The Voice and Its Doubles by Daniel Fisher

8/19/2019 The Voice and Its Doubles by Daniel Fisher

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MEDIA AND MUSIC IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA DANIEL FISHER


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HE VOICE AND IS DOUBLES


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THE VOICEAND ITS DOUBLES

Media and Music in Northern Australia

DANIEL FISHER

Durham and London 2016


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© 2016 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Minion by Westchester

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fisher, Daniel (Daniel odd), author.

itle: Te voice and its doubles : media and music in

Northern Australia / Daniel Fisher.

Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. |

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

Identiers: 2015042543

9780822360896 (hardcover : alk. paper)

9780822361206 (pbk. : alk. paper)

9780822374428 (e-book)Subjects: : Communication in anthropology—Australia,

Northern. | Aboriginal Australians in mass media. | Radio—

Production and direction—Australia, Northern. | Sound—

Recording and reproducing—Australia, Northern. |

Communication and culture—Australia, Northern. | Politics and

culture—Australia, Northern.

Classication: 94.5. 852 8 2016 |

302.23/44089991509429—dc23

record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042543

Cover art: Satellite dish, Northern erritory, Australia. ©

Deco / Alamy Stock Photo.


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CONTENTS

vii

ix

. Staging the Voice xiii

. 1

1. Mediating Kinship: Radio’s Cultural Poetics 43 2. Aboriginal Country 80

3. From the Studio to the Street 114

4. From Radio Skid Row to the Reconciliation Station 143

5. Speaking For or Selling Out? Dilemmas o Aboriginal

Cultural Brokerage 182

6. A Body or the Voice 222

. An Immanent Alterity 250

267

287

307


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ACRONYMS

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Arnhem Land Progress Association (Uniting Church)

Aboriginal Resource and Development Ser vice

Aboriginal and orres Strait Islander Commission

Aboriginal and orres Strait Islander Ser vice

Broadcasting or Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme

Council or Aboriginal Affairs

Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association

Community Broadcasting Foundation

Country Music Association o Australia

Culture Research Education and raining Enterprise

Department o Education and raining

o Department o Communications, Inormation echnology and

the Arts

Indigenous Hip Hop Projects

National Indigenous Radio Ser vice

Northern erritory Emergency Response

Niggaz With Attitude (hip-hop group)

op End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association

Yothu Yindi Foundation


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been working on this project and thinking about the political and

pleasurable imbrication o music, sound, and technology or a long time.

Across ten years o research, travel, and teaching, many people and places

have lef their mark on my thinking and encouraged me along the different

threads o musical and vocal sociality I draw together here. I extend my great-

est appreciation to the many broadcasters, producers, musicians, and activists

in Australia whose work drew my attention and whose efforts are insistently

tuned to the horizons and utures o Indigenous possibility. Teir efforts, their

many successes, and the riendship they extended to me are at the heart o

this book. In Brisbane iga Bayles, Alec Doomadjee, Daniel Kinchela, Wayne

Blair, and many others answered questions and shared music and stories, all

the while drawing me into 4’s daily routine and seasonal travels. In Dar-

win the crews at and Radio Larrakia and the members o Darwin’s

Long Grass Association gave generously o their time and, just as importantly,gave me room to ask questions, to work across organizations, and took me

with them on their travels. Tey need not have done so, and this willingness

to cart me along made everything else possible. Rico Adjrun has or a ull de-

cade proved an enormous ont o energy, great humor, and even better music.

I also thank iga or his permission to reproduce my photograph o him as

gure 4.1 and Jedda Puruntatameri or her permission to reproduce my pho-

tographs o her ather and other amily members in gures 5.2 and 5.3.

Several cotravelers in op End media whom I here call racy, Gary, andKaren proved steadast riends in the wake o a serious automobile accident

on the Stuart Highway. Te project might have stalled then and there but or


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x Acknowledgments

the care and hospitality they offered in a moment o existential crisis. Robert

Graham, Mary Laughren, and Murray Garde deserve special thanks or their

enormous generosity and hospitality both in Brisbane and Darwin.

Tis project has its genesis in graduate studies in the Department o An-

thropology at New York University. I ofen reect on my good ortune to ar-rive at Smith Hall and the Culture & Media Program when I did. As constant

models o rigorous and experimental scholarship as well as key mentors in

this project’s ormative moments, Fred Myers and Faye Ginsburg were and

continue to be more generous interlocutors than I would have thought possible.

In another stroke o good ortune I was lucky to attend Steven Feld’s seminars

on sound, the senses, and cinema. I owe Steve special thanks or helping me

begin thinking what a sounded ethnography might be and or his continued

generosity and riendship. om Abercrombie and Bambi Schieffelin were sharp

and enthusiastic interlocutors at , and I can’t thank them enough or their

assistance as I got this work off the ground.

Kristin Dowell, Luther Elliot, Aaron Glass, Elena Kim, and Susie Rosen-

baum saw some o this material in its earliest stages in our dissertation writing

group and helped me greatly with generous and genuine engagement. Tanks

as well to Elise Andaya, Lucas Bessire, Melissa Checker, Cheryl Furjanic,

Laura Harris, Bill Horn, Mariana Johnson, oby King, David Novak, Dawson

Prater, Lisa Steanoff, and Leshu orchin or conversation, musical dialogue,

and lmic companionship. Laura Ryan on East First Street and Lisa Bohnen-

stengel in Williamsburg, the many people I met through New York’s Coalition

or the Homeless, and the members o the Hungry March Band all helped me

see and hear a bigger New York and to think ethnography in new ways.

Te research on which this book is based was supported by an Interna-

tional Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, a program o the Social Science

Research Council (-), with unds provided by the Andrew W. MellonFoundation (2002); by a ellowship rom the Social Science Research Coun-

cil Program in the Arts with unds provided by the Rockeeller Foundation

(2002); by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship,

Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences 0210981 (2002–2004); by the Wenner-Gren

Foundation or Anthropological Research, dissertation research grant num-

bered 6944 (2002); and by a number o additional grants and ellowships rom

New York University’s Department o Anthropology.

In Sydney Jeremy Beckett proved a remarkably generous interlocutor dur-ing my rst antipodean travels while Clinton Walker and Gayle Kennedy lent

their ears and stories to my thinking as I nished the book. In Brisbane John


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Acknowledgments xi

Hartley, Jo acchi, Jinna ay, and Ellie Rennie were enormously collegial in

my rst months, while the Queensland University o echnology provided me

with my rst institutional base in Australia. In Canberra, Francesca Merlan

and Alan Rumsey proved more than generous, and I thank them in particu-

lar or introducing me to Canberra and the . I have also been ortunateto meet a remarkable group o Australian musicians and music lovers whose

contributions to my work must also be noted here. Michael Honen and Mark

Grose at SkinnyFish music gave o their time and their deep musical knowl-

edge o the op End; thanks as well to ony Gray or continued conversation

and shared stories.

Te manuscript that led to this book has been in progress at several in-

stitutions. I rst sketched its outline and core ideas while a Mellon-unded

postdoctoral ellow at Cornell University’s Department o Anthropology,

and I especially thank Jane Fajans, David Holmberg, and erence urner

or their support in this early stage and also am grateul or the collegial

conversation o my cotravelers in postdoctoral research Johanna Crane and

Francis Cody. At Rutgers University’s Center or Cultural Analysis my think-

ing was sharpened by conversation with Biella Coleman, Lisa Gitelman, Beth

Povinelli, and Michael Warner. In Australia, my colleagues at Macquarie

University provided the best kind o supportive challenges to early ideas. In

particular I thank Greg Downey, Chris Houston, Kalpana Ram, Jaap im-

mer, Lisa Wynn, and the late Ian Bedord or their collegiality and insight. A

sabbatical spent as a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Department o

Music in 2013 greatly assisted in completing the manuscript. I thank Aaron

Fox, George Lewis, Miya Masaoka, Meg McLagan, and Brian Larkin or their

generous welcome. My arguments also beneted rom the collective attention

and engagement o audiences at Cornell University; Columbia University’s De-

partment o Music; the Department o Anthropology at Sydney University; theAnthropology Department at , Austin; the University o echnology, Syd-

ney; Reed College; the Center or Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University; and

Berkeley.

