Radio has the ability to transcend space with ease, reaching those in remote towns, major cities, or altogether different continents. Stations also have the ability to attract various audiences, each one different from the next. This essay discusses two stations – radio CBQM in Fort McPherson, Canada, and a collection of aboriginal radio stations in northern Australia – that are iconic in both creating and reflecting the community it serves.
Radio CBQM is a small citizen-run multilingual radio station that hosts a variety of forms of media, from country music to call-in shows, poetry readings to local shout-outs. It is broadcasted from Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, a community of no more than 1000 residents, 80% of which are of Gwich'in aboriginal status. Dennis Allen’s documentary CBQM (2010) displays the community and their interaction with the radio in several interesting ways. The first is that almost everyone in the town is listening to the radio at all times; while driving, eating family dinners, knitting alone, or spending time with friends, the radio is on providing local entertainment and facilitating the translation of information to all people who are listening. As many listeners are elders who only speak the Gwich'in language Teet'lit Zheh, broadcasting in both English and Teet'lit Zheh evokes a sense of familiarity to all generations who listen. As a citizen-run radio that constantly fills the ears of the Gwich'in community with voices from their own community, CBQM serves as an important medium that brings the residents in Fort McPherson together, even in the long lightless months of the winter, while they are engaging in their daily lives. Secondly, the radio acts as an accessible means to disseminate information acting simultaneously as a radio show as well as a body to relay information to others: police officers warn residents of wolf sightings; friends wish others luck in bingo, an activity that also uses CBQM broadcaster as the caller; sometimes it is simply to tell another individual to hang up the phone so that another person can call them. All of this is encouraged by the constant ringing of the phone in the background of the radio broadcast, promoting more interaction between community members using the broadcaster as a mediator.
Aboriginal radio stations in Northern Australia function in similar ways to CBQM, in that they connect dispersed kin, overcoming geographical distance and penetrating institutional barriers by “linking people up” (Fisher 2009:282) through radio request programs. These broadcasts involve ‘shout-outs’ in an attempt to connect aboriginal kin from across northern Australia, creating a “social imaginary” whereby groups produce their social world through radio and reflect on it (Fisher 2009:293). This is especially true of individuals in northern Australia jails, the majority of which are aboriginal men and women. Radio shows on Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA) send music dedications from kin that cut across geographical space to inmates who receive warm ‘shout-outs’ from home when they are confined within the physical walls of Australian jails. A family is recreated in a makeshift community when individuals become isolated in prison. Similarly, Warwick Thorton’s film Green Bush shows that radio has as much responsibility to link kin up as it does to playing song (Fisher 2009:288). Social relatedness clearly plays an enormous part in aboriginal radio programming and should be examined for its complex and unique constitutions of community.
Northern Australia’s use of radio is similar to CBQM’s in that through radio programming, they bridge space to create a sense of community where at a particular moment there is little. The unfolding of these activities also reflects the communities in which the activities serve, as they unfold in the “mundane spaces of building sites, cars, [and in Fisher’s case] office buildings, and prison blocks” (Fisher 2009:283). However, CBQM differs in that it is highly localized, creating and reflecting a community that is primarily in Fort McPherson, rather than promoting continuity of kin relations across the vast northern part of continental Australia. Nevertheless, these two examples of the ways in which aboriginal radio creates and reflects a community have wider social implications than was once thought.
References
Allen, Dennis
2010 CBQM. National Film Board of Canada.
Fisher, Daniel
2009 Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.
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