Power to the podcast
But why does it take entertainment for Australia to pay attention to Indigenous injustice?
Thirty-eight episodes in, the team behind the independent podcast Curtain won’t stop production until the program’s protagonist and major inspiration is set free from prison, cohost Amy McQuire said at a Storyology panel yesterday on podcasting.
Kevin Henry was imprisoned in 1992 after being found guilty of killing a woman whose body had been found on the northern banks of the Fitzroy River in central Queensland the previous year.
McQuire, BuzzFeed’s Indigenous affairs reporter, and cohost Martin Hodgson, a human rights advocate, believe they’ve found enough evidence to justify an official pardon for the man they believe was wrongly convicted. They’ve garnered an audience that has built more support for Henry’s case.
“Podcasting is an excellent way to get Australians to care,” McQuire said.
But in that fact lie some uncomfortable truths, she said, using another hit podcast about an Indigenous injustice — Bowraville—as an example.
McQuire, a Darumbal woman from central Queensland who has been covering Indigenous affairs for a decade, met her cohost when Hodgson contacted her with a question: How many Indigenous prisoners are innocent?
She rang him back after the interview and asked him to look into Henry’s case. From publicly available information and historical records, he found the first thread that suggested his innocence. They worked on the case for a year and a half, and realized the story was so complicated that it deserved a serialised podcast.
Indigenous journalists are some of the best storytellers in Australia, McQuire said. Yet few are telling these stories as podcasts. Curtain is a rarity.
“The potential is definitely there,” she said.
There’s podcast potential in abundance for Australian media producers, other panelists agreed.
Kellie Riordan, recently named head of ABC’s new Audio Studios, said Australia is producing great audio. “We’ve got room to scale it up a bit, and hold our own in terms of quality of podcasting in Australia.”
Kristofor Lawson, who produces the podcast Moonshot — about new technologies and the people behind them — has been working on a podcast recommendation bot for Australian podcasts.
When you look at the most popular podcasts globally, he said, “there’s this skew toward US audiences, and I think that is a real problem because we have amazing audio producers in Australia.”
“I think that we’re going to see a lot more really high-quality content — not just coming out from the ABC, but coming out from a lot of independent companies and producers, and I think that will change the trajectory of a lot of audiences.”
