Beyond the Bars Community Radio Programme,a Decolonial Practice?

Abstract

An ethics of engagement community project was co-developed with 3CR Community Radio to learn about their Beyond the Bars radio programme, a radio broadcast produced in ‘prisons’. A collaboration with a First Nations broadcaster, a 3CR settler producer and two settler academics created a knowledge sharing project with local community radio, to demonstrate how Beyond the Bars can be considered a decolonial practice. This paper reflects on this programme to argue that it creates space- for Indigenous broadcasters and First Nation's people incarcerated to be heard, and to connect with family, community and Country. Broadcast participation means First Nations peoples speak for themselves and reconfigure negative media portrayals, the paper shows. We learn from this community engagement that Beyond the Bars broadcasts contribute to citizen participation despite this problematic ‘carceral setting’. We conclude by briefly suggesting that the collaborative project shows how radio content making participates in a decolonial practice.

Introduction

Hyperincarceration of First Nations peoples in Australia is largely grounded in settler colonialism with its history and present marked by dispossession and ongoing colonial violence (Moreton-Robinson, 2006, 2015; Wolfe, 2006). In response to First Nations peoples’ overrepresentation in incarceration centres in Australia (Anthony, 2013; Watson, 2009) and continuing First Nations and non-Indigenous peoples activism relating to the ongoing ‘social harms of prison’ (see for example Cunneen and Tauri, 2017; Cunneen et al., 2023), local 3CR Community Radio station in Fitzroy, Naarm/Melbourne, (Victoria, Australia) created the Beyond the Bars programme. This radio programme produces live and prerecorded broadcasts in several Victorian incarceration facilities during National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) week, a week which centres First Nations peoples’ experiences in Australia ¹ (3CR, 2016, pp. 209–211). From inside ‘prisons’ Indigenous broadcasters, producers and incarcerated First Nations peoples participate in this radio with 3CR's non-Indigenous producers to create the Beyond the Bars broadcasts, annually.

An ethics of engagement collaborative project (hereafter collaboration), a co-developed learning and sharing of knowledge with 3CR's Beyond the Bars programme coordinator, Juliet Fox, and Mutti Mutti Beyond the Bars broadcaster, singer/songwriter Kutcha Edwards, and Liz Dean and Claire Loughnan, non-Indigenous academics at the University of Melbourne (UoM), occurred in 2018. ² Designed with Fox and reviewed by 3CR it was decided that Dean and Loughnan would review the 2018 broadcasts and Beyond the Bars more broadly, and record two conversations with community radio's, Edwards and Fox. The analytical approach to this 3CR collaboration was to learn with them about the significance of this radio programme for both the First Nations people in some Victorian (Australian) ‘correctional centres’, and the Indigenous broadcasters who participate in the NAIDOC week broadcasts.

This paper demonstrates how the 3CR's NAIDOC week ‘prison broadcasts’ with incarcerated Aboriginal peoples who participate, and the Indigenous broadcasters ‘speak for themselves’. With the opportunity to articulate their experiences Beyond the Bars programming can also disrupt understandings of incarcerated First Nations people and interrupt how they are constructed when ‘spoken about’. Through producing this radio Beyond the Bars provides space for Indigenous agency both within and outside of some Victorian carceral settings, we suggest. This form of ‘citizen's media’ where communities and people make radio content (outside of a commercial professional journalist landscape) (Anderson, 2012; Rodriguez, 2001) can create radical political citizenship (Fox, 2016, 2019). Such radio can also unsettle what is claimed as knowledge about First Nations people, incarcerated and can approach a decolonial practice. This is despite how Aboriginal peoples’ ways of knowing and community media as knowledge producers, can be marginalised within institutional colonial settings (Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006): here, incarceration facilities, radio charters and universities.