My colleagues at Berkeley have been enormously supportive and gener-

ous with both ideas and riendship as I completed the book, while students

in my courses and seminars at Berkeley have likewise proven important and

stimulating interlocutors. At Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker and Eliza-

beth Ault have been wonderul editors, encouraging and engaged at each step,and I am truly thrilled that this book ound a home at Duke. I also thank the two

anonymous reviewers who read the draf manuscript and provided crucial


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xii Acknowledgments

textual interlocutors or the nal stretch o writing. Any aults that remain are,

o course, my own.

Chapters 1 and 3 revise and expand on arguments rst explored in essays

published in 2009 as “Speech Tat Offers Song: Kinship, Country Music, and

Incarceration in Northern Australia,” Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280–312;and in 2012 as “From the Studio to the Street: Producing the Voice in Indig-

enous Australia,” in Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the st

Century , ed. Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher (New York University Press).

A special shout goes out to my amily, who heard the music in this book

rst and whose conversations and laughter animate its pages. My parents,

Paul and Linda Fisher, encouraged me rom day one with their condence,

their love, and their strong sense o what truly matters. A million thanks also

go to John and Lyn ranter, who continue to extend their amazing hospitality

in Sydney, allowing me to eel a part o their extended amily. Kirsten ranter

has been a constant cotraveler rom the rst page to the last. She accompanied

me or much o the research, through the lows o high-speed car wrecks and

the highs o Christmases in Clovelly, New York, and Caliornia, and or the

past decade has shared with me the great joy o parenting Henry and now

Maximilian Fisher. Kirsten, Henry, and Max this book is or you.


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Laurel and I sat in the cinder-block broadcasting shed at the radio desk.

It was our third day in Barunga, a small Indigenous settlement in Aus-

tralia’s Northern erritory, broadcasting live radio rom their renowned

annual sports and music estival—ve days o concerts, contests, and

ootball games that drew Aboriginal and settler Australians rom across

the Northern erritory. Laurel, a Yolngu radio broadcaster and trans-

lator rom northeast Arnhem Land, was playing country and gospel

tracks and reading out the occasional request that was passed into the

shed on a handwritten note or called in rom the council offi ce via the

rotary phone stationed on the broadcast desk. And I was keeping her

company, both o us taking a break rom the insistent sun and dust

outside.

An old man came into the shed, wearing a plaid cowboy shirt,

jeans, and in bare eet. Would we send news to his niece in Galiwin’ku,he asked, to let her know that her uncle had won the spear-chucking

contest? I’d seen him throw an hour earlier, ollowing some tourist’s

efforts that, though earnest, went ar astray. His was indeed an impressive

shot, putting the spear into a powerul low arc, carving it down a grass

airway o sorts and right through the heart o a cardboard box standing

perilously close to some colorul polyester dome tents. Well-known In-

digenous actor and raconteur om E. Lewis was holding a microphone

and -ing the estival events. His voice led the loud collective cheerthat ollowed through his handheld , distorting its megaphone and

ampliying our collective excitement. Lewis had been working hard to

PROLOGUE Staging the Voice


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xiv Prologue

keep up the enthusiasm as tourists struggled to bring the wooden spear within

some proximity o the target. Everyone was thus thrilled to see the old man

display such skill, his technique and strength directing the spear through the

air as though with magic. Back in the studio Laurel opened the radio micro-

phone to share the news. She knew the man and his amily in Galiwin’ku, andput the news o his success across in Yolngu Matha, their shared rst language,

beore playing a country track rom the American singer Charley Pride.

In the days prior I had traveled south rom the erritory’s capital city, Dar-

win, through the large regional town o Katherine and on to this small central

Arnhem Land community with a radio broadcast team rom the op End

Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (). We arrived at the es-

tival site on a Friday, set up a tarp and tent, unolded camping tables under-

neath or the outdoor broadcast gear, and strung extension cables into the

cinder-block community broadcast studio. Te initials , acronym or the

amed, seminal rap group rom south central Los Angeles, were spray-painted

against a low brick wall inside (gure P.1). Tis -based musical collective,

the launching pad or celebrity rap artists and producers Dr. Dre, Eazy E, and

Ice Cube, is as popular in many o the Northern erritory’s remote communi-

ties as in Australia’s southeastern cities. Te broadcast equipment was housed

inside a second room, behind a locking door. Tere a table with a microphone

and small mixing desk sat in the middle o the room, while in the corner we

ound the rack-mounted tower o electronic equipment.

Te crew had been promised lodgings near the radio acilities or sleeping

and storing audio equipment. On arrival we ound that the house we’d been

allocated was the last available accommodation in the community, a derelict

structure, abandoned afer its previous occupants had moved several months

prior. When we saw the hundreds-strong swarm o cockroaches scatter away

rom the open door and its sudden blast o sun, we instead decided to sleepon the oor o the more regularly occupied radio studio, unrolling swags

alongside the graffi ti and audio cabling. Tat meant a midnight visit rom the

community bullock, sticking its head up to the chain-link gate that served as

a studio door, and a lot o talk late into the night in the shared, smaller space

o the studio.

On Saturday we began broadcasting music, requests, and interviews with

perormers and politicians rom the estival grounds. All day long Laurel, the

association’s manager Donna, and other Indigenous broadcasters and techni-cians had been running radio shows rom the edge o the ceremonial ground

that doubled as the dance hall, its leveled red dirt stretching away rom a long


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Prologue xv

semi-trailer-mounted bandstand. I spent the morning between the broad-

cast desk and the spear-throwing contest, and in the afernoon went with a

video camera to tape local pop music luminaries Yilila Band as they did their

sound check. Front man and lead singer Grant Nundhirribala and Yilila’s tour

manager, ony Gray, used duct tape to bind a microphone to the end o a

yidaki, then Nundhirribala began pumping out a drone over the or the

sound desk (gure P.2). Te yidaki was well traveled, cracked on one end, and

adorned with a bright blue radio bumper sticker.Just past dusk a rising star took the stage. Jessica Mauboy, then feen,

sang soul numbers to a prerecorded backing track, her melismatic delivery,

careully pinned hair, and spangle-studded blue jeans reracting the stage

lights across the dusty aces, board shorts, and long oral dresses o her audi-

ence. She had recently won an award at the amworth country music estival

or the virtuosity o her contemporary country vocal delivery, and her debut

single, a country and western cover o Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have

Fun,” had garnered enough attention to earn unding or a commercial music video. But this perormance at Barunga marked a generic shif in Mauboy’s

musical persona. It now echoed the new soul and sounds o Beyoncé

.1 Graffi ti adorns the brick wall o a radio studio, Barunga, Northern erritory.


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xvi Prologue

Knowles and Britney Spears and showcased her powerul voice as a virtuosic

instrument—a virtuosity oregrounded all the more by the lack o a backing

band; instead a track provided her accompaniment, staging her voice as

the ocus o our appreciation. Te audience gave her a rapturous welcome, an-

ticipating the international success she would soon achieve as an singer

and eature lm actor in lms such as Bran Nu Dae (2010) and Te Sapphires

(2012) beore a star turn in the 2014 Eurovision competition. Te show n-

ished up with dancing as Nundhirribala’s Yilila Band took the stage: eightpeople with guitars, bass, drums, and yidaki crowded onto the trailer-cum-

proscenium and put their voices together over a driving dance groove. Tese

were local heroes, hailing rom the community o Numbulwar just down the

road on the Gul o Carpentaria, and were themselves soon to tour Europe and

Japan promoting their rst record.

Afer the bands wrapped up or the night, Laurel, Donna, and I turned up

the powered speakers and let the music continue late. About twenty children

stayed near ’s broadcasting tent, dancing energetically under the spot-lit tarps that shielded the transmitters, players, and powered speakers rom

rain, however unlikely such precipitation may have been in July, the height o

.2 Duct tape holds a microphone to a yidaki, Barunga, Northern erritory.


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Prologue xvii

tropical Australia’s dry season. A ew clutched afer a ball, taking advantage

o ’s bright spotlights to scrabble together a game o Australian Rules

ootball. Parents and visitors drifed by in the night, just out o reach o the

lights.

Te association’s signal goes out each year rom this and other culturalestivals held in remote communities across the op End. Teir broadcasts

reach out through remote community transmitters rom Nauiyu, Galiwin’ku,

Barunga, Maningrida, Oenpelli, and more, sending out requests, country

music, news, and interviews with a range o Aboriginal public gures—actors,

musicians, and intellectuals. At times they also record local bands and local

battles o bands, songwriters, and young perormers. Tese recordings ll

their broadcasts in later months—occasionally becoming classics o a kind—

cherished and repeatedly requested by listeners across the Northern erritory.

