Late-night frequencies

Late-night broadcasting has a very different atmosphere to daytime radio. What did it feel like working those hours?

I worked late-night radio at triple j and 2WS, which was in the middle of a cow paddock when I first joined. At both stations, you'd often be one of only one or two people in the entire building late at night. It was eerie. It's impossible for that not to somehow leak into the atmosphere of what you're broadcasting.

Were you conscious of being completely alone?

It was surreal. At 2WS, in the middle of nowhere, I worked from 7 pm until midnight. The news team finished at seven and the dawn announcer didn't start until midnight, so I knew I was the only person there. If someone broke into the building, I wouldn't know because I was in a soundproof studio. There were times when someone would ring the front door in the middle of the night and I'd think, What do I do here? Do I answer that or not?

As a woman on my own, it did feel a little bit scary. But radio is such an intimate medium that you feel like you're talking to one person at a time. Of course, you're aware of the time of day and the atmosphere around you, but that communication happens in a kind of vacuum.

Those hours could also be pretty gruelling. I remember you telling a story about sleeping at the station between shifts.

This was when I was a morning traffic reporter. They knew I wanted to be on air, so they gave me my own shift from 6 pm until midnight. The only problem was I had to be back on air at five the next morning.

I thought, This is ridiculous. By the time I'd packed up, driven home, gone to bed, then got up, showered and driven back, I'd barely have slept. So instead of travelling home, I decided to stay at the station.

I thought I could just sleep on the couch in the so-called jocks room, which was the announcer's room, which we all shared as a communal space. But because it was a radio station, the radio played over speakers throughout the entire building. Even the toilets had speakers, because if you were on air and ducked out for a moment, you needed to hear that everything was still running smoothly.

The only place you couldn't hear the radio was the sound booth. Because I'm quite small, I could fit on the carpeted floor with a cushion. So that's where I slept.

You moved from late-night radio into television with The Noise and later Eat Carpet – a program that feels like it could only have existed at that moment in time. How did the idea emerge, and what gap were you trying to fill as a producer?

I was at SBS producing a music show called The Noise after working at triple j. My aim was to bring the same ideals to television: finding music that wasn't necessarily commercial, but was interesting and new: music that broadened people's minds and gave them a wider palette to choose their entertainment from.

Peter Barrett, who was SBS's Head of Programming at the time, came to me and said, ‘We get sent all this material from broadcasters around the world that doesn't fit anywhere else in the schedule.’ It was fringe and experimental art, short films, and weird and wacky filmmaking. It was parallel to what we were trying to do with The Noise, but across other art forms. He thought, ‘Maybe if we bring it all together, it'll make sense.’

Some of it was fantastic, but almost impossible to program on a television network. This was before the internet. Dance on film, for example, was only just taking off, and there was nowhere else you could see that kind of work unless you went to a European dance festival.

The late-night slot seemed perfect. Management didn't really care too much about what happened then. Late night is when the usual constraints on life don't really apply, particularly social ones. You don't have to deal with anyone you don't want to, there's no work or family to deal with, and nobody expects anything of you.

It's a space of freedom.

Yes, exactly. You're open to just about anything, and I think that's why audiences were so receptive to the strange array of work we threw at them.

It also connected with people who were looking for that kind of thing – and they didn't necessarily know they were looking for it. I've had people come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, Eat Carpet changed my life.’ These were people who'd grown up in country towns or felt completely isolated, with no friends who shared their interests. For them, seeing that weird, wacky work on television was a revelation.

Was there any moment working on Eat Carpet that you found unexpected or transformative for yourself personally?

Pretty much all of it, because it was new for me as well. I found it incredibly inspiring. It opened up the possibilities of how ideas could be expressed. I wanted to say to everyone, ‘Look, here's all this stuff. You're not going to like all of it, but isn't it interesting? Doesn't it make you think differently?’

I will say, though, I started having nightmares. Especially after watching so many short films, I had really weird dreams for a few years.

Some of them are genuinely unsettling. I watched one about an underground tunnel that felt exactly like one of my own nightmares about endless spaces.

Yeah, exactly. It can do that. When I stopped doing the job, the dreams went away! It was definitely from seeing such a high volume of really weird, and sometimes very violent, work.

Did they ever change the way you thought about your own imagination?

That was the most worrying thing! I'd think, How can I be capable of imagining these scenarios? What sort of person am I? Is there some monster inside me that I don't know about? [laughs]

Alternative late-night music programs really took off in the late ‘80s and ‘90s with shows like Rage. You were a part of that wave with your own work on triple j and shows like The Noise and Studio 22. Do any memories stand out?

Even before I started hosting music shows, I'd stay up late and discover music on television. There was one program in particular called Nightmoves, hosted by Lee Simon. It was a Melbourne-based show on one of the commercial channels. They'd screen live concert footage you couldn't see anywhere else and sometimes play albums. One of the most memorable moments for me was the first time I saw Sparks – and as I recall, Nightmoves showed performance footage, rather than a video clip. They blew my mind!

It felt like a delicious little private discovery. I'd be watching late at night by myself and suddenly stumble across a band I'd never heard before, or a kind of music I'd never experienced. It felt like my own exciting secret. I've never forgotten that feeling.

It strikes me that you've spent much of your career recreating that feeling for other people – finding unexpected work and passing it on. Where did that instinct come from?

As a kid, I had a really sheltered upbringing on a chook farm. Television and radio were my windows to the world. Then my brothers started bringing home records. That was my only access to something bigger.

I felt quite trapped in my life until those things opened up other possibilities. That empathy has stayed with me throughout my career. Even now, when we all have access to almost everything, I still feel for people who think the world they live in is too small.

I've never had the confidence of someone who can determine taste – who says, ‘You should listen to this because it's good, and don't listen to that because it's no good.’ I don't want to be doing that. I'd rather say, ‘Here's something you probably haven't come across before. You decide whether it means anything to you – but at least you've had the chance to discover it.’

One of the most beautiful things that happened was after we did a special edition of The Noise devoted to soul music. Deni Hines and James Baker from the Rockmelons presented the show. I got back to the office after it went to air and the phone was ringing.

I picked it up, and this young man was so excited. He said, ‘What is this music I've just heard on The Noise? They called it “soul music”. I've never heard it before. Can you give me the names of all the artists and tracks? Where can I find them?’

You could just tell that this music changed this man's life. Now, I don't know for how long or what the overall impact was, but in that moment, he discovered something he would never otherwise have discovered.

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