Voicing the Past: Creating History through Radio Documentary

Carolyn Strange, School of History, ANU
When a New York murder trial revealed the private woes of a highly respectable white family the metropolitan press published shocking testimony of madness and cruelty. But those who crammed into the Manhattan courtroom where Frank Walworth stood trial in 1873 for the murder of his father had a different experience: they heard the defence read into evidence the violent and profane threats, which the victim, Mansfield Walworth, had penned in letters to his estranged wife. Interpreting this historic case of family violence through radio documentary, Parricide! A Murder Close to Home, involved conventional empirical research as well as collaborative work with interviewees, other historians, a sound engineer, actors and an executive producer. But the question remains: can aural history move and persuade audiences in ways the written text cannot?

Martin Thomas, School of History, ANU
Two Journeys is a radiophonic essay, scripted by Martin Thomas and produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation by the veteran radio-maker Jane Ulman. It was first broadcast by Classic FM in 2001 and has since been repeated on the Radio Eye and Hindsight timeslots. The broadcast consists of a dense and evocative bush soundscape that provides a setting for readings of two historical documents: Francis Barrallier’s journal of exploration which describes his abortive attempt to cross the Blue Mountains in 1802 and a letter by Elizabeth Hawkins, a pioneer Australian settler, that powerfully describes her family’s journey from Sydney to Bathurst twenty years later. The presentation will discuss why radio struck Thomas as such an apposite medium for exploring the issues of race and gender that so interested when he first encountered these documents, and how this experience of bringing out the sonority of primary material influenced his writing of The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (2003), a book that resulted from this research.

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