’s broadcasts are themselves the sonic zero point o a large, regional

community broadcasting network. Teir signal travels through consoles and

tie lines, satellites and antennae, eventually to be transduced as sound emerg-

ing rom radios, computers, and even the phone systems o Indigenous cor-

porations in Darwin and Alice Springs. At Barunga and other on-location

broadcasts, ’s radio booth lls with children rom local communities

and Aboriginal Australians rom all corners o the country who stop or cups o

tea and talk, possibly putting out a request on-air while they sit and have a yarn.

And those requests take a particular shape, speak to others in terms o kinship

and amily connection, and requently rely on genres o popular music—country,

rock, and increasingly hip-hop and . For the “ethnographic present” o this

book, roughly the decade running rom 2002 to approximately 2012, the voices

on air moved across a spectrum o sung and spoken language—including the

cosmopolitan Arican American sounds o the Fugees, Beyoncé Knowles,

and Mauboy hersel; the country music o Slim Dusty, Charley Pride, andRoger Knox; and the voices o radio requests and song texts spoken and sung

in Yolngu Matha, Northern erritory Kriol, and Aboriginal English. And in

estivals like Barunga, voices also emerged rom microphones and powered

speakers, rom battery-powered megaphones and radio speakers. Te voice

in northern Australia, this is to say, is always already mediatized, staged by a

broad range o musical genres and sound technologies.

When I reect on the research that inorms this book, these days at Barunga

also stand out or making tangible the density o exchange between sonic ormand social relation that Aboriginal audio media entail. In walking over to the

broadcast studio that afernoon and allowing a recording o Charley Pride


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xviii Prologue

to celebrate the victory, the spear-throwing contest winner trod a well-worn

path, engaging in a widespread, amiliar practice that draws together voice,

technology, and musical sound. Tat path has a highly politicized, ofen sur-

prising history o activism and institutional politics in which what has been at

stake is how mediatized expressive orms will speak to, or, and o IndigenousAustralia. Audio media have long been at the center o Australian Indige-

nous rights and cultural activism, activism that sought to craf space in the

broader Australian imagination or Indigenous histories and concerns. But it

also emerged to address ears that the arrival o satellites, radios, tele visions,

and popular musics in northern Australia would mean the end o Australian

Indigenous cultural difference and distinction—that popular culture and sat-

ellite would entail a catastrophic displacement o Aboriginal singularity by

ersatz culture and the commodities o the distraction actory. Tese concerns

drew together Aboriginal activists and non-Indigenous advocates aiming to

enable the sel-determination o Indigenous people, and also attracted the

concerns o a range o state actors and advocates whose sporadic attention led

to unding support or organizations such as and radio and tele vision

production equipment or communities such as Barunga. Begun in activism

and advocacy, such media soon began to receive the (inconsistent) support o

the state in the orm o money, policy ormation, and research.

Such gures o activism and the imprecise attention o the settler state do

not in themselves account or the layers o politics and affect that audio media

entail as sound. Te establishment o Aboriginal radio stations and recording

studios have met the immediate aims o enabling the Aboriginal production

o media and also exceeded them. Te stories I engage with in the ollow-

ing chapters emerge rom a remarkable and rich media world—one that has

ostered the growth o an Indigenous Australian music industry as well as the

broad circulation o transnational orms o popular music: American countrymusic stars Faron Young and Charley Pride join Australia’s many Indigenous

rock, country, and acts on the radio playlists o northern Australia. It

has also led to what I term the mediatization o Aboriginal expressivity more

broadly, a consequential imbrication o sociality and audio media that matters

greatly or my Indigenous interlocutors.

Jessica Mauboy, staging her voice above the polished groove o a back-

ing track, participates in a long history o media activism and advocacy that

today allows a voice such as hers, singing commercial soul and musics, tobe heard in a remote Aboriginal community as at once “black” and “Aborigi-

nal.” As mediatized avatars, such celebrity voices have themselves come to in-


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Prologue xix

habit people’s own voices and expressive repertoires, not just when they speak

and sing about Aboriginal experiences, but in ways that undamentally shape

the value, politics, and historical signicance o those experiences. Barunga

provided an extended engagement with this mediatized voice, a voice staged

“onstage,” in radio, and against the drone o a yidaki, and also against broader,Aro-diasporic genres and sel-consciously black musical sensibilities. While

this book will suggest that the voice is always already staged to the extent that

we speak both in our “own” voices and in the voices o others, I am here pre-

occupied with a productive tension between a heightened reexivity around

what Mikhail Bakhtin called “heteroglossia,” what Erving Goffman gured

as reported speech, and what Jacques Derrida approached as the iteratability

and citationality central to speech and to the mediatization o voice as sound.

All these terms can evoke aspects o how my interlocutors and I ofen

speak our bodily voices as our own, yet also equally requently require and

stage the voices o others with our own mouths and bodies, animating a series

o sonic avatars in prosodic, musical, poetic, and vernacular acets o speaking

(and singing) together. In asking Laurel to send a message over the radio, the

old man I introduce above entrusted her with his voice, making himsel the

author, perhaps, o speech that Laurel animates (Goffman 1981). She then did

so with a mode o address that perorms intimacy and kin relatedness in pub-

lic; that both “sends a message” to a listener rom her uncle and also perorms

that relation or an audience, the public o Indigenous radio that is entailed by

this message and that can also hear itsel there, staged in sound. So i Aborigi-

nal audio media at times bears the signature o the state, in such moments o

collective sel-abstraction it can also unsettle, doubling an Indigenous world

in sound and creating there the possibility or shared pleasure, reection, and

critique. Tis joining o publicity, interpellation, and audition outlines the

mediatization o the voice as sound that is the topic o this book—a removalo the voice rom the body in a series o technical, expressive, and institutional

endeavors that gather together technology, musical sound, and orms o de-

sire and aspiration.


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Tis is a book about the Aboriginal production o audio media. It ex-

plores how the mediatization o voice and sound have come to animate

Indigenous lie, how audio media draw the interest and investment o

the Australian state, and how such media move people and matter in the

lives o Indigenous Australians. Like so many places across the globe,

northern Australia is awash in electronically mediated sound, with ra-

dios and electric guitars joining microphones and mobile telephones in

the circulation and amplication o music and voice. Tese audio tech-

nologies entail a durable politics o indigeneity and liberal government,

a shared concern with eliciting Indigenous voices that brings together

Indigenous and settler agencies, and also a series o arguments about

how best to do that, and why and how such voices might matter. While

audio media sound o Aboriginal history, its producers are also drawn

into the orbit o the state’s interests in Aboriginal media and associatedorms o scal and institutional discipline. Sound and voice, that is, are

sites where orms o affect, aural culture, and audit culture collide. Tis

book asks what is at stake or Indigenous Australians in this collision,

and in so doing endeavors to better understand the powers o audio

media and affecting sound in contemporary northern Australia. o tell

the story o Indigenous audio media in Australia is thus to explore an

ontology o the recorded voice, the moving character o speech and

song in their mediatization, and also to register the centrality o audiomedia and the voice to an aporia at the heart o liberal government in

the early twenty-rst century.

INTRODUCTION


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2 Introduction

Beginning in the early 1980s, Aboriginal Australians ound in radio, music

production, and lm and tele vision the means to transorm the terms o their

engagement with a broader Australian polity and to insert themselves into the

center o Australian political lie. Te activists behind such media built radio

stations and music studios and ound technological and institutional ormsthrough which to take some control o the satellite and telephone networks

then spreading across northern Australia. Tey did so by crafing request

shows rom country music and cassette-taped recordings o Aboriginal gos-

pel, country, and rock bands singing in local languages. Such efforts sought

not to sequester Aboriginal people rom a global mediascape but, rather, to

shape the contours o the media world they would inhabit, to enable orms o

visual and aural sovereignty in a new, mass-mediated domain. In the chapters

to ollow I analyze the mediatized world that has since taken shape, ocusing

on the distinctive work o music production and broadcast radio, and analyz-

ing the close proximity o media technologies, the voice, and those public

expressions o intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social

lie. One o my arguments is that this history o media production and media

politics has led to a particular sedimentation in sound o a rich politics, one

that draws voice, race, and agency together in distinctive ways, yet also tears

them apart in orms o discursive contest, expressive perormance, and tech-

nological work with wired sound.