Rather than presenting the findings of an empirical, research project wherein Beyond the Bars is an object of this collaborative approach, this paper analyses how this radio programme contributes to decolonising colonial representations of Aboriginal peoples incarcerated. The paper reflects on two key aims, both First Nations experiences of the the live broadcasts and recordings as a source of community knowledge making produced outside of the university, and the collaborative project. First, the paper presents a sketch of the history and significance of the Beyond the Bars programme. We introduce the interplay between Beyond the Bars dissemination of the voices of Aboriginal peoples incarcerated and show how this ‘prison radio’ can be meaningful for both Indigenous broadcasters and those incarcerated. Second, the paper reflects on the conduct of this collaborative project by considering ethical relations. We contend that an ethical engagement can be grounded in learning with Fox and Edwards and a form of knowledge sharing. This knowledge exchange can also be seen as approaching decolonial objectives: to engage with community radio to create the potential for positive beneficial outcomes for this 3CR community radio programme and First Nations participants (see Smith, 1999). The paper concludes by demonstrating how this community radio programme can provide opportunities for First Nations peoples incarcerated to re-create themselves, a decolonial aim and practice.

Beyond the Bars Programme, 3CR

With its long engagement with First Nations peoples creating radio programmes 3CR conducted their first Beyond the Bars broadcast in Port Phillip Prison in Laverton (Victoria) in 2002 ³ . To produce annual live and pre-recorded prison broadcasts in various Victorian prisons in NAIDOC week, ⁴ 3CR programmers seek permission every year from the Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety programme (Fox, 2018; per., comms). Content discussed on air when broadcasting and recording from inside incarceration facilities is restricted. Constraints include both Indigenous broadcasters and Aboriginal peoples incarcerated who partake in this radio programme must refrain from discussing why they are imprisoned and internal prison processes and are to use first names only. Despite working within such institutional limits, Indigenous broadcasters and producers and incarcerated Aboriginal participants can shape their own narratives in this radio programme, which in turn, can support a mode of agency with transformative possibilities, as is detailed below.

To prepare for the 2018 Beyond the Bars programming, broadcasters and producers ran mentoring workshops in six Victorian prisons. ⁵ This preparation led to between two and four hours of broadcasting in these incarceration settings. Ninety-two Aboriginal peoples incarcerated contributed to the creation of this 2018 NAIDOC week programme (Edwards and Fox, 2019; per., comms). Both Indigenous radio presenters and Aboriginal peoples imprisoned in some Victorian incarceration facilities are the creators of the content of this mostly live and recorded radio programme, which is then produced as a CD. ⁶

Community-owned and run 3CR prioritises community control over self-determined representations and radio content. Broadcast participants detail aspects of their lives, their life in prison, their concerns with ‘cycling in and out of prison’ (Anthony, 2013; Beyond the Bars CD, 3CR 2018), experiences of exclusion, and their ability to connect and reconnect with family (Anderson, 2013; CD 2018). Their participation in radio broadcasts include reading their poetry, performing songs and music workshopped with mentors, talking and sending ‘shout-outs’ to family, community and friends (Anderson, 2012a; Fox, 2019; Russell and Rae, 2020).

How the annual 3CR radio broadcasts continue to facilitate the possibility of maintaining community relations within and outside of prison has been established in academic research (see Anderson, 2012, 2012a, 2013; Anderson and Bedford, 2017). How Beyond the Bars also provides the possibility for incarcerated Aboriginal peoples to produce their own narratives and have their voices heard and disseminated beyond their carceral settings is also considered in the literature. (Anderson, 2012a, 2013; Fox, 2002; Russell and Rae, 2020). That this radio programme offers an opportunity for ‘listening across difference’ to aspects of Aboriginal peoples’ life stories and to their experiences of incarceration is also revealed by scholars (Dreher, 2009; Russell and Rae, 2020).

Dreher (2017) addresses the difficulty within the settler community to ‘hear’ Aboriginal peoples’ stories, generally (Dreher, 2017) and to engage with First Nations ways of being and their overrepresentation in Australian incarceration settings, specifically (see, for example, Cunneen and Tauri, 2017; Perera and Pugliese, 2018; Watson, 2009). To hear Aboriginal peoples incarcerated in Victoria through these broadcasts discuss their criminalisation in this settler colony can enable people who are listening on the outside to ‘witness’ their accounts of resistance (Dreher, 2009; Russell and Rae, 2020). Being able to hear about their experiences in and outside of ‘carceral settings’ can disrupt both the dehumanisation of incarceration (Dreher, 2009; Russell and Carlton, 2020) and the ‘deficit model’ through which many Aboriginal peoples in Australia were/are often constructed as lacking (Dodson, 1994; Langton, 1993).

