In April, Radio New Zealand featured an interview with Dan Clifford’s daughter Margaret, as part of its Anzac Day programme. You can listen to host Stacy Daniel’s interview with Margaret (and a few comments from myself about the recording of Dan) on RNZ’s website here.
(And if you haven’t already read “Her father’s voice” the blog on Dan’s recording finding its way back to his family, it’s here .)
Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum Online Cenotaph
Also on Anzac Day, I gave a presentation at Ashburton Museum about broadcasting unit recordings of New Zealand nurses. I turned this into a blog post for Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, which you can read here
こんにちは、日本 – Hello Japan!
In the blog, I explain how my current research has taken a slight detour from World War II recordings, to those which are “World War adjacent” – made in Japan between 1946 and 1948 by the Broadcasting Unit sent there alongside New Zealand’s “J Force”. This was our contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force or BCOF, which together with a much, much larger United States occupation force, took over the roles of demilitarisation and democratisation of post-war Japan.
My listening research has taken this detour while I wait for the World War II broadcasting unit recordings to make their way through the Utaina mass-digitisation project (a joint effort by the National Library, Archives New Zealand and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision to digitise at-risk, Crown-owned, audio-visual collections, such as RNZ and TVNZ’s archives.) Once they come out the other side of Utaina, the discs recorded in North Africa, Italy and the Pacific will be available as digitial files and I’ll get back to “listening to the war”.
So in the meantime, I am listening to the much smaller collection of J Force recordings, which had already been digitised in the 2000s by the RNZ Sound Archives. (A post about what I’m hearing there is on its way…)
And finally, I am very excited to have the newly digitised New Zealand Listener magazine made available online on the wonderful Papers Past website. The J Force recruitment advertisement above is just one of the many gems relating to broadcasting during World War II ( and immediately after) held in its pages. I know this has been a long-term project by Papers Past and the National Library so a huge ngā mihi to them for making this happen. At a time when funding for history and heritage is under attack, this is a wonderful resource for historians and anyone interested in the cultural life of Aotearoa since the 1930s.