I’d like to recommend a podcast for this season from the great broadcaster Boe Spearim, a Gamilaraay & Kooma radio host and podcaster located in Meanjin.
Monday to Thursday he hosts a radio show, Lets Talk, (hosted on Fridays by Karina Hogan) on 98.9 FM in Brisbane, the radio station owned and run by Brisbane Indigenous Media Association (BIMA) that plays First Nations artists and country music. The show is taken around Australia by the National Indigenous Radio Service, and like many of the shows on BIMA, it is also available as a podcast, which is where I catch it.
I can highly recommended Lets Talk, but I’m actually here to get you to listen to Boe’s independent project, Frontier War Stories. In his words:
Frontier War Stories is a podcast dedicated to truth telling about a side of Australian history that has been left out of the history books. In each episode I speak to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people about research, books and oral histories which document the first 140 years of conflict and resistance. These times are the frontier wars, and these are our war stories.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/07/aboriginal-people-sacrificed-their-lives-in-the-frontier-wars-for-us-to-be-here-i-wanted-to-honour-them
In the lead-up to “Australia’s” Invasion Day, January 26th, Boe has posted a podcast he’s made from a chat he had with former politician and archivist Michael Organ. They talk about the “founding figures” of the place now known as Australia (all my quotations) including Lieutenant James Cook, the guy who has a LOT of statues dedicated to him around this land. I wonder if anyone has ever investigated if there is a correlation between amount of statues devoted to a person and the amount of people who suffered because of the doings of that person. Suffice to say that in this instance the tally on both sides is high.
Boe is a deep thinker and a generous conversationalist, allowing his guests the space to make their point but always keeping the show rolling. I highly recommend, and if you can, I encourage you to fund his future podcasts via PodBean too.
And an added extra – if you don’t mind a bit of time travel in terms of the news and issues broached in your podcasts, I absolutely loved Wild Black Women, also from BIMA. Dr Chelsea Bond and Angelina Hurley wrapped up their show a little less than 2 years ago, but the colony being the colony, I’d say a lot of their content would stand today (I listened to it at the time so I’d be interested to hear if my recollection is incorrect.) They are wild in the sense of being incensed, but do it with good humour and so much integrity, and they taught me a lot. Since I missed attending their outside broadcast on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar back in 2020 (to my shame I was a couple of weeks behind in my listening so I found out it was happening after it was broadcast) I will also say here a huge thank you to them both. Amazing, generous black women.