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This seminar will explore how radio broadcasting provided Australians with a new medium through which local, national, and global identities could be negotiated. In Australian radio, sport programs proved a particularly illuminating locus of tension, as sport broadcasts embodied the conflict between popular amusement and cultural uplift that marked the earliest discussions of broadcast responsibility.  

As production formats and modes of address became more formalized with the emergence of the Australian Broadcast Company (A.B.C.) in 1932, sport broadcasts stood out for the informality of their rhetoric, their spontaneity, and their participatory characteristics.  Whether represented by cricket, horse racing, wrestling, football, rowing, or other athletic contests, sport had long resided at the nexus of national identity and Australian culture.  What made radio sport unique was the electricity of participation – the way in which listening audiences could transcend global distances and be linked live to athletes contesting events on the other side of the continent or the opposite side of the globe.  News reports, industry periodicals, oral histories, and other primary sources reveal the ways in which Australian radio listeners engaged sport radio to consider their place in the nation, the Empire, and the world.