Unboxing Community Radio with 2SER

 

An Incomplete History of Community Radio: 2SER’s 46 Boxes of Stuff

 

“You name a discipline, and you’ll find it represented in the log of names that have walked through 2SER’s doors.”
Professor Monica Attard
OAM, Walkley winning journalist &
Co-Director of the Centre for Media Transition

 

From the 46 unsorted boxes in a damp basement that made up the media institution’s “archives”, Dr Liz Giuffre and Demetrius Romeo have woven a compelling book about 2SER and its colourful people. 2SER’s quirky career has introduced listeners to music they’d struggle to find elsewhere, given voices to people who were otherwise going unheard, and amassed a group of intrepid volunteers who often went on to make household names in media and politics.

 

2SER is a platform which has allowed thousands to meet, share ideas, forge connections and gain media training and experience: to not only present at the forefront of social change but help drive that change. To nurture and propel music and music scenes. To inform their audiences.
                                                        Martin Walters, Station Manager (2021)

The book is designed to be read in any order, just like opening one of the boxes and starting somewhere, anywhere. It contains interviews with big names who started with the station – Richard Kingsmill, Robbie Buck, Tanya Plibersek, Cath Dwyer – as well as fundamental stories about Australian music that haven’t yet been told anywhere else – everything from Country to Dance.

 

 

As a history of 2SER, this book is also essentially a blueprint for community radio in Australia – not because 2SER was the first, but because it has lasted so long, has such a rich history, and has essentially trained so many people who have come to prominence in Australian media.

With humorous and heart-warming stories of the 2SER team’s broadcasting adventures, complete with illustrations straight out of the boxes, this amusing, accurate and highly readable “incomplete history” has a way of telling all.

 

 

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Dr Liz Giuffre is a senior lecturer in Communication at UTS, working on media history as well as contemporary forms such as podcasts and born-digital media. Liz is a host and producer of 2SER’s “Music Mothers and Others”, and participates regularly in the national independent arts press.

Demetrius Romeo had written and broadcast extensively about music and comedy as an “enthusiast” before returning to university to do much the same, academically. He’s pleased to discover that many years of hoarding books and records can be re-framed as “archiving popular culture”.

 

RRP $34.95

 

230mm x 153mm, 208pp
ISBN: 9781925043686