Sound historian Sarah Johnston explores 100 years of radio in a talk at the National Library, focusing on the early decades and the innovative World War II radio Mobile Unit recordings.

Sarah Johnston celebrates the first hundred years of radio

Read the full text of the talk

Kia ora koutou kātoa. Thank you to RNZ and National Library for organising this celebration of the start of radio in New Zealand, 100 years ago tonight.

Tonight is something of a game of two halves: first I will talk about the first broadcast of voice and music by radio and the start of radio broadcasting in this country - and then I'm also going speak about a research project I am working on, radio recordings made of New Zealand's forces overseas during World War II.

I have always been a huge fan of radio, ever since childhood listening to the Weekend children's request sessions, and then as a teenager, eating my breakfast with Morning Report coming out of the family transistor beside me. As a radio journalist I became one of those voices and worked for RNZ and Deutsche Welle in Germany, where I experienced the power of voices coming out of the air from the other side of the world. And as a sound archivist working with the Radio New Zealand archives, I learnt that that power of the voice doesn't diminish with time - listening to a voice from 80 years ago can transport you not just through space but also time. Sound to me, has a power that in many ways seems different to that of visual images.

100 years ago tonight, an experimental radio broadcast took place which signaled the arrival of this brand new technology, radio broadcasting, in Aotearoa. In time, radio would transform many aspects of New Zealand society and usher in many changes, which have included competing media such as television and now the internet. But radio has adapted and survived.

So this evening we are going to listen to the past. But I should start with a disclaimer - that there is no recording of that first broadcast from November 17, 1921. In fact, there are no known recordings of any radio broadcasts in New Zealand until 1935.

This is because no radio broadcaster had recording equipment, until the National Broadcasting Service purchased some disc recorders in 1935. Up until that time, all radio was simply broadcast live-to-air and not recorded or archived in any form.

The exception was of course commercially recorded music, which was imported from overseas in the form of 78 rpm discs. And that is what New Zealand's first radio broadcast of speech and music 100 years ago, largely consisted of. So we can at least get a feel for how that first broadcast sounded…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details