by activists on the campaign against deaths in custody, highlighting the important intersection of this campaign with the protest. In addition to this commentary, the struggle at the heart of this campaign is captured in Radio Redfern’s broadcast of an encounter between Tiga Bayles and the police. Today, more people have the means by which to record police violence against Black people and thereby amplify and multiply the witnesses to this violence. The potential power of this amplified witnessing was seen in the huge action that came after millions of people watched a recording of George Floyd being killed by police in the United States in 2020. In the 1980s, however, the technology to record such events was less available, so Radio Redfern’s broadcast of Bayles’s conversation with the police is a rare and valuable record from that period. Moreover, as I will discuss in more detail below, the recording shows how technologically mediated witnessing can play an active role in these encounters. When the police arrive at the protest, we clearly hear Radio Redfern’s participation in, and not just its passive reportage of, the events of the day. Other political campaigns also intersected with the protest in 1988, notably the campaign for land rights and Black history. However, these are mentioned less often in the recording and are not broadcast in the same direct way we hear police violence evoked when the police arrive at the protest.

From Belmore Park, the march continued along Elizabeth Street to Hyde Park, where a rally was held in the afternoon, featuring cultural and musical performances, and speeches by Indigenous leaders. The organisers of the protest did not want a ‘confrontation’. As Kirkbright asserts:

we wanted a place, or an opportunity, where we could celebrate and put our culture on show; place where the biggest mob can sit without getting involved in a confrontation situation.⁵⁹

They chose Hyde Park, situated at least a few blocks from Sydney Harbour, where the main Bicentenary celebrations were taking place, so as not to engage directly with the events and crowds on and around the harbour.

At the time of the protest, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was underway, investigating the 99 Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia between 1980 and 1989.⁶⁰ Public attention on Black deaths in custody had been growing since the ‘sinister’ death in custody of Aboriginal teenager Eddy Murray in the north-western New South Wales town of Wee Waa in 1981.⁶¹ The immediate catalyst for the Royal Commission was the so-called ‘race riot’ in Brewarrina, also in north-western New South Wales, on 15 August 1987.⁶² This event is briefly alluded to but not elaborated in Radio Redfern’s broadcast. In one interview from the march that Marie Bennett recorded, Aboriginal activist Tombo Williams (possibly Winters),⁶³ from Brewarrina, tells listeners he is proud to be ‘here to join the celebrations; mourning’ and explains why the march is important to him: ‘When the first settlers came here they destroyed our people. They’re still destroying our people today through deaths in custody.’⁶⁴ Bennett asks him ‘how do people feel back home in Brewarrina?’ He replies that:

the people in Brewarrina are very concerned about what’s going on. We have a busload from there that came here because of the – we’ve had a recent deaths [sic] in custody in Brewarrina itself and we’re here to support the march and fight against deaths in custody.⁶⁵

Indigenous deaths in custody, police violence and the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous people are never far from the surface in Radio Redfern’s coverage of the protest and were a core part of the political discourse around Indigenous survival.

At around 2 pm, Watson says to Bayles, who has just arrived in Hyde Park, ‘And I understand the police have been very helpful too?’ Bayles responds:

Yeah, they’ve been real good. No problems at all there. Not like the old days where they’d try and run over you on their motorbikes and move you off over onto the road and stuff like that, you know.⁶⁶

In the background, Gary Foley’s voice can be heard, giving a speech, and Watson informs listeners that Radio Redfern has people in the park, recording, and that they will broadcast the speech later.

Four hours later, in another phone call to the studio at about 6 pm (Watson later informs listeners that it was at almost the end of the rally), Bayles is describing the last musical performance when he is interrupted by the sight of a bus full of police arriving at Hyde Park.⁶⁷ Immediately the mood of the broadcast shifts from elation to anxiety. This shift is evident in the following exchange between Bayles and Watson:

Bayles: We had two beautiful songs from a Murri woman from Cherbourg. Maroochy Barambah. Two beautiful songs there; really strong. She’s got up there, microphone in front of her and sang. No music, no nothing behind her – it was beautiful. We’ve just got a busload of pigs has come in. [shouting] Hey look at the constables. [to Watson] Big busload and they coming looking like they mean business too.

Watson: What are they coming there for?

Bayles: I don’t know.

Watson: Is someone gonna talk to ’em?

Bayles: I don’t know.

Watson: Can you get down there, Tig?

Bayles: Yeah, we will.

Watson: Stay on air, ay, and let us know what’s going on as you’re talking to ’em.

Bayles: [shouting] Hey Foley, look at these pigs here. Big busload. Big mob. [to Watson] Yeah, I’ll just go down and check it out now.