With hyperincarceration an outcome of successive structural and racist policies in Australia (see for example, Kidd, 1997; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watson, 2009, 2014) ⁷ , First Nations peoples are largely produced and therefore often understood by settler communities through a normalising and regulating ‘deficit model’ (Langton, 1993; Walter, 2018). This model became a prescriptive and pervasive discursive lens, disseminating proof of their generalised, purported lack of character and/or vulnerable status (Bamblett, 2019; Dodson, 1994) and a ‘horrifying statistic’ (Langton, 1993), that largely continues to date. This deficit view led to framing First Nations peoples as the problem in Australia (Bamblett, 2019; Dodson, 1994; Walter, 2018; Watson, 2014, p. 146). Among the potential for positive impacts of this community radio programme, we argue, are the ways it can interrupt these simplistic, universalised representations that sought to dominate understandings of First Nations peoples (Langton, 1993; Watson, 2014). ⁸

Creating ‘access’ to First Nations peoples’ experiences beyond such negative portrayals and forging non-appropriative ways to do so (Mbembe, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012) 3CR generally and how Beyond the Bars achieves this, can be seen to resemble a decolonial practice we argue. For Mbembe (2016) decolonial projects must first entail ongoing critical interventions in Eurocentric and colonial academic models, and second, support an imperative to imagine an alternative world (Mbembe, 2016, pp. 6, 30). While we are not discussing universities or decolonising the curricula in this paper, it is how intellectual systems and practices within universities (Tuck and Yang, 2012), institutions and policy settings, require similar treatment. That is, intervening in knowledge systems whose dominance has typically been achieved as an effect of not listening (Dreher, 2009, 2017; Watson, 2009). Or being unable to hear those First Nations peoples who have always been creating their own knowledges and telling their own stories that have been predominantly devalued and overlooked (Wright, 2016). Adopting these two forms of necessary labour essential to practising decolonisation, we worked closely with Edwards and Fox throughout this community engagement and learning project. This paper now turns to the ethics of engagement before we return to discuss how Beyond the Bars can assist with reconfiguring and interrupting how First Nations peoples, incarcerated, are ‘spoken about’.

An Ethics of Engagement

Drawing attention to the need for community-oriented learning, listening and respect when co-developing this Ethics of Engagement (2018) with 3CR we were mindful of the more general ‘commodification’ or economisation of decolonisation processes (Sisters of Resistance et al., 2018). That is, how decolonisation within the neoliberal university, as one example, has partially become a fashionable engagement that risks deradicalising the fundamental aims of ‘decolonial projects’ (Mbembe, 2016). To co-develop a community engagement project the two university participants approached 3CR's Beyond the Bars’, Edwards and Fox, (broadcaster and producer, respectively) to enquire if there was a project that would benefit 3CR. We co-designed each stage of this community learning and knowledge sharing project through meetings and discussions with Fox and with Edwards, prior to the ethics of engagement commencing, and privileged 3CR as community knowledge makers.

In discussions we decided that this collaborative engagement would not be a methodological driven research project. Rather, it would consist of two recorded conversations about the programme, one with Fox (2018) and the other with Edwards (2018) (the latter was also to be filmed at 3CR studios). A third recorded ‘follow-up’ discussion with available 2018 Beyond the Bars participants in one incarceration site, was decided on by Edwards and Fox (and 3CR), and conducted by them in February 2019 (seven months after the 2018 broadcasts concluded).

These three co-designed conversation/discussions about Beyond the Bars and the review of the 2018 live broadcasts and select CDs of previous broadcasts, were to contribute to the stations digital archiving of the programme. Edwards and 3CR were provided with a copy of his filmed conversation about Beyond the Bars, for example. The conversation and review were also to support the radio station understanding of the meaning of this programme for those incarcerated, specifically given the continued high rates of Indigenous peoples incarcerated (Edwards, 2018, per comms, Fox, 2018, per comms). The collaborative project was to provide 3CR with further insights into how participants felt about the programme. By revisiting one of the 2018 NAIDOC week broadcast sites 3CR sought to understand whether the radio programme positively impacted First Nations participants: to learn about their experience of this programme.

