Bridget Griffen-Foley’s book aims to chart the history and scope of commercial radio in Australia from the 1920s to the present day. It is a big job, and she makes it feel like a big job as she tracks such basic distinctions as that between A and B stations, between the ABC and the burgeoning commercial rivals. She traces the establishment of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which, in 1932, ‘took over responsibility for the national service’, while the ‘B class licensees’ established a federation to deal with the concerns of the commercial stations, the fourth and final name of this association being the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasts (FARB).

Inevitably, the author finds herself not exclusively focusing on the history of the commercial stations but on the infiltration of radio at large in the national consciousness, for either information or entertainment. There was, for instance, some early concern about its possible effect on newspapers as purveyors of news, and in the war and immediate postwar years, when there was a shortage of newsprint, radio filled an important need. One newsboy is recorded as saying that some of his customers bought papers to follow up in more detail matters they had heard briefly referred to on radio. It had also been feared that on-the-spot reporting of sporting events, say, might lead to a decline in attendances. Who would want to go to the Sydney Stadium for the fights on a Friday night if he could follow them in the comfort of his own home on 2KY from 1928?

Until the mid-1950s, radio held unquestioned sway in Australian homes: in the matter of news it had the great advantage over newspapers, let alone cinema newsreels, of immediacy, and it enjoyed a sense of intimacy in the lives of its listeners. This intimacy would extend further to transistor radios (there is a photograph of two young women sunning themselves unwisely on a beach as they listened to theirs) and to car radios. Television was obviously going to offer severe competition for the hearts and minds of radio listeners, but radio seemed to keep reinventing itself to retain its significant place in the national culture.

Griffen-Foley traces the changing emphases at work in the commercial sector: its differential appeals to men and women, the young and the old, the various class divisions. She quotes lonely housewives who spoke of radio personalities as ‘friends’, as people they could listen to as they went about household chores. On the other hand, there were those who thought the ABC infinitely superior in its offerings of ‘relaxing, high-quality music and instructive, improving talks’.

Much of the book is taken up with distinctions between ‘news-reporting’ and ‘news-gathering’, and the regulations brought into play to govern what radio was allowed to say. Commercial radio was seen as a vehicle for airing political and religious views, for education and entertainment, for the ultimate democracy of the ‘talk-back’ phenomenon. This latter, which bred such celebrated ‘shock jocks’ as Derryn Hinch and John Laws, became a prime source of campaigning in the 1970s. ‘It allowed politicians to ignore difficult questions, focus on matters they wanted to raise, and refer to notes; and announcers were usually less aggressive than print journalists.’ In fact, the book comes most vividly to life in its accounts of talk-back, recalling how Claudia (‘Claws’) Wright ‘had an 8.30 a.m. dust-up with [Ormsby] Wilkins and [Norman] Banks that was compulsive listening for many Melbournians’, and how ‘former Prime Minister Menzies, a frequent target of Wright’s vitriol, abhorred her’.

Mention of Wright, Laws and others suggests the procession of well-known names that winds its way through the book, but, apart from a few exceptions such as those listed, ‘names’ is what they tend to remain. There is throughout an overall sense of shifts in the national culture, of how we think about communications, of the role of media in both personal and national life, of the power struggles and legislative acts that controlled the burgeoning of commercial radio. Griffen-Foley attends to these matters, but, despite the book’s value as a reference work, somehow the drama and narrative sweep of it all, with its cast of thousands, never catches one up and carries one along.

I kept expecting an absorbing story of tussles for ascendancy, of conflicts between the mandarin and the demotic. I acknowledge that the research is impeccable and don’t doubt its authenticity (except that – call me pedant, if you will – Griffen-Foley is wrong in saying Colac is 200 miles from Melbourne; it is barely half that). My dissatisfaction is partly in what she does with the staggering amount of information collected – or rather, what she doesn’t do with it. Very early on, we become lost in a maze of acronyms, station names, regulations and associations; in a word, in the sheer parade of facts, all of which are endnoted with a scrupulousness that would do credit to a statistician, but which the author never seems to pull together meaningfully. Virtually every paragraph ends with a reference number (and there are others scattered within paragraphs), so that one wonders finally what Griffen-Foley herself is making of the facts she has marshalled.

Further, the organisation is utterly prosaic. There are two main parts to this hefty volume: the first is headed ‘The Industry’ and the second ‘The Programs’. It was on the latter I pinned my hopes as my head swirled with the reports of pressures and prejudices in the ‘industry’ section. There was surely potential for drama in the emergence of the conflicting interests in the radio industry, but the numbing list of facts, including a bewildering profusion of station names (only trainspotting types will have these at their fingertips) and the results of numerous ‘surveys’, ensure that excitement is kept discreetly at bay.

When one turns to the ‘Programs’ section, there is no feeling of what any of them were actually like. Griffen-Foley mentions Australia’s Amateur Hour, hosted by Dick Fair and then Terry Dear over a twenty-year period, without giving the slightest whiff of what made it so popular. I can still remember being urged to ‘keep those votes rolling in’ by telephoning (I’m almost sure) B0530, and the way ventriloquists or high-voltage sopranos were apt to scoop the pool, unless disabled or underprivileged performers got the sympathy vote as well as recognition of their talents. The prospect of bringing times past to life is, for the most part, bypassed in the relentless quest for the purely factual. The drabness of the subheadings in this long section possibly indicates the book’s informing mindset. Take for example this consecutive trio from the chapter on ‘Sporting Chances’: ‘Broadcasting Rights and Facilities’, ‘Major Events and Personalities’ and ‘Specialisation and Commodification’. All right, those are not foolish pointers, but they are characteristic of the immutably plain and uninviting tone.

To be fair, there are revealing bits of information, and a few touches of mild humour, but the two-page summary in the final section, ‘Postscript’, suggests untapped possibilities for making something more riveting of the assembled information. I wasn’t after a nostalgic wallow or a blood-on-the-carpet account of power struggles on air, in the studio and beyond. I just wanted the saga to leap to life in a way that it persistently does not.