Watson: Yeah, stay on air. Just describe everything that you see, brother.

Bayles: There’s a busload. There must be 30 or 40 of ’em. They’re going along the streets here. They got them big sticks too; big batons they’re carrying.⁶⁸

The appearance of the police alters the coverage of the events broadcast on Radio Redfern. Where previously the station had sought to convey the main, planned events of the protest as directly as aurally possible, the arrival of the police results in the station changing its focus. As Bayles physically moves through the crowd to question the police, Radio Redfern’s coverage also moves to the physical periphery of the rally, yet the heart of its politics.

An exchange follows between Bayles and an officer, and then Bayles and a sergeant.⁶⁹ It is at times difficult to understand what they are saying from the recorded broadcast; the officer’s and sergeant’s responses are almost completely unintelligible. In real time, this interaction lasts for about two minutes. I transcribe sections of it here in order to capture the urgency and significance of the moment to the politics of the protest, as well as to capture the layers of meaning present in even such a short exchange.

Bayles: … You’ve got a problem have ya? [unintelligible officer response] Well there must be something wrong; we haven’t had police here all day. Is there something wrong here? Youse look like you expect trouble.

Officer: We got a call down here this morning.

Bayles: You did, yeah. …

Officer: Just have a walk around.

Bayles: Oh yeah, we haven’t had ya here all day, we don’t need yas now.

Officer: Public place we’re allowed to walk …

Bayles: It is ay. Public place – we’re allowed here too.

Officer: We didn’t say you couldn’t give a …

Bayles: No, you certainly never but youse look like you’re looking for trouble. … It’s people like you that will provoke the violence. You know that. That’s what you’re doing here. You know that. Youse’ll provoke it. You will initiate it. [to Watson in the studio] Yes, well we do have a large number of police here and we’re going to air throughout New South Wales and Queensland. … Yeah we got the police moving in here. They’re going right through the crowd. They’re just coming here to initiate violence by the look of things. …

In this first part of the interaction, we only really hear Bayles’s perspective, but the officer’s tone does not sound conciliatory, nor does he seem to be trying to offer any information that might de-escalate the situation. His responses are evasive and disingenuous. Bayles’s speech, in contrast, is direct and definitive. On the surface, Bayles’s message means the police officers in Hyde Park will incite violence and cause trouble. But his ‘You know that’ draws in the bigger history of police discrimination against Indigenous people and, indeed, given the context that the statement is operating in – which I have described above – could be read to implicate the failings of the entire justice system.

The fact that the police arrival alters Radio Redfern’s coverage so immediately is indicative of just how intrusive their presence is. It seeks to re-establish the presence of the colonial authority in that space. In response, Bayles and Watson quickly implicate listeners in the potential danger of the event, calling on them to bear witness to the police’s actions:

Watson: Well it’s going live all over Sydney and Brisbane anyhow.

Bayles: That’s good that it’s going live.

Watson: So you people –

Bayles: – big numbers of pigs here; big numbers of ’em.

Watson: So anyone listening –

Bayles: There’s some mean looking mothers too.

Watson: – start ringing up the police station, or ringing up anyone. This shouldn’t go on.

Bayles: … police liaison unit. And we need the police liaison unit here.

Watson: Any listeners, please ring the police liaison unit. Ring parliamentarians. Ring anyone.

Bayles: Yep, we need people to get as many people as possible down here. The police are here –

Watson: This is bloody shocking this is.

Bayles: – they are wanting to initiate violence. They’re walking around here looking like big men and they’re looking at initiating violence.⁷⁰

Radio has a long history of being used to oppose entrenched power structures.⁷¹ That is, used in an active way and not just for passive listening. In line with this tradition, Radio Redfern’s broadcast of the Hyde Park incident is a call to action as much as it is simply a relay of information.

This interaction between Bayles and the police prompts the question about how much the radio broadcast itself influenced the interaction. Anthropologist Daniel Fisher writes that, ‘Indigenous radio is a place where the voice is culturally produced – where particular voices are sites of cultural practice, governmental intervention, and social reflection’.⁷² In the above exchange, it is evident that Bayles is speaking with a hostile voice that has been produced by the social and historical circumstances: namely, the history of police violence and surveillance of Indigenous people. However, it is also the case, as anthropologist Dorothea Schulz argues, that radio is not merely instrumental in empowering voices because it does not just ‘transmit’ information but also ‘affects’ this information in the process of transmission.⁷³ It is evident that Watson and Bayles are aware of their radio audience and the responsibility to broadcast this event to them, so that they can in turn act as witnesses. Arguably, this awareness affects the interaction, prompting Bayles to act as a more assertive spokesperson. Indeed, it is Watson who encourages Bayles to talk to the police.