Tat these different media can today seem unremarkable in northern

Australia is itsel, rom a historical perspective, quite a transormation, and

one that began with radio technologies and cassette tapes and the hopes they

embodied. Over the course o the 1960s and 1970s a number o Australian

politicians and Indigenous activists and advocates had seen in radio broad-

casting a means o ampliying Indigenous participation in Australian political

lie. H.C. “Nugget” Coombs, advocate or Aboriginal interests and bureau-cratic champion o a then-new turn toward policies o sel-determination,

considered the easibility o creating a northern broadcasting network or

Aboriginal people, one modeled on the use o radio as governmental commu-

nication in colonial Papua New Guinea. Coombs and his associates imagined

this as a means by which Aboriginal people could be inormed as citizens,

enabled with news and political inormation to participate in a broader Aus-

tralian society, but to do so on their own terms. While one might argue that

this endeavor was part o an effort to devolve governmental labor onto Ab-original corporations, a orm o Australian “indirect rule” (see, or instance,

Batty 2003), one can also see in Coombs’s interests a technical and ethical


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Introduction 3

approach to Indigenous political aspiration, a dialogue with Indigenous activ-

ists such as Pastor Doug Nicholls, Bill Onus, Charles Perkins, and other ad-

vocates in their efforts to make Aboriginal people ull members o a broader

Australian polity. However one gures such governmental interests in Indig-

enous broadcasting, these hopes or remote Aboriginal radio were still, at theend o the 1970s, unullled.

Ultimately Aboriginal and orres Strait Islander activists and their allies

organized around radio and music production, producing media in orms o

oppositional political activism and creating the historical conditions o pos-

sibility or the diverse media world that one nds in contemporary northern

Australia, a world constituted by a series o Aboriginal media institutions and

Aboriginal-managed media inrastructures. oday’s Indigenous broadcasters

include remote satellite networks such as the op End Aboriginal Bush Broad-

casting Association () and the Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri radio net-

work, larger regional broadcasters such as the Central Australian Aboriginal

Media Association’s () 8 , and more urban stations operating

under community broadcasting legislation, such as Radio Larrakia in Darwin

and 4 “Murri Country” in Brisbane. Over the last decade this institutional

eld o cultural production has been complemented by a digital and ber-

optic inrastructure. Cell phone access is widespread across remote Australia,

Internet-based media and tablet technologies are commonplace in Northern

erritory communities, and pop music rom Lady Gaga to Ludacris can be

heard on phones and boom boxes throughout the North. Tis is a complex

sound world by any reckoning, shaped by the musics and material culture o

contemporary audio media, but it remains one to which a series o Aboriginal-

run media institutions are central. Tese have a long history as sites o po-

litical activism and have encouraged the growth o a signicant Indigenous

music industry; as places in which people reexively attend to the voice bothdiscursively and through practical work on wired sound, Aboriginal radio

stations and music studios oster an appreciation o music and voice both as

a social act—emerging rom distinct Indigenous expressive traditions and

histories o colonial relationship—and as a technical one, amenable to exten-

sive manipulation and renement. Tis contemporary media inrastructure

thus entails orms o voice consciousness to which audio technologies, gov-

ernmental institutions, and Indigenous political action are central.

Te ollowing chapters explore this mutual involvement through a serieso ethnographic and analytical questions: What are the particular musical,

historical, and institutional routes by which sound and the voice have come


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4 Introduction

to play such primary roles in the lives o Aboriginal Australians? How has

mediatized sound become a stage or intra-Indigenous political lie? And why

might such sound so powerully attract governmental efforts to resolve a sup-

posed Aboriginal problem? What is at stake or Indigenous Australians and

or the state itsel in producing the voice in northern Australia? How, that is,do contemporary concerns with voice and voicing draw together the distinct,

requently agonistic interests o Aboriginal activists, cultural institutions, and

the varied agencies o the settler state? o grapple with these questions is also

to address the historical complexity o Indigenous media as a political instru-

mentality and the different metapragmatic oci that such production entails.

Tree key imperatives underwrite Indigenous audio media production:

giving voice, sounding black, and linking people up. Tese imperatives have

shaped the politics o voice and expressive sound that course through media

institutions and provide the key metapragmatic and aesthetic terms o debate

about what audio media should do and how they should sound. Te impera-

tive that Indigenous media give voice, or instance, joins vocality to widely

circulating, historically overdetermined tropes o expressive agency that rest

on the powers o media to entail orms o collective or mass subject through

distinctive orms o broadcast address. While such efforts to give voice have

ofen been understood to enable agency, authority, and Indigenous peoples’

latter-day participation in a settler Australian polity, they can also be gured

as a key means by which the legitimacy o the Australian state is itsel secured

in its guise as a secular, liberal democratic, and maximally inclusive polity (c.

Batty 2005; Michaels 1994). Sounding black, however, provides instead an

underdetermined rubric or both the valorization and critique o expressive

speech and musical sound. Globally mobile, Aro-diasporic gures o black-

ness have come to resonate deeply or Aboriginal Australians. In their jux-

taposition with an emergent local valorization o and metacultural concernwith blackness as a signier o Indigenous identity, these gures can elicit talk

and argument about how Aboriginal music, speech, or radio ought to sound.

Finally, linking up provides a locally signicant gloss on the imperative that

Aboriginal media must do more than represent, but also must draw together

an Aboriginal public as the bearer o a new cultural uture. Te phrase “link-

ing up” entails a charge in Indigenous Australia, one that draws together

durable Indigenous ontologies o relatedness with the repair o relations rup-

tured by colonial violence and settlement. Linking up as metaphor thereoredescribes a pragmatic and normative, rather than representational role or

audio media: Radio, music, and media activism, that is, should do something


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Introduction 5

with sound, should (re)create and animate orms o relatedness assaulted and

ruptured by violent colonization, settlement, and assimilationist government.

Each chapter o this book explores an expressive, technological, or insti-

tutional complication entailed by these imperatives. Troughout I seek to

demonstrate how a undamental indeterminacy in the relationship betweenthese imperatives and the sounds o Aboriginal media can lead to reection,

conversation, and orms o intra-Aboriginal contest around the meaning

and power o sound itsel. Tese are moments in which music, radio, and

the voice itsel can come unstuck, when the ontological stability o both a

collective subject and its expressive apparatus appear under negotiation by

individuals and institutions alike. Radio and music production offer privi-

leged points o entry, then, not only into the ways that Aboriginal people have

made a cosmopolitan musical culture their own, but also into the constitution

o an Indigenous historical agent through sustained, reexive consideration

o musico- vocal mediation, and through expressive work in and with sound

itsel. Tis is a story, in other words, about making audio media in Indigenous

northern Australia and the imbrication o this work with modes o kinship,

affect, the material qualities o phonographic and radiophonic technologies,

and the shifing and imprecise attention o the settler state.

How such metapragmatic and aesthetic imperatives are translated into the

sounds o radio or into musical orm by Indigenous media producers can be

a source o intra-Indigenous disagreement. Tat is, the consequences o such

imperatives can be understood as relatively underdetermined, and indeed,

these distinct but mutually implicated rameworks that I group together

here under the rubrics o voicing, blackness, and relatedness elicit evaluative

reection in the radio and recording studio, and ofen work to denaturalize the

collective Indigenous subject implied by particular orms o vocal expressivity.

Tey are also a source o excess, o a undamentally creative preoccupation with voicing that spills beyond the music and radio studio and comes to inorm the

historical subject o Indigenous politics as an institutional concern, its nonre-

ducibility to the settler state conditioned not solely by a oundational alterity

or ontology but by this dynamic, at times contested relation between a media-

tized vocal sociality and the historicity o Australian indigeneity. What I here

rame as imperatives are thus the metapragmatic rameworks by which Ab-

original producers reect on the aims and ends o their work, how they orient

and think about its value and consequence or Aboriginal communities, andhow they reproduce their distinction within a broader settler-colonial society.

As such, I approach these as recursive principles that eed back into the poetic


27/62

6 Introduction

contours and musical sounds o Aboriginal audio, inorming those vocal and

social practices through which audio media, its Indigenous subjects, and the

Australian government have become entangled in northern Australia.

