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2024 was a BIG year. On June 6, The Greatest Menace team attended state parliament in Sydney as guests of the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, as he formally apologised to the LGBTQIA+ community for injustices suffered before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1984. The apology was partly triggered by our podcast. Pat, Simon, and I listened along with TGM contributors Jacquie Grant, a trans woman and former inmate of Cooma Prison, and gay couple of 55 years Terry Goulden and John Greenway, as politicians of all stripes spoke of their regret at the demonisation visited on the LGBTQIA+ community until 1984.
Outside Parliament House, Sydney, 6 June 2024, before the apology. From left, Terry Goulden and his husband John Greenway; Paul Horan, executive producer, Audible; Jacquie Grant; Simon Cunich; Pat Abboud, beckoning to Siobhán McHugh to join the photo rather than take it.
I wrote an in-depth article that analyses the making of the podcast: ‘Intimacy, Trust, and Justice on The Greatest Menace, a Podcast Exposing a “Gay Prison”.’ It’s published in the open access journal Media and Communication – download free pdf HERE.
Podcast Studies Roundtable, IAMCR 2024, Brisbane
Also in June, I co-convened, with Prof Mia Lindgren, the first ever Podcast Studies preconference event at the IAMCR (International Association of Media and Communications Research) conference. Organised with help from fellow pod scholars Dr Dylan Bird and Lea Redfern, it was a wonderful sharing and celebration of academic podcast research. We deliberately kept the event small and intimate, the 18 scholars from four continents forming a proto Podcast Think Tank that we hope will continue to develop research networks and collaborations – see the full report on proceedings.
Pod scholars from China, India, the US, Africa and Australia letting loose after an intense, rewarding – and fun! – day.
HEART of ARTNESS – Season 2
Back home in early July to another intimate podcast gathering: the reconvening of the team from Heart of Artness. We used the excellent Rodecaster kit to record a stimulating chat in my lounge room that will (one day!) kick off a second season. It will incorporate interviews I did a while back now with Indigenous artists such as Archie Moore, whose breathtaking work, Kith and Kin, won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in April 2024 – the highest global accolade. Archie was already meditating in our interview on the ruptures wrought by colonisation which he explores in his Biennale installation.
Team from Heart of Artness podcast preparing for S2: Guy Freer, technical producer; Ian McLean, art historian; me and Margo Neale, co-hosts.
Filmed interviews & lectures from Sydney to Madrid
In September, I was pleased to give a series of guest lectures on everything from podcast aesthetics to ethics, to media/sound students at Macquarie University, where I am Honorary Associate Professor in the Dept of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature. I’m also a member of their dynamic Creative Documentary Research Centre. So I was delighted to be interviewed for the CDRC by colleague Dr Helen Wolfenden, on all manner of podcast-related themes, from practice to pedagogy. The full interview is online here, usefully subdivided into chapters – handy for teaching perhaps.
The short clip below has me reflecting on whether narrative podcasts are art or journalism. It was clipped by Florence Lumsden, an indie podcaster based in North Carolina, whose show The Format delves into the podcast industry – my interview with Flo will be up early in 2025.
Which reminds me: I did a loong and satisfying interview with Spanish journalist Gorka Zumeta on all things podcasting following my residency in Madrid at Universidad CEU San Pablo in late 2023, kindly hosted by Dr José María Legorburu. Gorka probed deeply into the philosophy of sound and the business of audio/podcast journalism – it’s published in both Spanish and English, here.
Being introduced at CEU San Pablo against a life-size image of my book!
ORAL HISTORY meets PODCASTING
For me, podcasts, radio documentary and oral history are interlinked, as I always turned my big oral history projects into an audio series, and sometimes a book as well. My first book was a social history of the Snowy Scheme, a huge hydroelectric project that became the birthplace of multiculturalism in Australia. I was lucky enough to interview many dozens of those European migrants who made a fresh start here after WW2 by working on it – and what a diverse, polyglot bunch they were. In October, for the 75th anniversary of the scheme’s launch, I got wheeled out again to talk about that remarkable time, when people of over 30 nationalities who’d been fighting each other only a few years before, came together in the rugged Australian Alps to build one of the engineering wonders of the world. Better still, I got to play audio clips from the original oral histories I recorded in 1987/88 – the full collection is archived in the State Library at Sydney.
