Radio Fields by Bessire Lucas; Ginsburg Faye; Fisher Daniel & Daniel Fisher

Author:Bessire, Lucas; Ginsburg, Faye; Fisher, Daniel & Daniel Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2012-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

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The Cultural Politics of Radio

Two Views from the Warlpiri Public Sphere

MELINDA HINKSON

Warlpiri people residing at the town of Yuendumu, central Australia, have been involved in a range of audiovisual media projects over the past three decades, from radio broadcasting through to film and television production and videoconferencing. In this chapter I consider two moments in this recent history with a specific focus on radio, as a way to reflect on the shifting relations between Warlpiri people and the Australian state. Warlpiri radio broadcasting reveals the distinctive cultural imperatives that may be observed more broadly in Warlpiri social interaction, but simultaneously broadcasting activity occurs against/in response to the demands of the Australian state. Increasingly these demands call out a new kind of Warlpiri subject, the responsible individual worker who would reorder his or her social obligations so as to bring them inline with those of “mainstream” Australia. In the first case considered here we glimpse the contradictory nature of the emergent community-based mediated public sphere and the ongoing challenges that Warlpiri social imperatives pose to the realization of a Warlpiri “community.” In the second case, the time of a neoliberal intensification of state “intervention,” we hear senior Warlpiri voices reflecting on the similarities and differences of the colonized past and present. These voices, carried by radio waves and the Internet, are directed both to the local community and to more distant listeners. In attending to these two moments, this chapter considers what radio activity reflects on Warlpiri people’s sense of who they are in turbulent times and on the increasingly complex parameters of their public sphere.

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