In Aboriginal Australia the capacity to speak is itsel inected by a charged

political culture around representation. Indigenous Australian activists andthe communities they have come to represent express a proound concern

with who can speak. For those seeking to speak or Aboriginal communi-

ties or institutions, or instance, their authority is requently circumscribed by

a representational project and sense o obligation and responsibility toward

those represented. Such relations are lent a particular charge both by the long

history o colonial violence and displacement experienced by Indigenous

Australians and by the requent moments in which non-Indigenous Austra-

lians and settler governments have been heard to speak or them. Tis is joined

by a more diffuse restraint, a perormative hesitation to speak beyond one’s

own mob when conscious o the many and diverse people that cohere as

“Aboriginal Australia.” In contexts o music production, cultural estivals, and

radio programs, such intensely ocused consciousness around representation

leads to a question: How ought such authoritative or representative voices be

staged? Many o my interlocutors also ask, ollowing this line o questioning,

With what kind o voice and in what kinds o musical genres might one speak

as, or, or to Aboriginal Australians? o put it differently, questions o who can

speak or or as Aboriginal are also deeply tied up with questions o how one

should speak, and with questions about what kinds o sounds and musics and

expressive idioms ought to be considered representative, and which inappro-

priate or even dangerous or Aboriginal Australia. o approach Aboriginal

audio media, then, is to reckon with the question o authority as a representa-

tional and political issue, but also as an aesthetic, technological, and histori-

cally durable and generative problematic as well.On one hand, the mediatized voice can be understood as a series o sounds

placed at a remove rom particular bodies and social moments and put into

circulation. Tis is a voice at once o a sel and other to it, a site o technical

labor and expressive virtuosity, and also an object o discourse and practi-

cal labor around which congeal arguments and debates about blackness,

political agency, and representation. Tese sounds also resonate in more ab-

stract gures o voice and musical genre that circulate as data and argument

in boardrooms, grant applications, and governmental audits. As I suggest inchapters 5 and 6, this voice may also be elicited by the state as an index o

citizenship or required by governmental powers who constitute their sover-


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Introduction 7

eign authority on principles o democratic participation and inclusion. And,

nally, it may be gured institutionally as a commodity, an auratic gure o

audience to be transacted within an institutional economy as market share.

Such orms o expressivity, elicitation, and institutional exchange course

through the voice when it is made both a site o political mobilization andexpressive agency by Aboriginal people and Aboriginal advocates, and a site

o intense interest and investment by a range o governmental, institutional,

and juridical powers. For instance, liberal orms o sovereignty grounded in

ideals o democratic participation, requently gured in terms o “voice,” have

in Australia come to inorm broader governmental efforts to “recruit” or

otherwise support the production o an Indigenous voice (Batty 2005; c.

Attwood 2004). Inormed by the efforts o Aboriginal activists and advocates

such as Doug Nicholls, Bill Onus, Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler, and many

others, policy makers and advocates in the Council or Aboriginal Affairs

() sought to create the conditions through which Aboriginal participa-

tion in Australia’s political lie could be assured. One outcome o such aims

was the legal and policy apparatus o “sel-determination”— juridical instru-

ments and commonwealth-unded institutions that over the course o the

1970s and 1980s enabled the ormation o distinctly Aboriginal corpora-

tions, and unding and representative structures designed to cultivate and

enable an Aboriginal voice. One o the most immediately germane conse-

quences o these efforts was the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act

(1976), parliamentary legislation that provided the legal and scal inra-

structure or the corporate organization and rationalization o Indigenous

media production.

Tis shared interest in recruiting an Indigenous voice also presumed its

status as medium, indexing the maniestation o both political will and sub-

jective interiority writ large. Tis can be parsed more nely, even troubledby other analytic approaches to voice that historicize and its colloquial and

scholarly apprehension as media. John Durham Peters’s (2004) parsimonious

gloss on the mediatization o voice highlights ve distinct categories by which

we might consider the voice a “modern medium.” Tese include the voice

as a trope or power and agency; a medium or language and site o linguis-

tic interest; an object o aesthetic interest or poetic reection; an embodied

physicality—a biological process; and a psychic object, a ocus o desire and

at times erotic interest.

My aim in the chapters to ollow is not so much toadd to this list as to think about how such categories spill beyond liberal un-

derstandings o voice as media, asking how these are distilled and remixed in


29/62

8 Introduction

social practice, how they are inected, conjoined, and differently constituted

across uneven relations o power and racialized privilege. It is also to extend

the latter gure o voice as eros back through the prior categories in order to

hear in the voice a series o incommensurate state, settler, and Indigenous

interests.We can give this gure o mediatized sound and voice as a domain o shared

interest greater nuance by drawing it through what Jacques Lacan (2004)

termed the objet petit a, a concept Michel Chion (1998) and Mladen Dolar

(2006) translate as that “small otherness” o which the voice partakes in

orms o signication and subject ormation. As a historically emergent prod-

uct o intertwined histories o political action, media production, and musical

sociality, the voice here is neither simply transparent to relatedness nor inert,

a “thing” around which separable individuals gather. It is at once an index o

sedimented relations, a eelingul and charged expressive medium, an “affect-

ing presence,” and the means and ends o diffi cult political labor. As such

voice might be considered a provocation: even where it receives maximal rei-

cation or objectication, we should understand the consequential and lively

thingness o the voice as a “common stumbling block” o the different institu-

tional and Indigenous agencies or which it is a ocal point, a gure o desire,

or an object o work; as an opaque instigation to shared interest, it may also be

a source o incongruence and differentiation. As the ollowing chapters will

describe, the voice can ofen seem elusive, emerging in unexpected places,

hard to quantiy or enumerate in the small but deeply signicant corners o a

music recording or radio request (see chapters 2 and 3). I the particular aims

o many o my interlocutors to produce the Aboriginal voice could emerge

as a sedimented politics (see chapter 2), they could also seem swallowed by

orms o institutional labor and bureaucratic compromise (chapter 5) and the

sounded voice deerred or displaced—pushed to the uture through requentgrant proposals, or gured as past accomplishment in those audits, surveys,

and grant reports with which Aboriginal organizations are so ofen orced to

contend (chapter 7).

In the chapters below I endeavor to untangle the technological, institu-

tional, and expressive orces within this media world that push and pull at

the Aboriginal voice in its mediatization, de- and renaturalizing its expressive

powers in order to better understand the character o those diverse sounds

and media artiacts animated by Indigenous audio media. So although the bookdoes not venture ar into a psychoanalytic eld (see Gordon 1997: 41–42), it

does ocus its analysis on a politics o desire, aspiration, and hopeul praxis


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Introduction 9

that in Australia has been pegged to the mediatized voice itsel. In Australia

that politics takes shape in a series o historically specic relations—between

kin, between institutions, between different Indigenous peoples, and between

Indigenous people and the state—that are as much the subject o this text as

the mediatization o sound. When I write about the particular kinds o nostal-gia that country music thematizes and elicits or Aboriginal listeners, I tie that

work to the crafing o kinship relatedness in the ace o state discipline and

administration, and when I explore conicts between agencies o the settler

state and Indigenous broadcasters, I aim to understand the ways that what ex-

ists in the world might be a consequence o what people have aspired to, what

they worked together to create, even when what has come to into being can

seem so very different rom prior imaginings. In the story I tell here, aspira-

tion and desire, in both their ulllment and rustration, are ingredient to the

mediatization o music and sound.

The Vocal Uncanny

Te deep connection o radio and recorded music with voice and affecting

sound make audio media a premiere site or expressive projects that tie me-

diatized sound to a political project. o oreground the mediatization o voice

in northern Australia is thereore both to register a globally consequential

ideology o voice as index o power and sel-presence and to conront a un-

damental reexivity and sel-consciousness around voicing. Tis requires at-

tending not only to the consolidation o an ideology o voice to which a broad

scholarly literature so strongly testies, but also to the voice as sound and

to its requent de- and renaturalization in such contexts o cultural produc-

tion. In these ways the voice might be approached through the gure o the

vocal uncanny, a way to understand the voice as something both o and otherto my interlocutors, a power at once deeply amiliar but, as the nodal point

o at times competing interests, also a site o deamiliarization, struggle, and

unease.