Speaking at the Engineers Australia event, slide of Snowy workers c. 1951 behind.
It was a delight to speak to 800 engineers (100 in the room and 700 online) to celebrate the scheme. Most were young, many of them migrants themselves, and the culture shock and gradual accommodations between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Australians of the 1950s and ‘60s resonated. The event was introduced by the extraordinary Arnold Dix, a Snowy boy who grew up by Lake Jindabyne, created by the project. Arnold has several degrees, in geology, law and engineering, and puts them all to good use as head of ITA, the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association. Over fish and chips afterwards, Arnold told me how he’d supervised the rescue of some 40 Indian miners after a tunnel collapse the year before.
Arnold Dix (R) with Damon Miller, an engineer on Snowy 2.0, a current extension of the original project.
Arnold currently advises the UN and somehow runs a flower farm on the side. The Snowy is still producing great stories, 75 years on! I told several more of them on various ABC shows, including RN’s Late Night Live, where the redoubtable host David Marr rashly invited me to sing. Which is how my impromptu rendition of the old folk ballad, Put a Light in Every Country Window, was unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
In November, it was off to Melbourne for the Oral History Conference of Victoria. I loved meeting the current crop of practitioners and hearing about fascinating projects from interviewing centenarians to mapping Melbourne’s buskers as both a podcast and a PhD. But I was really hanging out to hear the keynote, by my inspiration of so many years, Alessandro Portelli, all the way from Rome. At 82, Sandro was as eloquent and insightful as ever on how we make meaning of our lives, and the stories we tell about them. He truly is the world’s most brilliant oral historian, as his colleague and friend Prof Alistair Thomson introduced him.
Alessandro Portelli delivering the keynote at OHA Victoria Conference, Nov 2024.
I was thrilled – and a bit nervous – when Sandro attended my own session, a masterclass on the making of The Greatest Menace. The format, of converting interviews to serialised storytelling, crafted with archival and ambient sound, was new to him, he told me – but ‘great’. That got me thinking: what if current podcast producers were to get together with Sandro, and ask him to select and discuss works from his archive? What a cracker podcast that would be – because the meaning and impact of oral history only deepens with age and fresh contexts. Later I introduced Sandro to some excellent Italian podcast academics and practitioners… and the excitement was mutual. Watch this space! This is where the fellowship and shared community of audio people is so rewarding.
Honoured to have Alessandro Portelli attend my masterclass – and get interested in podcasts!
MY TOP PODCASTS for 2024
At year’s end, I delivered what has become an annual ritual – to select the year’s best podcasts for The Conversation. It’s always tough to whittle it down to ten, while trying to cover a range of genres and origins. There were obvious ones, such as The New Yorker and In The Dark’s forensic expose of US war crimes in Iraq. But there were also ones that might have flown beneath your radar, such as The Belgrano Diary, a tour de force hosted by the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, laden with poetic, sonorous reconstructions and memorable observation. (‘He looked like he’d been on a lifelong gap year.’).
Some I couldn’t fit in include Trial by Water (revisits the ghastly story of the father who drove his three boys into a dam and adduces compelling new evidence), Cement City (a tender if overlong portrait of a declining US town) and Baghdad Nights (an examination by my old collaborator, Richard Baker – Phoebe’s Fall, The Last Voyage of the Pong Su – of the sordid macho world in which Australian wheat officials associated with the Saddam Hussein regime).
2025 is shaping up to be exciting.
There’s another investigative podcast in the offing (led by the wonderful Patrick Abboud, host of TGM). And I’m headed to Europe in Sept/Oct, to present at the International Oral History Conference in Krakow, 16-19 Sept, and give a keynote at Aristotle University in the ancient city of Thessaloniki. Maybe also get to ECREA in Istanbul 8-10 September.