University funding supported filming, transcriptions of the conversations/discussions and the transcription of the 2018 CD and were organised by UoM participants. In addition, by listening to the mostly live 2018 Beyond the Bars, NAIDOC week broadcasts and CD and a selection of the previous recordings it was agreed that Dean and Loughnan would identify some of the central points contributors made during the radio broadcast.

Most discussions about the project, including pre-recording meetings and the Fox and Edwards’ recorded discussion, took place near or at 3CR. By meeting off campus the project sought to reframe the orientation within universities whereby Aboriginal peoples and community knowledge makers and holders, well known within their communities and beyond, can either be ignored by the university (see for example, Smith, 2018, pp. 30–31) or bought into the university on the university's terms. In this way the project was informed by critical questions which ask whose lands are ‘we’ on, and what is our relationship to it (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Styres, 2018, p. 34), and who benefits from not needing to think relation to land (Moreton-Robinson, 2006; Watson, 2009). Accordingly, the location of the project is also important. It puts place and community in context to overcome the abstraction of place from individuals and communities, both of which are central to Aboriginal ways of being and knowing (Graham, 2008).

3CR always understood its relation to place and the significance of its location for Aboriginal peoples. ⁹ 3CR studio is located on Wurundjeri WoiWurrung land as is the University of Melbourne: the suburbs now called Fitzroy, Carlton and Parkville. More recently the UoM has begun to create more meaningful engagement with the spaces it occupies (and continues to profit from), its colonial underpinnings and the communities surrounding its campus, including the Wurundjeri WoiWurrung. ¹⁰

Ethical Relations

The ethics of engagement project draws on Kombu-merri and Wakka Wakka philosopher, Mary Graham's (2008) elaboration of Indigenous ethical conduct. This relational philosophy includes addressing relations to place and local community. She notes that the reflective motive is a relational ‘process of meditating upon our collective actions and experiential learning’ (Graham, 2008). As part of a community ‘we’ learn how to act through our encounters with land, place, and things. Graham observes:

Aboriginal people maintain that humans are not alone. They are connected and made by way of relationships with a wide range of beings, and it is thus of prime importance to maintain and strengthen these relationships. (2008, p. 187)

Rather than being removed from relations, this ethic is founded on everyday forms of conduct and learning through animate and non-human relations. This resonates with the imperative articulated by Luce Irigaray's (1993) extension of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1979) relational ethics where the otherness of the other with whom we are always in relation (and cannot fully know) both demands that we respond well and calls ‘us’ into being. For Graham (2013), the ‘reflective motive’ is generated by understanding that ‘selves’ are always of relations, revealed in the ‘habitual moments’ of everyday life.

Acquired through lived, observed, relational and experiential learning, this accumulative ‘reflective orientation’ occurs ‘through practice’. Graham's understanding of engagement refers to an orientation towards each other shaped by a ‘reflective motive’. It generates an openness to others that is already marked by ‘acts of sharing’, producing a relational philosophy embedded in ‘our places where land, learning, identity, and education intersect’ (Graham, 2008, p. 184; see also Styres, 2018, pp. 24, 29). Requiring an awareness and openness to different knowledges and relations (Graham, 2008) and cautioning against a simplistic appropriation of Graham's ‘reflective motive’, this understanding of ethical relationality can assist with re-developing habits of listening. Moreover, through creating ethical engagements with community, here 3CR radio, Fox and Edwards, and with them, Beyond the Bars NAIDOC week broadcasts and recordings, more meaningful ‘sharing’ of knowledge and resources can occur: a central aim of the project. ¹¹

The Ethics of University Ethics Process

Obstacles that diminish ethical relations for co-developed community engagements can be characterized by the UoM's required ‘ethics’ approval process necessary for the collaborative process to begin. The desire to protect First Nations peoples from the abuses of academic studies has also become an example of the ongoing structural and epistemic conditions of colonisation (see Smith, 1999) and is reflected in the problem of some of the ethics requirements, such as written or oral consent (Walter, 2016).

UoM's ethics processes largely construct Aboriginal peoples – in this collaboration, singer, songwriter and then broadcaster, Edwards who has worked with media (both as an interviewer and interviewee) and has a long history of performing locally and internationally – as mostly without agency or peoples who are universally at risk. While this is slowly changing, there remains a tendency in academic ethics procedures for Aboriginal peoples who can and do actively resist such objectification processes, to be collectively framed as vulnerable: largely unable to act. ¹² This demonstrates the tension between the requirements of a standardised ethics application as a form of protection against colonial research harms in the present, and the material harms and benevolence which can accompany this process.

