The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia by Daniel Fisher (review)

In The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia, Daniel Fisher of the University of California, Berkeley, offers an insightful and well-theorized analysis of the challenging domain of Aboriginal radio broadcasting in Australia's north. It presents research grounded in fieldwork that was undertaken last decade before the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which was a conduit through which many Indigenous public programs were funded. Fisher's observations recount the trials faced by Aboriginal radio networks under the constant pressures of dwindling public funds, low wages for Indigenous broadcasters employed through government work-for-welfare and training schemes, and mounting imperatives to find alternative income streams in the struggle to stay on air. Fisher argues that these engagements of Australian Indigenous peoples with audio media production double and actualize through sound their complex socialites and politics of aspiration.

Fisher's fieldwork was principally situated within two radio networks. The first, which he addresses in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, was 4AAA in Brisbane, which is owned by the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association (BIMA), and services the local Murri community and other Indigenous Australians living in southeast Queensland. As the capital of the northeastern state of Queensland, which has a long and well-documented history of dispossessing Indigenous peoples, Brisbane is generally considered to be the most populous urban gateway to Australia's northern expanse. The second radio network, which Fisher discusses at length in Chapters 5 and 6, was the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA). TEABBA is headquartered in Darwin, the tropical capital city of the Northern Territory, but services a diverse audience of Indigenous Australians who speak a multitude of different Australian languages within an area known as the Top End that spans some 1,100 kilometers from north to south and 1,800 kilometers from east to west. Also running through these chapters is the story of the long-standing Indigenous Australian affinity with country music, which Fisher introduces in Chapter 2, and exemplifies through analysis of two recent films by Indigenous Australian directors, Samson and Delilah by Warwick Thornton (2009) and The Sapphires by Wayne Blair (2012).

Fisher locates 4AAA's beginnings in 1984 in the studios of student radio station 4ZZZ on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland in Brisbane amid the staunch conservatism of the Bjelke-Petersen state government. He recounts how its iconic manager, the late Tiga Bayles, had been guided by activist imperatives at the commencement of his career, yet came to realize over the years that 4AAA could cultivate a much broader reach beyond Indigenous audiences with a more accessible country music format. Fisher adeptly traces how 4AAA was positioned to negotiate the multiple tensions that arose over this time as the auditing and compliance regime to which it was subjected by government funders grew more and more onerous, as the Queensland state government sought to transform community radio services into commoditized creative enterprises, and as younger audiences began to identify with and wanted to hear newer styles of popular music.

TEABBA, by contrast, was founded in 1989 in a visionary initiative to network media equipment and infrastructure that government had introduced into remote Aboriginal communities under the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). One of the greatest proponents of BRACS and the usefulness of radio as a means of improving Aboriginal people's lives in remote Australia was the late Frank Dj. Garawirrtja, whom Fisher identifies in his manuscript as FD. Garawirrtja was a man of Yolngu ancestry from Galiwin'ku, a remote town on Elcho Island within the Yolngu homelands of northeast Arnhem Land some 800 kilometers east of Darwin. He was the founding Deputy Chair of TEABBA, and later its Chair, and I was immensely privileged to have worked with him after commencing my own fieldwork on the continuum of traditional and popular musics in Arnhem Land in 1996 (Corn 2013...