Meanwhile, I had the discombobulating experience of being made into a gift voucher! A devoted boyfriend bought two hours of my time to advise his partner on her fledgling podcast. I tried to talk him out of it – told him it would be much cheaper to buy her my book – but he wasn’t having a bar of it. I’d make a perfect Christmas gift, he said.
A fresh creative challenge for 2025!
Meanwhile, it’s high summer here and I’m off to the beach with Godot dog. And yes, he’ll make us wait 😄
Happy New Year!
Ian McLean and Margo Neale at the start of our journey, Yuendemu
Since January 2015, I’ve been working with the eminent art historian Ian McLean and the irrepressible Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator at the National Museum, on a wonderful project funded by the Australian Research Council: to investigate and document the little known but influential relationships between Aboriginal artists and close white associates.
Siobhan interviewing Warlpiri artist Alma Nungarrayi Granites at Yuendemu
I’ve recorded 30 oral histories, in two remote and one urban setting. We are donating this revelatory interview collection to the National Library of Australia, where it will be available as a research resource. But first, I’m mining it for a podcast, called Heart of Artness.
At the ABC, Sydney working on The Conquistador, the Warlpiri and the Dog Whisperer, March 2018. Margo Neale (presenter), Claudia Taranto (Executive Producer) and me (producer).
It’s been an enlightening and extraordinary journey. Sitting by a river, 300 kilometres from anywhere in Yolgnu country in tropical Northern Australia, listening to Yinimala Gumana describe how his great-grandfather came back from a hunting trip in 1911 and found about 30 dead bodies floating there: they’d been massacred in a ‘punitive expedition’ after a white surveyor went missing. (The surveyor turned up unharmed.) And then a tragedy in Yinimala’s own life, when a friend and ranger colleague was taken by a crocodile at the same spot, in 2018.
Cecilia Alfonso and Gloria Morales, who manage the Warlukurlangu art centre in Yuendemu, NT
Learning to understand the two Chilean women whose tough pragmatism has earned the approval of the Warlpiri artists who employ them.
Cecilia Alfonso and Gloria Morales have increased the turnover of their desert art centre from 300 works produced in a year to 8000.
With artist Richard Bell on top of the MCA, Sydney, which holds his work.
Sitting with artist Richard Bell in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, with Sydney Harbour glittering outside the window, as he fulminates about the “Captain Cook Cruises” going past – a reminder of the British invasion that cruelled his people and tried to quell his culture. ‘ I’m Irish – they practised on us,’ I tell him. ‘For 600 years, before they got to you.’ It instantly changes the dynamic.
What follows below is a version of an article that Ian McLean and I wrote for The Conversation. To find out more, visit the Heart of Artness website and listen to the podcast. Five episodes are up now (Nov 2018). Four to come: on early days in Yuendemu in the 1980s and on the edgy proppaNOW movement of Brisbane, featuring artists such as Bell, Vernon Ah Kee and Jennifer Herd.
Artist Jennifer Herd, founding member of proppaNOW
Aboriginal Art– it’s a white thing
… so Richard Bell declared in 2002. But as we discovered investigating this white thing, it’s also full of ‘positivity’, to use a favourite Bell expression. Not all that is white is evil.
Bell’s accusation was aimed at the then-booming market in remote Aboriginal art, but it was as true of the urban Aboriginal art scene. Bell should know. His [art] has been acquired by major white art institutions, from Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to London’s Tate Modern, and he is represented by Brisbane’s Milani Gallery, a major player in the Australian contemporary art world. This white thing is no big deal says Bell:
‘Nobody thinks it’s strange that black people play in sporting arenas owned by white people, for teams that are owned by white people. Josh [Milani] has an arena for us to play in – it’s the same deal. The MCA is the equivalent to Sydney Cricket Ground.’
As in sport there is much more to the art world than the stars, the artists, and this much more is mainly white. Largely invisible in the hype around Aboriginal art, we wanted to know about these invisible white men and women.