My own engagement with these questions began at 4 radio, a hugely

successul Aboriginal country music radio station in the southeastern city

o Brisbane whose call sign, “Murri Country,” derives rom the regional and

valued ethnonym or Indigenous Queenslanders. In my rst six months o

research I joined young Murri men and women as they underwent trainingin radio and music production. I ound that their training, ostensibly ocused

on producing vocal sound or broadcast radio, included a broad range o other


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10 Introduction

objectives as well. Vocal training occurred in constant commentary on re-

cordings; in metapragmatic discussions between Aboriginal broadcasters

around how they might reach an imagined Anglo-Australian listener; in tech-

nical pedagogy around the visualized sound o a digital timeline undergoing

the “normalization” o audio compression; and on the telephone, learning to“speak proessionally” and sell an advertising spot. In each o these different

moments, the effort to produce a proessional sound involved a correspond-

ing aesthetic and pragmatic effort to produce a respectul representation o

Aboriginal competence, and was also a highly technical operation, using sof-

ware tools and visual icons o audio signal in a computer timeline to normal-

ize the volume requency o a prerecorded radio program. Here, as I detail in

chapters 3 and 4 below, expressivity, technology, “blackness,” and proession-

alism all became entangled in conversations and technical pedagogy around

the voice and its relationship to the music with which it is conjoined in a

broadcast. And it did so across a broad array o practices that spanned techni-

cal work, paperwork, and a lot o talk.

My young interlocutors in Brisbane in this rst stretch o research spent

much o their day seeking to reach others on the phone, in a production stu-

dio crafing a public ser vice announcement, or in a classroom ollowing the

lesson plan o a technical instructor. Tey then documented these activities

in worksheets and orms o written assessment geared toward displaying their

training or governmental auditors. Te voice here emerged as a goal o expres-

sive and technical labor, a mediatized orce to be audited as sound, and also

an object o institutional reporting, a gure on the page. In my rst months o

eldwork, then, assisting in the training o young Aboriginal men and women

in producing Aboriginal radio, I was drawn to understand the voices they pro-

duced as a number o related avatars signiying, minimally, a broad Aboriginal

collective subject, the institutional ulllment o governmental requirements,and the education and capacities o these young producers. In such work, the

“Aboriginal voice” was both evoked as an aim and dispersed as technological

skill, expressive technique, and the abstract “product” o institutional labor

and governmental investment.

In these terms the voice became layered with political struggle, with the in-

terests o the settler state in its role as auditor, and also with a range o charged

and highly valued orms o Indigenous political engagement and representa-

tional authority. In the recording studio, at the radio desk, and in the offi cecubicles and political meetings that mark much lie in Aboriginal Australia,

the voice inspired reexive consideration and occasional unease that reso-


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Introduction 11

nates with a series o amiliar, modern gures o media’s productive power,

its capacity to enable orms o collective sel-abstraction, to ampliy senses o

collective identity and political agency, and to evoke an alterity, one’s “sel ”

returned as the voice in the machine. Analytics o sel-abstraction (the ca-

pacity to hear onesel as part o or membershipped into a broader collective“sel ”) or o the uncanny (hearing a sound that is both o and other to onesel,

impelling distance rom the sound and that collective sel) each single out

the excess that media animate in social lie, underscoring how media avatars

may distill the relations o their production in orms o sensory engagement

or spectacular object.

My consideration o the ways that sounds take on such powers, however,

should not be read as marking a mystically inclined Indigenous alterity.

Rather, this is to reckon with the capacity o modern media more generally to

spectacularize and animate objects, images, or sounds emerging rom specic

social relations (Debord 1972; c. Briggs 2007). As Michael aussig (1993) and

Andrew Jones (2001) have argued, the magic o technological reproduction

strongly inheres in a Euroamerican ascination with media across the twentieth

century, a ascination that accounts in part or the primitivist staging o that

magic by colonial powers in charged domains o the global South in what

aussig describes as a orm o “rontier ritual” (1993: 208; see also Jones 2001:

11; Weheliye 2005). Tis overdetermined assessment o a supposedly primitive

engagement with media might better be understood as a orm o projection

by which analysts have returned magic to media technologies by routing

it through a putative non-Western alter. Furthermore, in northern Austra-

lia phonographic, lmic, and broadcast media have a lengthy history prior

to their deployment by Indigenous activists. Film and photography amously

played a central role in rontier engagements as Aboriginal people have been

subjected to regimes o cinematic surveillance and specular ascination (seeBerndt 1962; Bryson 2002; Deger 2004). Beginning in the 1950s in Arnhem

Land and the 1960s in Australia’s central desert, Aboriginal people sought some

say in the ways they were pictured by ethnographic lmmakers. Aboriginal

people also have long been consumers o lmic media—theaters in Darwin

and Alice Springs, as well as in small country towns and in the larger cities o

Melbourne and Sydney, counted Indigenous people among their audiences

rom their rst moments. Vinyl records and cassette tapes also circulated

widely in Australia and make up a part o the material archive o Indigenoushistory in northern Australia. As I recount in chapter 2, country music on tape

and in perormance has been a marked eature o remote northern Australian


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12 Introduction

lie since the late 1950s, and this history o media consumption inorms how

people remember the past as well as how they make that past signicant or

present musical and other concerns. One aim o my analysis o the media-

tization o sound in northern Australia is to understand this as historically

contemporary with Euroamerican, so-called metropolitan histories o mediaconsumption and thus to approach the emergence o Aboriginal media as

coextensive with this longer durée, not simply emerging, ex nihilo, in the last

decades o the twentieth century.

Unpacking the term “mediatization” provides a rst step toward understand-

ing the sustained reexivity o my interlocutors in their relation to modern

media and its avatars. In recent scholarship across communications, art history,

and anthropology, mediatization describes a distinct orm o metatheory—a

way o tracking the signicance o modern media’s institutions, technologies,

and mobile artiacts beyond or beore any specic moment o reception or

production (Briggs 2011; Couldry 2008; Hjarvard 2013; Schulz 2004). Here

the objects o media attention do not simply exist in the world, but are in

important ways made by, or, and through their mediatized circulation, taking

shape in relation to media technologies, institutions, and modes o circulation

as “communicable” (Briggs 2007; Briggs and Hallin 2007; c. Agha 2011). Te

term can also be differently traced genealogically into literary theory and the

“postmedium” moment o art critical writing (see Osborne 2013), and rom

there to a North American conversation around “new media.” Fredric Jame-

son (1990) thus describes “mediatization” as a medium’s awareness o itsel

as one component o a broader system, an insight taken up by David J. Bolter

and Richard Grusin in their work on remediation (1999); that work is itsel

inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s interests in how new media “consume” old

(1964). Tese writings inorm recent scholarship in anthropology that seeks

to theorize relations between different orms o media (Gershon 2010) andbetween media and those other orms o social mediation with which anthro-

pologists have long been undamentally concerned, such as ritual, kinship,

and exchange (see Mazzarella 2003, 2004). In these works, media are said

to “remediate” one another, to acquire their meanings and capacities through

their correlation and to gain a orm o sel-consciousness in that mutual rela-

tion. o address the mediatization o the voice is thus to oreground the exten-

sion o the embodied, human voice into other orms and agencies, the tak-

ing o voices into circuits o transduction and circulation, and also the use o vocal sound and metaphors o voicing to gure expressivity, representation,

and social power. It is to see “voice” as undamentally preoccupied by media


34/62

Introduction 13

technologies and thus made a site o reexive consideration, manipulation,

and judgment.

Tis dynamic o de- and renaturalization can be gured against Walter Ben-

jamin’s accounts o the aura in his widely read essays on mechanical reproduc-

tion and the history o photography (1968 [1936], 1999 [1931]). For Benjaminthe auratic aspect o an original seems both to attend and to be destroyed by

the advent o new technologies o pictorial reproduction and serialization—a

paradox that Samuel Weber characterizes well: “What is clear in Benjamin’s

discussion, even i he does not say it in so many words, and what has been

increasingly evident ever since, is that aura thrives in its decline and that the

reproductive media are particularly conducive to this thriving” (1996: 101,

emphasis in original). Reproducibility, in short, provokes reection on singu-

lar things and originary moments as media supplements take on constitutive

powers. A similar underdetermined relation links voice and audio media.