About half an hour after the police arrive at the rally, Watson tells listeners that the police have left the park and there were no arrests. He has this information courtesy of his brother, Ross Watson in Brisbane, who called the police liaison unit in Sydney.⁷⁴ Ross Watson’s actions can be seen as a fulfilment of Radio Redfern’s call for listeners to be witnesses to and actors in the event. Charlie Watson proceeds by playing a recording of Gary Foley’s speech, approximately three hours after Foley delivered it in the park. The police presence remains topical on Radio Redfern for the rest of the day. Watson and Brenda Croft discuss the issue again in the evening, lamenting that the police arrival might cast the march in a bad light.⁷⁵

Conclusion

Following the rally in Hyde Park, many protesters moved south to Kurnell on the southern shore of Botany Bay and opposite the La Perouse Aboriginal community on the north head and where many people were camped and being fed and looked after. A vigil was conducted at Kurnell by Aboriginal people from the Northern Territory. This event lasted all night, with dancing, singing and a smoking ceremony. The organisers of the event did not want it recorded, so Radio Redfern had limited capacity to broadcast it, in contrast with its transmission of the march and rally. Perhaps because of this, the station shifts into a much more reflective mode during the evening. The recordings continue until about 1 am on 27 January.⁷⁶

As I said at the outset, important histories and archives should not be told and interpreted just once and for all, but rather told and retold to enrich and revisit their possible meanings. I have focused on three key themes that are prominent in the recording; I might just as plausibly have considered how the broadcast participated in the almost-immediate historicisation of the march.⁷⁷ Other listeners might hear and emphasise other questions, themes and meanings. The Radio Redfern recording is perhaps one of the longest and richest aural archives of radio broadcasting in Australia. It presents a unique perspective on a single, very significant day for Indigenous people and history, and an insight into a medium that Indigenous people across the continent have used in the most creative and resourceful ways for some decades. Currently, the recordings are held in the National Film and Sound Archive, where in the era of digitisation they commend themselves to being made more accessible to students and historians of Indigenous history and radio alike, as well as to anyone interested in the protests and Aboriginal politics more broadly. As I have argued throughout, the true value of the recordings is only realised when they are listened to and so their future preservation and access should optimise listening – for instance, by making them more easily searchable; altering the metadata so that their chronological order is more apparent; making copies of them available in other archives; or rebroadcasting or exhibiting segments of them.

This article began with a comment from Linda Burney about Radio Redfern as ‘Black heart radio’ that positions the station at the heart of the community that arose in Sydney for the protest. Burney speaks of Radio Redfern as the ‘lynch pin’ in ‘getting the message’ out to people. This short statement registers the importance of considering Radio Redfern’s part in the protest because it was central to and participatory in the protest. Moreover, Burney’s statement highlights Radio Redfern’s role in mediating – that is, reporting for and involving listeners in – the events of January 1988. The way events are mediated, in itself, adds a layer of meaning to the events that should be interrogated in order to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics involved in creating meanings of historically important events and experiences.

As such, I have discussed both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of Radio Redfern’s broadcast from 26 January 1988, focusing my attention on the political content of the recording and the intersecting themes that cut across the politics of the day – notably, the discourse on Indigenous survival, the campaign against deaths in custody, and the significance of the protest as the culmination of pan-Indigenous solidarity. In the process, the ways in which the medium of radio affected and participated in the protest; what was made possible through this medium; and what role it played in the protest emerged. The Radio Redfern recording expands our understanding of radio history and what radio is and can be. Community radio has played a crucial and overlooked role in Indigenous communities and political activism. Historians and others would do well to use other recordings in producing Indigenous histories that are committed to listening deeply and being guided and changed by what they hear.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank Maria Nugent, who supervised the honours project that this article is based on, for her invaluable insight and support.

References

Primary sources

Radio Redfern, 26 January 1988. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), [RADIO REDFERN. 1988.01.26. 0635–0735] to [RADIO REDFERN. 1988.01.26. 2400–0100].

Newspapers

Age (Melbourne)

Land Rights News

Sydney Morning Herald

Secondary sources

Atwood, Bain and Andrew Markus. The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999.

Barta, Tony. ‘After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia’. Australian Journal of Politics and History 31, no. 1 (1985): 154–61. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.1985.tb01330.x.

Barthes, Roland. ‘Introduction à l’analyse structural des récits’. Communication 8 (1966): 7.

Bell, Sharon. ‘Filming Radio Redfern: “Riding to Success on the Backs of Blacks”?’ Media Information Australia, no. 56 (May 1990): 35–37. doi.org/10.1177/1329878x9005600108.

