Radio has traditionally been considered an “unspaced” or immaterial technology, as many of its most influential studies attest. In the case of long-running South Australian community radio program The Prison Show, that capacity to penetrate physical barriers and re-link social groups otherwise denied contact illustrates the ongoing cultural insertion of radio broadcasting and its technologisation of everyday life. Radio 3d Adelaide’s The Prison Show at first seems an old-fashioned music request program. Letters from listeners are read aloud, and music selections, themed to the letters, are played. But these letters and requests are all directed from, or to, specialist audiences: those incarcerated in the State prison system, with special focus on Nunga (South Australian Aboriginal) populations. Drawing on the works of French theorists Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, this paper explores the spatial implications of radio for prison audiences. It demonstrates how Prison Show audiences, whether incarcerated or “out”, seek to transform the alienating “places” of the prison system into lived “spaces”, connected into social and relational networks. As they conduct this transformation, prisoners create within these “practised places” all of the complexities, contradictions, and contestations existing “outside,” in “non-prison” spaces. According to Lefebvre, the “use” of social locations precedes their “construction,” because it is the slow social accretion of social uses which renders a given social “space” meaningful. This paper shows how radio, conventionally considered the “unspaced” medium par excellence, directly models a politics of “practised place.” Examined in this most intense and problematic of post-colonial formations, this study demonstrates the power of radio to technologise social relations, creating new and compensatory forms of social contact.
Listening to The Prison Show makes it possible to trace the paths of individuals from level to level, as they are processed through the various operations of the State Department of Correctional Services. The mapping of prisoners provided by The Prison Show proffers not only a multi-layered representation of penal “correction”, but a consistently contradictory vision of contestation. The program’s talk-texts are strongly disputational, displaying resistance in both aggressively masculine “break-out” colloquial speech behaviours and macho music selections – most often heavy metal or the directly subversive political anthems of reggae. Set against these are discursive constructions of idyllic family security, saturated in sentimental verses and romantic ballads, constructing a feminised ideal of an absent “home.” This ideal presence marks a key absence of this programming, insistently laminating the familial over the deprivations of imprisonment, as it seeks to seal and heal over a wound in the body social. The attempt is especially salient given its specific cultural context: the intensified alienation and suicide rates of younger Aboriginal male prisoners, and the findings of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Commission; or the sad history of Australian Government policies on removal of Aboriginal children from their families, detailed in The Stolen Generation Report.