Part of the standard practice of ethics applications also requires sample discussion points to be submitted for review. While open conversation/discussion points for the three conversations were co-created with Fox and 3CR reviewers (and discussed with Edwards before his filmed conversation) this structural element of ethics requirement can inhibit emergent outcomes. For instance, in Edwards’ filmed conversation when asking the second co-designed discussion point as a question he redirected the narrative. Stating ‘that is not the right question’ (Edwards per., comms July 2018) Edwards asserted his authorial knowledge and therein led his filmed conversation. Doing so offered us a more meaningful learning opportunity. (We return to this point in the following section.) Furthermore, this narrative shift demonstrated that no matter how ‘open’, co-created and pre-formulated discussion points are, ‘counter-stories are powerful forms of resistance’ (Smith, 2018, p. 32). This demonstrates that even when approved conversation prompts are co-created, an ethics committee or process cannot fully know in advance what is important or ethical to ask.

Community Radio and ‘Family Discovery’

By imploring us to hear another story we learnt from Edwards about how Beyond the Bars was also important for 3CR Indigenous mentors/broadcasters. When contributing to Beyond the Bars programme, Edwards explains, broadcasters can ‘discover family lost’ (Edwards, 2018, pers., comms) in carceral settings. Edwards recounts how he learns of a family connection when approached by an unknown uncle after one mentoring workshop (prior to the 2018, NAIDOC week broadcasts). This uncle had not seen Edwards since, at 18 months old, he was ‘removed’ from his family by the state (see Kidd, 1997). In this meeting he informed Edwards about previously unknown family relations. Notwithstanding how problematic incarceration is for First Nations peoples (Watson, 2009) as Madeline Whetung observes, ‘[t]he stories we tell, the way they are told and the places in which they’re told matter’ (Whetung and Wakefield, 2018, pp. 151–152).

Edwards and Fox also discuss how two other Indigenous broadcasters have ‘reconnected’ with family by chance due to Beyond the Bars: one by being part of the NAIDOC week broadcasts and the second, through listening to the Beyond the Bars CD. The live NAIDOC week broadcasts (and the yearly CDs that follow) become forums through which Aboriginal peoples incarcerated can ‘reach out’, retain or make connections with families and communities, which will be elaborated below. We learn here, how Beyond the Bars can function as a ‘meeting place’ for Aboriginal peoples across Australia (Edwards, 2018 pers., comm). This demonstrates how re-connecting with family members can occur for Aboriginal peoples ‘on the outside’ as well as ‘inside’ in the preparations for NAIDOC week broadcasts and during and after Beyond the Bars broadcasts (Edwards, 2018, pers., comms; Fox, 2018, pers., comms).

Edwards’ experience and shaping of the ‘right story’ offered more than our ethics approved and 3CR workshopped and co-developed discussion points allowed. Edwards’ patience, generosity and ‘teacherly’ intent, and his long-standing working relationship with Fox (who recorded this conversation) meant that we learnt more about the significance of Beyond the Bars - for Indigenous broadcasters. His filmed conversation also generated reflection of First Nations peoples’ agency for the authors. While extending our understanding of this incarceration community radio broadcast, we were also given an opportunity to re-imagine -Beyond the Bars as approaching a decolonial project. This is despite the attendant negative implications of racist policy making informing policing and the criminal justice system in Australia and elsewhere, regarding First Nations peoples (see Watson, 2009; Porter, 2016; Walter, 2018).

Edwards’ conversation, moreover, shows how ethical research is neither reducible to ethics approval processes that codify the ‘management’ of ethical relations nor able to enculturate fully an ethical encounter between researchers and discussants (Whetung and Wakefield, 2018, p. 150). Rather, Edwards’ redirecting of the conversation required an ethical response: the capacity to be open and listen to his intervention (see for example, Dreher, 2009). Furthermore, to hear demanded a preparedness to let go of knowing, accumulated habits of listening and the open discussion points. Underlining the problems associated with university ethics processes practising ethical conduct includes being open to relational, dynamic possibilities and listening, to learn to respond well.

