Voices from the Air

To the families of the ABC war correspondents

To Gillian and Emma

‘I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all. To men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them.'

King George V, Christmas Empire broadcast, 1932

I
n the 1920s and 30s, radio was a revolutionary phenomenon in a troubled world – it defied the endless gulfs of distance, crossed impassable borders and spoke to people and nations with the profound impact and compelling intimacy of the human voice.

The title
Voices from the Air
reflects something of the seemingly miraculous reach of radio in the years before the Second World War, when it was breaking down the isolation of Australians within their own vast land and connecting them with the wider world.

With the coming of war, radio was on the frontlines and the air waves carried the voices of war correspondents and the sounds of the distant battlefield into Australian homes. The reports of a new breed of radio correspondents heard from the white noise and the static brought a powerful immediacy to the stories of the war.

The original scripts and letters written in the field by this group of ABC war correspondents were my starting point almost two decades ago, when I was searching the ABC Archives for some connection to my own experience as an ABC foreign
correspondent: who were the earliest ABC correspondents and what challenges had they faced? The documents from the Second World War were a rich source of information and in 2004 I included some of them in an exhibition about the ABC's foreign correspondents, but it was the barest sketch of the work and lives of the first ABC war correspondents.

The correspondents' scripts tell part of the tale. They are more than just the first draft of history: they tell the story of reporting from the war zone. Mistakes are roughly overtyped and corrected by hand, the blue pencil of the military censor scores through lines and paragraphs, and official red-ink stamps decorate the sheets. Each is a chart of the correspondents' thinking, the construction of each story, and the filter of censorship . . . and it suggests that there is a story to be told beyond the reports themselves.

The letters and diaries in the archives tell a more personal tale of the correspondents caught up in the extraordinary events of that time, and shed more light on the men themselves, as well as on the devastating events they reported.

In writing their stories, I have mostly not tried to adjust for the sometimes narrow view of eye-witness reports or contemporaneous letters. Reporters in the field frequently had incomplete information, or were unaware of the broader conduct of the war. As events developed, their first reports were often updated in the ongoing coverage, or through the revisions of later scholarship, but I have used their reports and letters largely as they were filed, broadcast or written at the time. This is a series of snapshots. It is not a military history, and does not cover all of the Second World War, only some of the key campaigns reported by ABC correspondents. Similarly, it deals with the issues that arose for ABC correspondents but it is not a history of war reporting.

I have used edited extracts from their original reports or transcripts and these have also been edited for grammatical purposes, much as the sub-editor or producer would have done before broadcast. In the case of some cables or telegraph messages, the telegraph language has been edited for meaning and sense. But as much as possible I have used the correspondents' own words, from their despatches, scripts, letters and diaries, to tell the story of their work in the field.