The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia – By Daniel Fisher

The cultural mediation of sound through technology and forms of audio and visual media has long been a topic of research and theory in communication, media, music and cultural studies. A particular challenge for fieldworking anthropologists in this area is how to capture and analyse the everyday social life of sound, technology and media ethnographically. We usually end up at one of two ends of the spectrum: the abstract and theoretical end closer to the above-mentioned disciplines, or the end deeply embedded in informants’ everyday lifeworlds. In The Voice and Its Doubles, Daniel Fisher leans towards the former. Based partly on fieldwork in two city-based Aboriginal media organisations – the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA) in Darwin and the Aboriginal country music radio station 4AAA in Brisbane – the book explores the ‘mediatization’ of sound and voice in Aboriginal radio. Using a range of theories from communication, literature, popular culture and media studies, Fisher develops many intricate conceptual arguments about how Aboriginal audio media produce a particular sedimentation of a rich politics in sound that ‘draws voice, race, and agency together in distinctive ways, yet also tears them apart in forms of discursive contest, expressive performance, and technological work with wired sound’ (2). He approaches the mediatized voice as ‘sonic avatars’ (xix) both of and other to the Aboriginal radio workers (9); the ‘doubles’ in the title. He identifies three ‘metapragmatic frameworks’ (5) for how the Aboriginal broadcasters understand their work – ‘giving voice, sounding black, and linking people up’ (4) – and explores the expressive, technological and institutional aspects of these imperatives. Chapter one discusses the mediatised sound and voices of radio requests and country music in order to argue that Aboriginal radio has become a generative cultural resource and a form of cultural activism as these sounds and voices reproduce kin and shared histories of injustice for Aboriginal people. Chapter two considers the sound of recorded country music as distinctively Aboriginal. I have analysed this subject in ethnographic detail among Central Australia Aboriginal musicians and was keen to compare with Fisher’s field sites in Darwin and Brisbane. However, the chapter mainly discusses secondary sources on Aboriginal country music, with additional interview quotes from radio workers and discussions of country music in films. After detailed theoretical discussions about radio as vocal technology and a historical outline of Aboriginal radio in Australia, chapter three draws on Fisher’s experiences at the radio station in Brisbane to explore how radio becomes ‘a generative site of Indigenous self-fashioning’ (117) through vocal expressions. He looks at the role of in-house training programs, various kinds of radio production and government policy in mediatising Aboriginal voice, but like in most chapters, the use of detailed ethnographic data as base for analysis is limited. Chapter four provides an overview of the history of Indigenous radio policy in Australia and focuses on some key personalities shaping changing strategies to studio and live broadcasting at the Brisbane radio station. It outlines how training and work at the station need to satisfy funding bodies’ bureaucratic regimes that increasingly emphasise fiscal responsibility and entrepreneurial activities. The shift to market-based activities and organisational culture is further explored in chapter five, with a focus on the Darwin based media association TEABBA. Fisher considers the radio producers as ‘cultural brokers’ both between Indigenous groupings and between these heterogeneous groups and the bureaucratic patrons that fund the association. This chapter importantly illuminates the increasing diversity of contested experiences, values and needs within an Aboriginal domain in the north, which confirms what I have noted in relation to the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association: that such organisations occupy a precarious position as simultaneously sites for tensions and conflict between different Aboriginal interests, and sites expected to represent an Aboriginal view and voice in relation to non-indigenous agencies and society (Ethnos 2010, 75(3): 293). In chapter six, Fisher follows a conflict between TEABBA and a remotely located media organisation. The use of Bourdieu’s notions of struggle as central in the dynamics of fields of cultural production here seems somewhat forced for analysing conflict as generative of Aboriginal media production and institutional sociality. Gillian Cowlishaw’s in-depth ethnographic arguments about the generative aspects of conflict in regional Australian Aboriginal settings seem more relevant for the conflict described in the chapter. Fisher also tends to side with a pan-Aboriginal political activist stance he associates with TEABBA (although quotes and descriptions do not always support this), while he doesn’t seem to take the aims of the remote media