Sustaining Relations

Centrally, Edwards’ conversation, the live broadcasts and the 2018 CD emphasised relations: to Country, to communities, to place and family. The importance of maintaining family connection was emphasised when Edwards and Fox returned to a carceral setting to discuss the broadcast with a participant who contributed to the 2018 NAIDOC week programme. When asked about their Beyond the Bars participation they said:

[I]t is very important and vital for blakfellas that are in the system, doing time away from their loved ones, to be able to […] extend their love and reach out to the people that care about them the most, which is their family. (Participant, Edwards and Fox per., comms., Feb. 2019)

Family relations can be upheld through being involved with the Beyond the Bars (2018) programme. ‘Vital’ to supporting relations is the potential to ‘speak with’ those ‘who care about blakfellas’ through the radio broadcasts.

‘Reaching out to those who care’ is also a central theme articulated by many Indigenous participants throughout the yearly CDs (see for example 3CR (2004) Beyond the Bars 2004), as is established in previous literature (Anderson, 2012a, 2013; Dreher, 2009; Fox, 2019; Russell and Rae, 2020). Due to their capacity to participate in Beyond the Bars, participants reflect that they feel that they become part of their broader communities and the NAIDOC weeks celebrations, and through this, supports a sense of being remembered and cared for (Edwards and Fox, 2019, pers., comms. CD 2018). As Lynne Killeen, Aboriginal Wellbeing Officer at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre ¹³ explains: ‘I think for them it just means to know that they’re still wanted, they’re still loved and people out there do care, because a lot of women come in with the misconception that nobody gives a damn’ (Beyond the Bars CD, 2018). The Indigenous broadcaster, Indigenous and non-Indigenous producers provide this sense of care for Aboriginal peoples incarcerated, when creating the possibility ‘to be heard’ with them.

Intertwined with ‘feeling cared for’ is a sense of ‘being listened to’, the play of which reasserts the centrality of being heard. As one person states: ‘I love this broadcast […] you get heard. You have a voice. Each year you fellas come out, you come out of your way to come out for us to share our stories, our poems – just to be heard. […] We love it’ (Beyond the Bars CD, 2006). The chance to ‘share’ stories, to discuss their experiences, and ‘to be heard’ is critical to those who contribute to this radio programme, albeit limited by the constraints of the incarceration facility in terms of what can be discussed, described earlier-. Such ‘citizen media’ (Anderson, 2012) creates the space for Aboriginal peoples incarcerated to be part of the production of radio content, to speak and be listened to ‘beyond the bars’. Being able to come together to produce, build, shape and circulate their voices, and through this mode of communication, sustain their family and community relations can be central to disrupting the production of stories about First Nations peoples who are incarcerated.

Shaping the Story, ‘Remaking Ourselves’

First Nations peoples can ‘revisit’ and ‘remake themselves’ through articulating ‘their own stories’ (Anderson and Bedford, 2017, p. 9; Wright, 2016) through their various Beyond the Bars NAIDOC week performances, including through music and ‘shout outs’ to family and community. Such storytelling among Aboriginal peoples, Styles argues, refers to ‘the ways we narratively describe ourselves as Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally’ (Styres, 2018, pp. 25, 28). Aboriginal peoples acknowledge how this prison broadcast assists with creating and disseminating their ‘messages’ and as such, their collective sense of community and belonging (Edwards and Fox, 2019, pers., comms., Feb 2019).

The incarcerated contributor who discussed what Beyond the Bars radio programme meant for them (Edwards and Fox, 2019, pers., comms., 2019) emphasised their story making. He states that stories: surround us with ourselves, the memories that come along with it, the ability to be able to just re-listen to all the stories that we have come together to produce, which is that beautiful CD of songs, memories, messages to ourselves and our loved ones. (Participant, Edwards and Fox, 2019, pers., comms., Feb 2019).

This establishes how ‘collaborative story-making, collective memory’, as Waanji writer, Alexis Wright (2016) argues, nourishes connections to community. ‘Coming together’ to create radio and ‘speak’ with their communities through Beyond the Bars, establishes how the NAIDOC week contributors can sustain a mode of community making inside ‘the prison and outside’ (Anderson, 2013; Russell and Rae, 2020).