Milani Gallery is a major Australian art centre, owned and run by Josh Milani, who trained as a lawyer: ‘I do it as an advocate – with a sense of moral purpose and hopefully integrity. Queensland has a very large population of Aborigines… my work as a gallerist should represent the culture that’s here.’
Growing up with an Italian migrant father, Milani always “felt like a Wog”. His natural empathy with outsiders and intellectual passion for art and justice led him to where he is now: the go-to dealer for international curators. ‘I’ve learned a lot – how power operates, identity operates.’
Artist Wukun Wanambi and art centre manager Will Stubbs, Yirrkala 2010 (photo: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre).
Issues of power and identity are equally fundamental to the art produced at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, a Yolngu owned and run art centre in Yirrkala, 600 km east of Darwin. Its art also comes from the artists’ lived experience, in this case of an unusually intact Yolngu culture. Will Stubbs, a former criminal lawyer from Sydney, has been employed to managed the centre for over 20 years. While he has to balance cultural imperatives with market demand, for him cultural imperatives come first. “They bring in what they want to bring in, not what we ask for. And then we have to make it work from there’ – in, that is, the white market and art world.
Celebrated Yolgnu artist Nyapanyapa Yuninpingu (photo: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre)
One of its most successful artists is Nyapanyapa Yunipingu. One wet season when the centre ran out of bark, Stubbs handed Nyapanyapa some leftover acetates to keep her busy. She filled them at the rate of five a day. As he filed them away, he noticed ‘this filigree of complexity, of abstract existence, that I’d never seen before.’ As the acetates accumulated, Stubbs realised that seeing them in random permutations and sequences would accentuate their impact – so he contacted a Melbourne digital guru, Joseph Brady, who could devise such an algorithm.
Joseph Brady, digital artist.
The resulting Light Box became an installation in the 2012 Sydney Biennale – and Joseph Brady became so affected by Yolngu culture that he transplanted his young family to Yirrkala, where he now manages the Mulka Project at the art centre, a vast archive of Yolngu knowledge.
Like Milani Gallery, Buku-Larrnggay is one of the most successful purveyors of Aboriginal art, but as different as these two models are, they are not the only success stories. The Warlpiri-run Warlukurlangu Centre at Yuendemu, 300km northwest of Alice Springs, is also defying the post-GFC downturn in the Aboriginal art market.
Warlpiri artist Margaret Lewis Napangardi at work at Yuendemu.
Run by two Chilean women, its market-driven approach is the polar opposite of the culture-privileging mission of Will Stubbs. ‘They hired me because I’m an outsider,’ says Cecilia Alfonso, who started at Warlukurlangu in 2001. ‘They don’t want some hippie-dippy well-intentioned person to run their business.’ She and her business partner, Gloria Morales, monitor the market closely and encourage the artists to paint what is likely to sell. ‘This is a meeting of the two worlds as an enterprise and they come in for money.’ The centre now turns over about 8000 artworks a year, compared to around 300 when she and Gloria started. Traditional owner and artist Andrea Nungarrayi Martin is unconcerned whether the artists paint their traditional ‘tjukurrpa’ or dreaming story or decide to do something non-sacred. “Doesn’t matter – so long as it sells.”
Cecilia Alfonso with Warlpiri foundation artist of Warlukurlangu, Paddy Stewart.
It’s another twist in the ‘authenticity’ debate around Aboriginal art. In 2002 Bell decried how the white-controlled Aboriginal art industry privileged art from remote areas as more ‘authentic’ than that by urban artists such as him even though ‘we paid the biggest price.’ Bell’s genius is to leverage this loss to get a return. “When I started working with Richard [in 2003], we were selling paintings for $2000”, recalls Milani, but ‘the more people he offended, the more I put his prices up!’ … and the more this white clientele bought Bell’s paintings.
When Milani first met Bell in a pub, he had his trademark punch. He wrote on a beer coaster that he was an ‘enema of the state’. But he was no novice and he had a plan. Brilliant as these white dealers are, they need the artists as much as the artists need them. ‘We’ve positioned ourselves inside the tent’ – though not without Milani’s help – but, Bell told us, ‘that doesn’t stop us from getting outside and pissing on the tent.’
