in prototype days: notes from the making of a radio documentary about S.P.A.T. (the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania).

1. Homecoming
This is a perhaps surprisingly personal story, so I am going to start with the personal. The first time I encountered the museum was largely serendipitous. I hadn't been back to the island of my birth for over three decades when in 2014 I was invited to Hobart by sound artist Matt Warren to perform in an experimental music series he was curating. I was already in the country performing at other mainland experimental music festivals (the NOW Now in Sydney and Soundout in Canberra), and in general I was travelling a lot and Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra were just other places to go, but Hobart: that was something. This time in Melbourne, i'd walked around feeling, distinctly, the almost-present tangibility of the life I could have lived if i'd stayed in Australia. It was like I could only be an afterimage in relation to this ghostly self, this parallel universe of unrealised alternate possibility. I was ready to go home.

Arriving in the city I stayed with a family friend, a retired teacher and dedicated wine buff who lived over the bridge in the suburb of Bellerive. He had kindly offered to drive me around the place, including to my old primary school and the semi-rural house I grew up in, where I spent 10 minutes standing in the long grass trying to understand how to open myself adequately to history as a set of sensations, to get to grips with positioning myself in a place I had mythicised for so long it seemed both calcified in memory as a set of fixed reference points or a mnemonic grid, and completely vaporous; a miasma of insubstantial, fleeting sensations. This experiential disjunct, inevitably, included a literal struggle with the notion of memory as and/or against recording. While I took a ten minute field recording of the silence of the family home I'd left when I was seven, which included the inaudible sounds of myself thinking, grappling with updating a historic set of references overturned and polished so many times they'd become like precious stones in my mind, underneath the sounds of wind, and other sounds I only remember because they are captured in the recording itself, I tried to get all other references out of my head and just 'be there', but then a German Shepherd barked, and I was immediately self-cast as Andrei Gorkachov in Tarkovsky's Nostalgia.

This is a 5 minute edit of the recording I made, alongside a photographic still that I took at the same time. I called  it “held breath, stood in the location once was (oyster cove variations #1)”
(also on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/85336913) 

Another place it was suggested I go to locally was a small museum for sound recording technologies. I can't recall who actually suggested this, but it turned out this museum was located in Bellerive, just down the road from where I was staying. I have a photograph of myself, which I asked one of the volunteers sitting the desk that day, to take. I am grinning in a short sleeved checked shirt that I found in a Hobart op-shop. I am surrounded by gramophones and old radios and I look like I want to move in. Like phonography, photography's ability to capture a moment of initial encounter sometimes forces us to ask an unnatural question of time: how is it possible to still have an image of firstness, and why would we want to hold on to such a thing as we move on from such moments of innocence, of waking to an environment for the first time? This question seems to me to crystallise one of the 'problems' of recording. This photograph speaks of that initial impression of S.P.A.T., but I realise now that it was Amanda who took that photograph. Like the wider experience of encountering Tasmania itself, I have moved further into the photograph, into the recording, in to the collection. This encounter has become a key and important part of my updated experience of Tasmania as an adult.

Prior to this the notion of exile had become an enormous block for me when it came to revisiting Tasmania, which had also become wound up with not wanting to damage the reified memories that appeared, like a series of photographs, in the storage box of my mind. This seems an ontology quite peculiar to the personal history of being an adoptee  in my experience, the naturalising of amnesia and the sense of the past being unreal, with the tremulous images on the tip of memory being counter to the wider disorientation of a vast void of absence that is the black hole of the self and its unknowability. To return to place seemed to risk rupturing something  very fundamental, the very psychological building blocks I relied on. Doing so much work on personal history in the past few years had freed up this base somewhat, so I was interested in exploring some more. When a call for sound works by Hobart art project space Constance ARI appeared on my radar later in 2014, I risked another return and submitted a proposal. It was duly accepted, and in January 2015 I found myself traveling back to Tasmania to install two pieces of work, one of which, Huia Notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded), appropriately comprised a wax cylinder of extinct birdsong that folded 19th century human musical notations of vanished non-human sounds back into 21st century listening, to create a 'time capsule traveling in both directions', a new media fossil and a performative memorial to another lost world of living significance. This extremely tenuous music, cut to a correspondingly brittle 19th century format, was presented in the gallery on an Edison Gem phonograph with a Model C reproducer, kindly loaned to me by Lindsay McCarthy from the collections of the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania.

The little Gem C was perfect for this project because it had a production date of 1908 (the year after the huia's official extinction date), and was an affordable option at the time - reflecting the amateur and working class voices of the bird mimicry that comprised the musical notations at the basis of the work. I also always thought that in a way the dimensions of the Gem's black body and its gold horn-stripe made it *look* a bit like a huia (which is possibly just me being somewhat sentimental).

