Analysis

Even as I say goodbye to radio I know its power to reconnect people

A radio community is a living, thriving, wriggling, combative, remarkable thing. 

You can have absolutely nothing in common with the person listening in with you on any given morning, yet you come together again and again, curious or dismayed by each other: pinned in the car with the groceries melting in the boot as a fellow listener shares a story; or shouting at the radio as a guest refuses to answer the question.

Or as a presenter gets on your nerves …

Radio is both anachronistic in its set-up — a real-time conversation via physical transmission towers and air waves — and startlingly contemporary: the most vivid and unpredictable form of social media yet invented.

What happens next, what's going to be said next, can never be truly anticipated.

For just on four years now, I've risen at 4am, gone into the ABC Radio Melbourne studio and spent just short of three hours grappling with the greatest period of change to life as we have known it for generations.

Fire, pandemic, floods and cost-of-living

It started in 2019 with fires that fundamentally changed our relationship to and understanding of our country and climate; morphed into a pandemic that became more unimaginable as the years ground on, and more recently has become the realisation that many of us have built our homes and lives on shifting sands, as revealed by the slow-moving devastation of floods in almost every state.

Then a housing and cost-of-living crisis that has shaken truths that for generations we have considered fundamental to who we are: people who can save up and own a house, pay for a start in life for our children and who can afford to retire.

In four short years it feels like everything has changed.

Some days my job is traffic cop and adjutant — managing and directing news and newsmakers and guiding everyone through safely.

Some days it's chief fact-checker and combatant — calling bullshit on … well … bullshit and holding speculation and speculators to account.

And some days it feels like I'm the least qualified, most rostered-on amateur counsellor and psychologist, as it seems that all of Melbourne is on the couch and confessing their fears, angers and anxieties … and I'm looking around wondering where the professionals are and when they're going to turn up and take over.

Have we always been this raw?

Anyone who has had a public-facing role over the past four years shares an experience of people and their anxieties, their pressures and their inarticulate fears that few others can understand: the person at the end of the phone, over the counter dealing with someone who is often at their lowest point, at their most fragile, at their most needy.

It's not for nothing that social media like TikTok and Instagram are full of sly recordings of consumers and customers and hapless, angry ordinary people in full meltdown: throwing things at the person behind the counter, weeping uncontrollably as something doesn't go their way.

Perhaps we have always been this raw just below the skin, but the before-times allowed us to hide it a little better.

But something has certainly changed: a sense of entitlement, or a sense of resentment and grievance that rises easily to the surface, or a feeling of a lack of control, perhaps even of financially drowning, that is so unsettling that it leads to behaviour that would surely shame someone once they managed to reach a calmer state.

The rules of engagement have changed too.

The once unsayable is so easily said. The truly appalling is so easily expressed.

The understanding that there is another human on the end of the acting out seems to be easily discounted.

But what hasn't changed is that persistent, powerful strand of human kindness and connection that binds all of us within the strange ecosystem of a radio community: the calls that celebrate a fellow listener, or aims to help them, employ them, support them, pay for them.

I've had people call me on air and offer to employ a listener's struggling son or clean another's home or fund a child's treatment. Generosity is unending, even while it's surprising every time.

Radio is a place all of its own

I announced this week that after four years in this role, and after almost two decades of pre-dawn alarms, I am stepping down from daily radio and moving on to an ABC TV role.

And while I will not miss the early starts, I will not find the kind of conversations and direct connection to an audience that I have in radio more than anywhere else.

It's a place all of its own – a real place to which people go each day, in search of company that delights and challenges. It's a rare privilege to sit in that chair.

The country and our footing within it has undoubtedly and fundamentally changed over that relatively brief time – audience shifts clearly show that; but more than other medium, I back radio's power to reconnect people more than any other kind. A city-wide conversation in real time. Never underestimate the power of that.

This weekend surviving the wilderness, outliving your T-shirt and beating the rental crisis, four cities at a time.

Have a safe and happy weekend, and here's Queen Kylie, lovers! She's backed up after slaying with Padam and rediscovered her '90s House groove. I approve.

Go well.

Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.