In the 1930s and 40s, wireless ‘was what television, the internet and the iPhone, all rolled into one, are today’. Empire State tells the story of Ernest Fisk, the man who led the Australian wireless company AWA in those extraordinary decades, and was managing director of the music giant EMI in London after the war. Fisk considered wireless ‘the greatest gift of science to Australia’. Its’ possibilities were ‘as great as the future of Australia itself. His story is about a technology that helped change the world, and the great global political shifts that turned this son of the British Empire into a citizen of Australia.
Related:
DOWNLOAD:Ernest Fisk and the World Wide Wireless [pdf], Jock Given, February 2012 (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/linkableblob/3800610/data/earnest-fisk-and-the-world-wide-wireless-data.pdf)
Guests:
Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, Director, Centre for Media History, Macquarie University
Richard Begbie, historian, Historical Radio Society of Australia
Dr Peter Fisk, physicist, and grandson of Ernest Fisk
John Dougall, Executive Director, Amalgamated Wireless Australasia [AWA]
David Moloney, heritage consultant
Publications:
Title: Wireless and Empire: Geopolitics, Radio Industry and Ionosphere in the British Empire, 1918-1939
Author: Aitor Anduaga
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2009
Further Information:
Jock Given, Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Melbourne (http://www.swinburne.edu.au/lss/staff/view.php?who=jgiven&unit=isr)
Research supported by CH Currey Memorial Fellowship, State Library of NSW (http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about/awards/currey.html)
Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), The first direct wireless messages from England to Australia [picture], 1918. 1 photograph : b&w ; 20.1 x 23.1 cm. (http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3421834)
Neville Williams, ‘When I Think Back … Ernest T. Fisk - Pioneer, visionary and entrepreneur’, first published in Electronics Australia, June-July 1989 (http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bpefisk/fh/SirErnest.htm)
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1909 was awarded jointly to Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun ‘in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy’ (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1909/)
Goot, Murray, ‘Fisk, Sir Ernest Thomas (1886–1965)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fisk-sir-ernest-thomas-6177/text10617)
Ernest Fisk and the first wireless messages from the UK to Australia, State Library of NSW (http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/people_places/north/professionals/fisk/index.html)
Davies, L. W., ‘Hooke, Sir Lionel George Alfred (1895–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hooke-sir-lionel-george-alfred-10536/text18707)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/empire-state/3793124