Artist Richard Bell.
I am thrilled to report that my article The Affective Power of Voice: Oral History on Radio, has been included in the forthcoming edition of The Oral History Reader (Routledge 2015). This comprehensive anthology (722pp) is undoubtedly the most important collection of articles by the international community of oral history scholars and practitioners. I am humbled to be in the company of such giants of the genre as Sandro Portelli, Michael Frisch, Studs Terkel, Paul Thompson, Sherna Berger Gluck, Valerie Yow, Doug Boyd, Paula Hamilton, Steven High, Linda Shopes and of course the editors, Australia’s Alistair Thomson of Monash University and the UK’s Rob Perks of the British Library.
2015 has been a good year for publication of my oral histories. The City of Sydney has done a fine job of placing online the archive of interviews with residents at Millers Point Sydney, done by me and coordinating oral historian Frank Heimans back around 2006. These interviews capture the rich harbourside community life of one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs, where men worked on the wharves (stevedoring) under tough conditions, and women raised families in cramped public housing. One of my favourite quotes was a woman who laughed that yes they did have running water back then – you ran in to the laundry, filled a bucket, ran back out and threw it into the bath! There are also great interviews with sports journalist legend Frank Hyde, a gentle man with a lovely sense of humour who sings Danny Boy on the tape; Jack Mundey, trade union leader extraordinaire, whose Green Bans movement stopped the proposed demolition of these inner Sydney ‘slums’ and kept the community intact; and Bill Ford, who grew up swimming off the steps at the ‘Met’ wharf and went on to be part of the famous US Freedom Ride that was mimicked in New South Wales in 1965 in a push to end discrimination against Aboriginal Australians.
With Denis O’Flynn, President INA, Dr Richard Reid, Michael Lyons and Dennis Foley at the launch of the INA Oral History, Nov 2015
My other big project this year brought me full circle: recording the oral histories of prominent Sydney Irish and Irish-Australian members of the Irish National Association (INA), which has its centenary in 2015. As an accidental Irish migrant who has now spent just over half her life in Australia, it was fascinating to hear stories of similar migrants, and what they felt they’d gained and lost in the process. The project explores how the INA upholds Irish culture and heritage, through activities around music, dancing, teaching the Irish language and maintaining an awareness of Irish history and politics, through events like the annual Easter oration at the wonderful Waverly cemetery monument, the St Patrick’s Day parade (revived in 1979) and the Famine Memorial event at Hyde Park Barracks each August. The interviews were commissioned by the National Library of Australia, which has placed some of them online in full. You can browse the timed summary, where a keyword or phrase will take you direct to the audio, and even provide a citation. Try Bishop David Cremin recalling how he held a controversial Requiem Mass for Bobby Sands, the first of the IRA hunger strikers to die in 1981. Or Maurie O’Sullivan, passionate Irish cultural advocate, describing how he talks Irish to his dogs and his horse to keep up his language skills! There is also Tomás De Bháldraithe, whose father wrote the first Irish-English dictionary, reflecting on the prominent role his family played in the public intellectual life of the nascent Irish state.
My next oral history project promises to be exciting and very different. It’s an investigation into the relational aspects of how contemporary Aboriginal art is produced, funded by the Australian Research Council. I’m part of a team with noted art historian Ian McLean and Indigenous Curator at the National Museum of Australia, the indefatigable Margo Neale. We’re seeking to understand how Indigenous artists work with non-Indigenous art centre staff and dealers, and in conversation with other artists, both Indigenous and non, and how these relationships affect the art that emerges. We’ve already visited two remote communities and it’s been a revelation. No wonder I love oral history – you get to hear the life stories of the most extraordinary people. And I agree with Studs – there are no ordinary people; just the uncelebrated. Let’s get celebrating!
Field research with Margo Neale and Prof Ian McLean
Siobhan McHugh 