Here are a couple of photos of me, the Gem and its caretaker, SPAT president Lindsay McCarthy, at the time. I note only now that I'm still wearing the same shirt:
    

2. The Bridge
At 9:27 on the evening of the 5th January 1975, an oil tanker traveling up the Derwent river collided with several bridge pylons, causing the bridge from Hobart city to the eastern suburbs to collapse. This accident, which came to be known as the Tasman Bridge disaster, killed 12 people. This disaster sits just outside of personal memory - in January 1975 I was less than one year old. 

On the night of the incident's 40th anniversary, January 5, 2015, I was back in Hobart. It was only the second time since the early 1980s, staying in the spare room of the same old family friend. Browsing the radio channels, I was hoping to catch and record any historic report or memorial silence broadcast over the local airwaves. Instead, they were playing Peter Sculthorpe's final and longest solo piano work, Riverina Dreaming (Gundyarri Wagga Wagga), on the ABC concert programme. The pianist was Tamara-Anna Cislowska. One review of Sculthorpe's Complete Works for Solo Piano in Gramophone magazine, talking about her interpretation of Riverina, suggests that "Cislowska’s great gift is to pick up on the saudade inherent in this distinctive, finely crafted and for the most part lyrical music, and project it outwards in an utterly natural, unforced manner. A profoundly affecting release which will be a revelation to some, to others a homecoming."

I listened to this broadcast threaded through the double-transmission space of my hand-built Mini-FM radio transmitter and an array of small radios, and recorded it. The first two movements of Sculthorpe's piece, Looking Back, and The Wiradjuri Presence, wove their signal in and out of a tumultuous sea of radio static like a message in a bottle. Listening to it felt like diving into a wreck, and it simultaneously felt like a homecoming.

While listening to I realised that, if in some sense for me, to be Tasmanian is to be haunted, then for me it's also connected to this very idea of a saudade, presented in 'an utterly natural, unforced manner' - the everyday homesickness. I also elected to include this recording of the Sculthorpe in the SPAT documentary, echoing my personal artistic involvement in these histories; it's an experimental documentary for that reason. 

3. Machines and memory

When I was asked to make a radio feature for the now-decommissioned ABC experimental sound programme Soundproof, I resolved to come back to make a doocumentary about S.P.A.T. During my two weeks making this documentary, I spent time with S.P.A.T.'s community members and recorded hours of audio that didn't make it into the doco. 

I recorded a set of wax cylinders in the SPAT collection and used the run-out groove audio, and recorded the operational sounds of scores of unique machines. I recorded myself playing a pianola roll of Abba's Dancing Queen on the museum's player piano to the laughter of elderly community members and contemporary artists I'd brought in, I heard the underground history of Tasmanian audio inventors, and recorded Lindsay and Bruce McCarthy (two members of the same family) talking long-form about their ground-up impressions of technological history. Lindsay demonstrated a wire recorder and spoke abut using one as a young journalist, while myself and fellow artist Matt Warren watched on in awe. I wanted the doco to be experimental but I was intrigued to know how the sounds could also be represented in a more discursive radio documentary format. The documentary emerged somewhat organically from this conjunction.

The machines themselves became both the location of and symbols for the preservation of memory, and in this telling are inseparable from their histories of use by the people explaining them, who were eloquent and generous around their knowledge and perspectives. Gwen, the founder of the museum, lives on in Max's map of the museum's machines and artefacts, recalled every time he passes her photograph in the museum entranceway, or considers the phonographs, gramophones and 78rpm records she fought so hard to bring together. Bruce waxes lyrical at one point on the idea of the technician as a mover of media history; one who is often overlooked or erased within the genius narratives of technological progress - in his conception of history, it is not that Edison's tinfoil cylinder was the founding moment of sound, but that its status as prototype was only one of many moments, many of them completely lost to the discourse of history.

 

In saying so, he articulated a philosophy that gave the documentary its title, In Prototype Days, of which he spoke off the cuff as a mythic precursory time at the dawn of the invention of technical-material things, along with his attendant worries about the silence and loss which attend the erasure of these collective cultural memories.

Bruce died in 2022. A fragment of his very moving and beautiful philosophy of technics is in the final doco if you want to listen to it  there. 

My documentary also includes interviews with artists and researchers speculating on similar issues, in response to S.P.A.T.'s collections, and their perspectives expand toward a micro politics of technological and cultural history, and the disaster narratives which render such storehouses so important, just as they potentially imperil them. In Prototype Days is itself a snapshot that cannot be repeated, with many of the older interview subjects now also gone, and aspects of the culture of the museum with them. I am privileged and happy to have spent time learning from them, and the objects and machines they so lovingly preserved within the rich, living narrative of the Museum under their watch. 

