RADIO CLIMATE
Creative Climate
If you were Country what would you want human beings to do?
Welcome to Radio Climate, an expanding archive of audio pieces that foster connections with the environments around us through listening. Understanding deepens when listening to communities, sounds and languages of place. We invite you to listen as a move towards understanding, a tool for transmission and transformation. These soundscapes arise from and respond to places that are all within travelling distance of here. Sit back and listen with your whole self, and contribute your own voice to the archive in reply.
What might Country be asking us to learn?
BIOGRAPHIES
Creative Climate, funded by Creative Australia, is the new national peak body for arts and climate providing leadership, connections, advocacy and access to high-quality resources that support artists, arts workers and arts and cultural organisations and their funders to transition from a carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Curatorial Team
Miyuki Jokiranta is a creative researcher and audio maker who uses sound to foster care for the environment.
Lana Nguyen practices as an independent curator, organiser and producer on projects that stem from the politics and cultures of place. She has worked in experimental, live and public art, recently focusing on creating spaces for collective learning, site responsive cultural production and initiatives for climate response.
Eliki Reade is an interdependent producer, broadcaster, curator, and artist of Kailoma-Fijian descent. Working across community-led spaces and in climate advocacy, Eliki is led by storytelling, transforming narrative into a vessel for critical connection and action.
Daniel Browning is an award-winning Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist and radio broadcaster. The ABC’s former Editor Indigenous Radio, he is the inaugural Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney.
Angharad Wynne-Jones (she/her) is Cymry (Welsh) Australian and lives on the unceded lands of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung. She is Facilitator of Creative Climate, the culture and arts climate action peak body.
Audio artists and collaborators
Geoff Robinson
Geoff Robinson is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist who creates situated projects that engage listening to connect with the durational layers of place. Often in collaboration, Robinson’s practice highlights ecological tensions between situations and places across time, as a way of understanding past, current, and future relations to ecologies and place.
Mara Schwerdtfeger
Mara is a composer and curator based in Eora Sydney. She plays the viola and collaborates with her laptop to create live performances and recorded pieces for film, dance, and gallery spaces.
Hayden Ryan
Hayden Ryan is Yuin-Walbanja sound artist and scholar from the south east coast of New South Wales, currently residing in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). His sound work explores Indigenous identities, histories and relationships with place through spatial audio, field recording, signal-processing and acoustics.
Jasmine Griffiths
Jasmine Griffiths is an emerging sound designer, with a love for the natural world and for storytelling. With an affinity for audio drama and narrative works, she is always looking for new ways to explore the sonic medium and push the boundaries of her expertise.
Yaraan Couzens Bundle
Yaraan Couzens Bundle is a proud Djab Wurrung, Gunditjmara, Yuin, and Bidjara law woman, cultural knowledge holder, and environmental defender. Deeply immersed in her culture, she is a firekeeper, traditional dancer, and whale dreaming custodian who advocates tirelessly for the protection of sacred country and waterways.
A Climate For Art
A Climate For Art (ACFA) is a collaboration led by Eliki Reade and Lana Nguyen that unifies the arts around our changing climate through divestment, community building, and peer-led networks. They see the climate crisis as a cultural crisis requiring a cultural response — growing critical climate dialogues through a community of practice, events, creative projects and gatherings.
Amias Hanley
Amias Hanley is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening across sonic ecologies, auditory cultures, and queer and transgender studies.
Aunty Vicki Couzens
Dr Vicki Couzens is Gunditjmara from the Western Districts of Victoria. She acknowledges her ancestors and elders who guide her work. She has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for almost 40 years. Her contributions in the reclamation, regeneration and revitalisation of cultural knowledge and practice extend across the ‘arts and creative cultural expression’ spectrum including language revitalisation, ceremony, community arts, public art, visual and performing arts, and writing.
Dr Linden Ashcroft
Linden grew up in country Victoria on the lands of the Yorta Yorta people, and teaches weather and climate science as well as science communication. When she’s not teaching people how to share their science with the world, Linden researches the past to help us prepare for the future. By exploring the climate of Australia using historical documents and weather observations, she combines her love of science and stories.
Lesley Head
Professor Lesley Head is a geographer whose research examines human-environment relations, both conceptual and material. Her current focus is on the cultural dimensions of climate change and sustainability issues.
Daniel Browning is an award-winning Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist and radio broadcaster. The ABC’s former Editor Indigenous Radio, he is the inaugural Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney.
Miyuki Jokiranta is a creative researcher and audio maker who uses sound to foster care for the environment.
Credits for the Country on which these recordings were made:
Gunditjmara Country
Wurundjeri Country
Taungurung Country
Bunurong Country
Boon Wurrung Country
Yorta Yorta Country
Wathaurong Country
Graphic Design: Wei Huang
Illustration: Edie Bush
Mixing and mastering: Camilla Hannan
We would like to thank Lily Shearer, the Muruwari theatre maker, performing artist and cultural leader who devised the prompt “If you were Country, what would you want humans to do?” while working with young actors in Brewarrina.
We would also like to acknowledge and uplift the work of Gamilaroi cultural scientist Paris Norton, her article ‘Learning to love Country and adapt to climate change’ inspired the question “What might Country be asking us to learn?”
We would also like to acknowledge that Cultural Currents, the audio series made by A Climate For Art, is made with the support of funding from the British Council.
Photography credit: Phoebe Powell