Bell, Sharon and Geoff Burton, dir. 88.9 Radio Redfern. Sydney: Film Australia, 1988.

Bessire, Lucas and Daniel Fisher, eds. ‘Introduction’. In Radio Fields Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, 1–47. New York: New York University Press, 2012. doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814771679.003.0001.

Bessire, Lucas and Daniel Fisher, eds. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012. doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814771679.003.0001.

Bongiorno, Frank. The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2015.

Bosch, Tanja E. ‘Radio as Instrument of Protest: The History of Bush Radio’. Journal of Radio Studies 13, no. 2 (2006): 249–65. doi/abs/10.1080/10955040701313420.

Butler, Kelly Jean. Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony, and Memory in Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2013. doi.org/10.4324/9781315135809.

Carr, David. ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’. History and Theory 25, no. 2 (May 1986): 117–31. doi.org/10.2307/2505301.

Cohen, Paul. History in Three Keys. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Cook, Kevin and Heather Goodall. Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists Talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013. doi.org/10.22459/MCH.09.2013.

Craig, Douglas. Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Damousi, Joy and Desley Deacon. ‘Introduction’. In Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, 1–2. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2007. doi.org/10.22459/TLAM.11.2007.

Fisher, Catherine. ‘World Citizens: Australian Women’s Internationalist Broadcasts, 1930–1939’. Women’s History Review (August 2018): 1–19. doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2018.1506554.

Fisher, Daniel. ‘From the Studio to the Street: Producing the Voice in Indigenous Australia’. In Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, edited by Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher, 69–88. New York: New York University Press, 2012. doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814771679.003.0001.

Fisher, Daniel. ‘Intimacy and Self-Abstraction: Radio as New Media in Aboriginal Australia’. Culture, Theory and Critique 54, no. 3 (2013): 372–93. doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2013.818278.

Fisher, Daniel. ‘Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia’. Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 2 (May 2009): 280–312. doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01132.x.

Griffin-Foley, Bridget. Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.

Haag, Oliver. ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream: Towards a History of Published Indigenous Australian Autobiographies and Biographies’. In Indigenous Biography and Autobiography, edited by Peter Read, Frances Peters-Little and Anna Haebich, 5–28. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008. doi.org/10.22459/iba.12.2008.01.

Haebich, Anna. ‘“Between Knowing and Not Knowing”: Public Knowledge of the Stolen Generations’. Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 70–90. doi.org/10.22459/AH.25.2011.05.

Hilmes, Michele and Jason Loviglio, eds. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hollinsworth, David. ‘Discourses on Aboriginality and the Politics of Identity in Urban Australia’. Oceania 63, no. 2 (December 1992): 137–55. doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1992.tb02409.x.

Johnson, Lesley. The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio. North Ryde, NSW: Methuen, 1988.

Lin, Chua Ai. ‘“The Modern Magic Carpet”: Wireless Radio in Interwar Colonial Singapore’. Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 167–91. doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X11000618.

Markus, Andrew. ‘Genocide in Australia’. Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 57–69. doi.org/10.22459/AH.25.2011.04.

Molnar, Helen and Michael Meadows. Songlines to Satellites: Indigenous Communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada. Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 2001.

Morris, Barry. Protest, Land Rights and Riots: Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013.

National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997.

Nugent, Maria. ‘Stories about Citizenship: Aboriginal People’s Historical Remembrance in Australia’. Pacific and American Studies 17 (April 2017): 54–57.

Nugent, Maria. Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.

Portelli, Alessandro. ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’. History Workshop, no. 12 (Autumn 1981): 96–107. doi.org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96.

Read, Peter. ‘Reflecting on The Stolen Generations’. Indigenous Law Bulletin 8. no. 13 (July/August 2014): 3–6.

Rose, Deborah Bird. ‘Remembrance’. Aboriginal History 13 (1989): 135–48. doi.org/10.22459/AH.13.2011.08.

Rothberg, Michael. ‘Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness’. Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 158–84. doi.org/10.1086/509750.

Shulz, Dorothea. ‘Reconsidering Muslim Authority: Female Preachers and the Ambiguities of Radio-Mediated Sermonizing in Mali’. In Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, edited by Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher, 108–23. New York: New York University Press, 2012. doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814771679.003.0001.

Tatz, Colin. ‘Confronting Australian Genocide’. Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 16–36. doi.org/10.22459/AH.25.2011.02.

Thomas, Martin. ‘The Rush to Record: Transmitting the Sound of Aboriginal Culture’. Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 90 (2007): 107–21. doi.org/10.1080/14443050709388114.

Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo, 2006.

Wright, Alexis. Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth. Sydney: Giramondo, 2017.

---