Historically durable language ideologies that link presence and interiority to

speech are implicated in the anxieties surrounding the power o recording

technologies to take voices rom bodies and conront auditors with a orm

that speaks at once intimately and abstractly, unsettling the givenness o both

audition and expression.

Te Euroamerican history o broadcast radio, or example, is one in which

radio sound has indexed a great expansion o the audible domain. In this

moment radio gured as both an icon o technoscientic modernity and an

occult, almost magical practice. o hear through a wireless was not simply to

hear a voice or piece o music, but also to sense domains beyond the imme-

diately perceptible, beyond the requency range o human audition, and also

beyond the parameters o human lie itsel. And this twinning o technology

and magic, o enlightenment and the occult, suggests an aural kinship with

Benjamin’s optical unconscious. o listen through the ether, that is, also couldmean listening to the ether, drawing on radio’s auditory prosthesis to animate

domains beyond the immediately sensible with desire, imagination, and anxi-

ety such that radio signals could speak rom beyond the grave (Sconce 2000;

Sterne 2003). Radio’s early static and hiss also could index affective, seemingly

opposed experiences o a newly audible mass public—both the claustrophobia

o being immersed in an unimaginable crowd and the loneliness o great dis-

tance, o a vast and shared isolation (Sconce 2000).

Tis ocus on perception receives a different emphasis in analyses thatbackground reproducibility in avor o prosthesis and affordance, describ-

ing the ways that media extend the senses, becoming submerged within


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14 Introduction

the sensory horizon and eld o agentive possibility this can entail. Fried-

rich Kittler’s writings build on Heidegger to describe the imbrication o radio

technologies with Euroamerican perceptual horizons, suggesting that radio’s

uncanny magic quickly receded to the limits o awareness as broadcast tech-

nologies were naturalized as a technical accomplishment, transparent to theircontent. Radio, that is, allowed—or, better, demanded—a new kind o hear-

ing. Kittler draws on Heidegger’s brie reerences to radio in Being and ime

to describe radio’s spatial magic underscoring how remote things can become

“ready to hand” by means o broadcast technologies (see Heidegger 2008

[1962]: 140). “With the radio, or example,” Heidegger writes, “Dasein has so

expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance

o ‘the world’ ” (1962: 140). Te world is at once closer, yet also set at a remove

as an object toward which a subject may act. Radio here typies or Heidegger

a modern sensory prosthesis with reexive consequences or the constitution

o the modern subject (Heidegger 2008 [1962]: 141). Heidegger’s subsequent

discussion o eyeglasses makes this proposition o technology as prosthesis

more clear: though perched on one’s nose, they disappear, making the distant

wall available to a myopic subject. Just so or radio, insoar as it makes ar-

removed sounds seem themselves closer to hand than the very receiver that

brings them close, which or both Kittler and Heidegger serves as more an a-

ordance or being-in-the-world than a ocus o attention. Te mediation o

sound thus disappears to the extent that audio media themselves are natural-

ized as transparent, technological prostheses—less magic, and more machine.

Yet such gures o the transparency o radio sound and the backgrounding

o mediation that it can entail are consistently problematized in Australia by

an institutional politics o representation and orms o pedagogy around the

voice in radio work and sound engineering. Te mediatized voice is a light-

ning rod or talk and reection about cultural authenticity, appropriation,expressivity, and agency. It is also a site o expressive virtuosity and technical

expertise. And its metaphorical resonance means that voice can stand or

the sonic, even visual representation or pragmatic locution o an Aboriginal

collective subject— voice becomes avatar here, its doubles encountered across

a range o media orms: images o singers, numbers in an audience survey,

and even, or especially, in the visual representation o sound displayed in a

graph o tonal values at a digital audio workstation. o this we must add re-

corded voices, the voices o radio s, news stories and analysis, as well asthe sounds o song—traditional and commercial alike. And nally we might

include the numbers o an audience survey or the sociospatial representations


36/62

Introduction 15

o broadcast signal on a radio station’s promotional materials. In Australia

audio technologies rarely vanish to the voices and agencies their mediation

supplements, and this productive capacity o media, its power to occasion

concern with the ontology o its reerent, is at times itsel in the rame.

In Australia producing the voice as recorded and broadcast sound has ledto a conjuncture in which specic voices must become aware o themselves as

instances in a broader system o mediation, and as such susceptible to logics

o remediation. Such remediation can be ormal, evidenced by the aesthetic

orm o an expressive or media practice as it takes the shape o another media,

one homologous or alike in some way. It can mean the ways a particular

media becomes the content o another, such as when music is made into

lm, or singing voices animate the apprehension o still images, or it can be

a orm o media ideology in which the way one uses or thinks about a partic-

ular orm o media derives rom a relational, multiply mediated environment

and the social and cultural protocols that inect the valence o their relation-

ship to one another. Finally, that awareness can extend to arguments about the

ways that media might remediate social phenomena that historically have not

been seen as media per se, such as kinship (chapter 1), ritual (chapter 4), or the

voice itsel (chapters 2 and 3).

As I detail in later chapters o this book, the voice in northern Australian

media production must also be understood as an object o institutional de-

sire, a site o governmental interest, and the raison d’être o a broad range o

broadcasting institutions, unding bodies, and governmental departments. I

thus approach the voice in such domains at once with attention to its embod-

ied expression, its mediatized transduction as radio or musical sound, and

the power o its varied avatars in the institutional labor dedicated to cultivat-

ing, soliciting, or eliciting an Aboriginal voice. Surveys and seminars, audits

and governmental policies all come to evoke and set out the voice as both apower to be reckoned with and a quality or quantity to be reckoned, an object

o bureaucratic desire and a ocus o requent enumeration and statistical

characterization. And in the context o such different interests in sonic media,

encounters that empower are tempered by encounters that evoke unease.

Indeed, what Mladen Dolar terms the “bare lie” o voice, itsel evoked as a

possibility by the voice’s mediatization, can seem swallowed by these different

technical and institutional apparatuses and their avatars as quickly as it

becomes apparent. Te successul sel-abstraction o Indigenous belonging bymeans o such indices o indigeneity, then, may be accompanied by encounters

with a vocal uncanny, ghosts o power or phantoms o the state shadowing the


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16 Introduction

mediatized voice. One o the primary arguments o this book, then, is

that the “ideology o voice” that one encounters across northern Austra-

lia, and perhaps across much o the world, must be drawn through audio

media’s power to both ampliy and unsettle the voice and the character o

its bearer.

Sounding Black

Conversations around the voice and its avatars are also implicated in a local

concern with what blackness itsel ought to sound like in this particular, Ab-

original place. Blackness is a historically variable, charged racial ascription in

Australia. Its targets have been vilied, policed, and dispossessed on the basis

o an ascribed racial difference that has been marked (in part) by skin color

and by efforts to reckon degrees o distance rom a putative “whiteness.” Over

the course o the twentieth century, however, this ascribed and stigmatized

category was reashioned and revalorized, upended to become a point o pride

and belonging, a resource in political struggles over rights and recognition.

Writers, activists, and historians such as Kevin Gilbert, Oodgeroo Noonuc-

cal, and Gary Foley embraced blackness as a necessary aspect o Aboriginal

identity and political power. Gilbert in particular, a playwright, novelist, and

poet, gave literary orm in works such as Te Cherry Pickers and Black Like

Me: Blacks Speak to Kevin Gilbert (1977) to an experience o blackness that

both decried the racism o a broader settler society and celebrated the par-

ticular experiences o black Australians across the continent, building on the

oundation o an ascribed racial category the ground o a shared identity. In

Gilbert’s plays, poetry, and nonction writing, the experience o racializing

subjugation became the crucible or a collective subject amid the diversity

o Indigenous Australia. Such works participated in a broader, cosmopolitandiaspora inected by the thinking o Frantz Fanon, the Black Power move-

ment, and the successes o American civil rights activism. Te activism and

exploration engaged by Gilbert, Noonuccal, and others might thus be under-

stood by reerence to a kind o antipodean “double consciousness” (Du Bois

1903; Gilroy 1993), with which I gesture here to a orm o sel-reexivity that

recognizes a racial identity ascribed through settler-colonial rule and turns

this racialization on its head by way o a cosmopolitan identication o shared

subjugation, a maniest assertion o solidarity and identity with the BlackPower o North America and anticolonial movements o West and South A-

rica (Attwood 2004).


