ABSTRACT

In his inaugural address to listeners, Charles Lloyd Jones, the first chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), described radio as ‘this unseen voice’.1 Broadcasting had been officially in operation for almost nine years, but he employed this image to create a sense of excitement and wonder about radio. The use of this rhetoric in 1932 reveals the extent to which people were not yet accustomed to the new cultural institution of broadcasting nor to this new phenomenon in their daily lives. This book examines the transition - the way in which people stopped treating radio as a marvellous if slightly mysterious piece of technology and became accustomed to the ‘unseen voice’ as domestic companion, a normal and necessary part of their daily lives.