4. In Prototype Days

The long version of the writeup I did for the ABC Radio National site reads as follows: 

in prototype days portrays scenes from the everyday life of S.P.A.T. (a.k.a. the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania), a small museum and archive devoted to the history of recorded sound, located in an old post office in a quiet suburb on the eastern shore of Hobart's Derwent River. Strung together along a thread of anecdotes, physical demonstrations, and conversations inspired and provoked by objects from the S.P.A.T. collections, the documentary is a celebration of experiment, curiosity and tinkering, as well as a story of intriguing and uncommon items of technological history, told in the the voices of the people that have made, fixed and used them. These voices re-activate the machines, calling them out from their historical silence.

There's Brian who made his first working crystal radio from a safety pin and a razor blade. Max, who demonstrates a very rare and valuable children's tin gramophone originally "given away with tins of meat". Lindsay recalls interviewing famed British WWII airman Douglas Bader, sitting on his bed in a Hobart hotel room recording onto precursor of the tape recorder that stored its audio on a stainless steel wire. Bruce yarns about the time he built a illegal radio transmitter at school, which his father made him dismantle, but not before he'd driven around the suburbs testing the reach of the signal on the car radio by a rather novel method.

Bruce also waxes lyrical on his alternative version of the history of invention, less a set of individual 'eureka' genius moments than an ongoing series of collaborative work-projects occurring, as he puts it, "way back in prototype days". This is a vision which takes technê - craftmanship or 'hand work' - as one model for the human acquisition of knowledge - one that can work in tandem with epistêmê - theoretical or analytical expertise. At S.P.A.T., sonic media and inventions are correspondingly treated as hands-on, everyday, functional items of music and audio culture, rather than untouchable, rare and arcane ideas to be kept behind glass. Devices well-known by their caretakers, their history of being used, worn out, rescued and fixed to play again is an important part of their story, as is the community's struggle to retain the value of this everyday historical knowledge, forever at risk of being forgotten and discarded.

Following Bruce's speculation, In Prototype Days is a lateral depiction of technological history that asks the question: what if history were not written vertically, by the inventors, businessmen and architects, but horizontally, by the machinists, assistants and technicians? These technicians are both the subject of the documentary and its decentered narrators. We tune in with them to some legendary moments of the technical development of inscriptive sound recording, such as Edison listening in to the crude sounds of the earliest tinfoil phonograph, but we also hear the lesser-known story of Eric Waterworth, the local Tasmanian boy who in 1927 got so sick of having to change a 78rpm record every couple of minutes (or at least that's the way Bruce tells it) that he invented the world's first record changer at the age of 17.

What we hear at S.P.A.T. is not simply the sounds of nostalgia. The museum's hands-on, community-centred approach to history can bridge generations and inspire fresh readings, suggesting other, less linear routes for the circulation of ideas through technology. There is something surprisingly contemporary in the low tech simplicity of a gramophone made of cardboard and played with a pencil, or the positive environmental footprint of a crank phonograph that works without the need for electricity. These and other items at S.P.A.T. can easily appear as alternatives that still engage the imagination, rather than mere technological dead ends. Just as, 70 years ago, S.P.A.T.'s community members went forward into the future to listen to the wider world through their own hand-built crystal radios, in contemporary Hobart, S.P.A.T. becomes an access point and a rich resource for younger artists and inventors, who see value in diving into the wreck and treasure of culture, seeking answers from the past to apply to the urgent questions of the present. 

While they look like radically different spheres, contemporary sound and media art and the cultures of small community museums have a lot in common. To consider the potential for their intersection in a place like S.P.A.T is also to recognise that we can learn vital and important lessons from the history of things, and the people that know them and safeguard the knowledge of their use. From this perspective, the technological past is part of a present and future tool kit, one that can offer a focus on slowness, simplicity, longevity, making and re-use as a set of constructive alternatives to increasingly rapid societal, environmental and technological change. In this, I am echoing Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz's declaration that no form of media ever truly becomes obsolete: "Media may disappear in a popular sense, but it never dies: it decays, rots, reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. It either stays as a residue in the soil and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated through artistic, tinkering methodologies." 

In Prototype Days serves as a geological dig through a couple of weeks of the museum's life. It gives listeners a glimpse of all the simultaneous layers of stories that might exist within S.P.A.T., and points to the many more that they could discover if they were to visit the museum themselves. These stories appear as shards and fragments, and occasionally as whole precious objects, the lesser-known ones which sit gently alongside those louder, dominant, centralised narratives of the development of technology that we might know already, quietly suggesting other possibilites, and disrupting the notion that the story of the development of technology has to always head toward the same narrative, within a globalised world.

In Prototype Days is a celebration of experiment, curiosity and tinkering. it is a story of intriguing and uncommon items of technological history, told in the the voices of the people that have made, fixed and used them, creating a decentred narrative structure which "shows" as well as "tells" various minor stories of localised sonic heritage, grounding sound in its historical conditions and forms of use. In listening this way, we preserve the possibility that prototype days might be simultaneously behind us, with us, and ahead of us.