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Introduction 17

Te ounders o Sydney’s Radio Redern, a station I introduce more com-

pletely in chapter 4, thus placed themselves at the vanguard o Australia’s anti-

apartheid activism, seeing the extension o welcome by the Australian state

to the South Arican rugby team, the Springboks, as turning a blind eye to

the violence o South Arican apartheid rule. iga Bayles, Radio Redern’s co-ounder, recalled unneling into the stadium in a small crowd o activists, sit-

ting in the bleachers and unurling placards condemning the actions o South

Arica’s apartheid state. Tey were greeted with racializing insults and aggres-

sive police, and ultimately helped occasion a government-imposed state o

emergency that sought to quell Australian anti-apartheid activism. Such

world historical events arrived in Australia through orms o mass media, gal-

vanizing Aboriginal activism around a transnational movement and asking

people to reckon their own situation by reerence to broader, global dynam-

ics o racialized rule. Te global character o anti-apartheid activism and the

Australian resonance o American Black Power and civil rights movements,

that is, have long inormed Australian efforts to reckon race beyond what

Fanon called the “double narcissism” o a racialized dependence o black on

white (2008 [1952]: xiv); to embrace blackness as a shared, structured aspect

o diverse Aboriginal and world historical situations, and to seek remedy or

those situations.

One can understand the possibility o such contestation and identica-

tion in terms sketched by Cornel West (1990), Paul Gilroy (1991, 1993), and

Stuart Hall (1993). Focusing in particular on what Gilroy amously terms the

Black Atlantic, these scholars tied the emergence o blackness as a global

cultural value to three coordinates: the displacement o “high cultural orms”

and a European Enlightenment inheritance as universal models o culture;

the emergence o the United States as a global political power in the post–

World War II period and an associated shif toward the United States as aglobal source o cultural production “in its mass-cultural, image-mediated,

technological orms” (Hall 1993: 104); and nally, and critically or this book,

the decolonization o the Tird World and the broad attraction and publicity

that accrued to the civil rights movement, Black Power, and orms o stylistic

Aro-centrism. Aboriginal political struggles, most requently understood

through the lens o a global movement toward Indigenous rights, must also

be understood within this global moment o postcolonial struggle in its me-

diatized constitution. What this broader ramework has brought to the mixin Australia is the centrality o colonial legacies and postcolonial relations

to a range o musical cosmopolitanisms, the inversion o racial dichotomies,


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18 Introduction

and the awareness o whiteness as itsel a historically unmarked but powerul

racializing category (see also Warwick Anderson 2006).

Tis matters in distinct ways in relation to sound, sound recording, and

radio. Musics coded as black have been a central eature o both sound record-

ing and radio since its inception. John and Alan Lomax not only took soundrecording gear across the United States, recording and revalorizing the musics

o an American racial underclass; Alan Lomax also brought “black sounds”

to a national radio audience beginning in 1939 (Szwed 2010). Te rst popu-

lar musics, rst sound lm, and early national radio audiences were in part

constituted around the sonority o black voices, then understood as avored

by emergent technologies o audio reproduction (Donald 2008; Weheliye

2005). Critical theoretical scholarship on the history o sound recording tech-

nologies thus suggests that orms o black cultural production have shaped

Euroamerican understandings o audio technology, even as they have ofen

been staged as each other’s antithesis (aussig 1993). O equal importance,

those same technologies quickly became part and parcel o a broad range

o black cultural production itsel, instruments in musical counternarra-

tives o a black uture. I the history o audio technology builds on a oun-

dation o racial presupposition, such technologies acquire unoreseen lie in

the uturist composition and improvisatory bricolage o racialized peoples.

Tey nd their apotheosis, one might say, in their redeployment in the “cut

’n’ mix” o diasporic musical culture and in the compositional practices o a

black avant-garde.

Much o the scholarship describing and exploring such relations be-

tween race, sound, and audio technology has been maniestly concerned with

a geographically distinct Aro-diasporic cultural ormation, a “sonic aro-

modernity” (Weheliye 2005), its improvisatory bricolage (Hebdige 1987; Veal

2007), and the signal dilemmas that diaspora and minstrelsy present to thediverse communities constituting the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993, 2010; c. Ed-

wards 2004). Tis powerul critical historiography, however, does not apply

transparently to an Australian embrace o black popular culture. Many o my

Australian interlocutors identiy themselves as “black but not Arican,” seeing

the many similarities in their experiences and collective history with racial-

ized populations across colonial domains yet also questioning the relevance

and ubiquity o Aro-diasporic cultural orms across Australia. As I describe

in chapter 4, the tension between a racialized identity as black and the rst-ness and distinction o indigeneity, alive in the political reections and strate-

gies o activists through the 1960s and 1970s, were swayed toward the latter


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Introduction 19

in the tenor o public discourse and activist endeavor beginning in the early

1970s. Yet the powerully attractive, exciting images and sounds coming rom

North America, South Arica, and the Caribbean all sounded as strongly or

Aboriginal Australians through the 1960s and 1970s as they do today and

ofen give orm to the ways that technology itsel is understood as musicalinstrument or to how the voice should sound, how a song ought best be sung.

In dialogue with scholars who have traced the resonance o Arican American

expressive idioms beyond the communities o a contemporary Black Atlantic

and into China and Japan, this book thus explores the emergent signicance

o blackness as a musical sign o value and power, an aural and actual embodi-

ment o revalorized alterity with resonance or my interlocutors, and a deeply

elt problematic that draws together race, sound, and relatedness across what

might be termed a Black Pacic.

o return to the events recounted in my prologue, when Jessica Mauboy

sings soul and musics in northern Australia, she is heard to overtly per-

orm blackness as a positive acet o her own and her Northern erritory audi-

ence’s shared identity as “blackellas” in a settler-colonial Australia, but also to

take a position within Australia at the popular musical vanguard as a commer-

cially viable representative o an antipodean soul tradition. In Australia, country

music has or decades stood as the paramount, iconic genre o Aboriginal

popular music—singing powerully to Aboriginal people, resounding on ra-

dios, and dominating request programming and perormance practice. More

recently, musical genres o and hip-hop have joined country as a means

to link up with peoples elsewhere, to perorm blackness as a positive value

against a long history o racial vilication. In 2004 and in the Northern er-

ritory, Mauboy could do so both with a country cry-break against an acoustic

guitar or with the wide vibrato and creaky voice o commercial —and

each generic musical signier could also cross over rom a politicized, affect-ing perormance o blackness and indigeneity or an Aboriginal audience

to a broad, commercial and white audience in Australian cities and suburbs

around the country. Yet in the studios and radio stations o Aboriginal Aus-

tralia, as I describe in more detail in chapters 2 and 3, the broad challenge

to country music by more overtly “black” musics o soul, hip-hop, and

has not proceeded without comment. While one radio host at Sydney’s Koori

Radio argued that black music speaks to a black experience, and embraced

the musics o Arica, America, and Australia alike as speaking equally wellto the experiences o Aboriginal people, other music and radio producers

in Queensland argued that such musics participate in the racialization o


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20 Introduction

Aboriginal people—and that their efforts should instead be toward underlin-

ing the history o colonization and dispossession, to oreground the particu-

larity o Indigenous historical experience and expressive tradition. We move

urther away, then, rom the sensory prosthetics o Kittler et al., to understand

audio technologies in Australia as always already problematized by a politicso sound.

Linking Up

Te mediatization o voice and the imperative that audio media sound black

both attend historically overdetermined and highly charged concerns with

relatedness that I gloss here as the third imperative underwriting Indigenous

media production as political praxis: that such media “link people up.” In

Aboriginal Australia linking up means more than simply making a connec-

tion; it evokes a proound suturing and repair o ruptured social relations. Its

historical resonance rests in the ways it has come to signiy bringing amilies

together who had been separated by colonial violence and the predations o

an assimilative state. Te phrase itsel comes rom efforts to identiy and re-

unite children and amilies orcibly separated when children were placed in

homes and missions, taken rom their amilies and communities as members

o what has come to be known as the Stolen Generations (Read and Edwards

1989; c. Attwood 2004). Te premiere organization responsible or much o

this work and or publicizing and advocating on behal o people affected by

these policies was called simply Link-Up, and this now names a national net-

work o organizations de

Documents

The Voice and Its Doubles by Daniel Fisher