While this radio programme is set against the experiences of colonisation in the present, we argue that Aboriginal peoples producing their own radio content can establish active citizenry in the above and following ways. Beyond the Bars broadcasts can be an example of, as Martin Nakata (2007, p. 492) writes, how ‘we continue to maintain our values as a people of tradition; we have actively shaped new practices […] and we are making and re-making ourselves […] everyday’. When 3CR Community Radio content is produced with and by First Nations peoples, members of multiple communities and language groups (Edwards, 2018, pers., comms.), ‘we’ are offered the opportunity to hear how they also express and reassert their ‘own’ modes of ‘remaking’. We can hear how many Aboriginal peoples incarcerated away from -Country, community and family move beyond their carceral settings and resituate themselves in and of Country and communities (Edwards, 2018, pers., comms., CD 2018, CD 2016) . ¹⁴ . Being able to listen to the CDs, non-Indigenous settler communities can also hear how Aboriginal peoples mediate their modes of belonging while incarcerated.

This illuminates the productive potential and rich sites of radical practice that Anderson (2012, p. 298) avers, mostly exists in ‘community prison radio contexts’ when radio broadcasts are operated with and by Aboriginal peoples. This ‘prison radio’, an example of citizens media, can assist with enactments of citizenship from some Victorian ‘carceral settings’ in NAIDOC week (Anderson, 2012, 2013; Dreher, 2017; Russell and Rae, 2020). The programme achieves this through the possibility of First Nations participants producing their own ‘prison radio’ from the ‘ground up’ (Anderson, 2012a). It can support a mode of community-making through First Nations peoples’ articulation of their experiences which hold transformative possibilities. As local community-based knowledge creators, producers and broadcasters, Aboriginal peoples who are incarcerated can contest the settler colonial misconceptions of First Nations peoples and their presence in incarceration settings, through such broadcasts.

A Decolonial Project?

By supporting Aboriginal broadcasters and producers in the ways discussed above, this 3CR radio programme, after Banerjee and Osuri (2000, p. 280), can be considered a ‘decolonial project’ which intervenes in colonialism in the present. If decolonial acts involve creating knowledge and liberatory practicses from the experiential ground of peoples subjected to ‘the colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 492), then these broadcasts can be seen to practice a form of decolonisation. In producing ‘counter-histories and counter-memories’ Beyond the Bars can also break with colonial silences (Smith, 1999) that ‘alienate, marginalise and silence peoples and their experiences’ (Mignolo, 2007, 492), and in so doing, interrupt the imposition of the deficit lens. As Tanganekald, Meintangk Boandik scholar Irene Watson (2014, p. 146) argues ‘[w]e can transform the place. We can, in fact, think our way out of this position’ (see also Dodson, 1994). Indigenous broadcasters, producers and participants can shape their own narratives in the NAIDOC week prison broadcasts.

Arguably then, even within the institutional frames that underpin the NAIDOC week broadcasts – 3CR's broadcast charter, incarceration sites, and the legacies of colonial structures and the problems of colonialism in the present – Beyond the Bars contributes to citizen participation: First Nations peoples’ agency, knowledge creation and distribution of their stories. As such, participation in this radio program can create a ‘strength-based’ possibility for incarcerated Aboriginal peoples’ which contests the power relations inherent in settler colonial knowledge production about Indigenous peoples. What Beyond the Bars radio achieves in NAIDOC week broadcasts are how it creates a space of contestation where First Nations peoples can ‘reflect their own experiences’, which breaks with knowledge being produced ‘about them’: a decolonial aim. If decolonial acts can ‘reposition’ a racialised lens (Banerjee and Osuri, 2000, p. 277), challenge ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007) and disrupt the deficit discursive lens (Dodson, 1994) attached to First Nations incarcerated people, then this radio programme can be a decolonising project in practice.

Positioned within an assemblage of practices of listening, caring, speaking, hearing, disruption, and radical transformation, Beyond the Bars creates and distributes knowledge worth knowing, learning and listening to. Edwards filmed conversation and the learning he offers, and the CD recordings of the broadcasts when heard, can destabilise the invisible norms of whiteness that manifest as privilege and largely continue to permeate various institutional settings (Beyond the Bars, 3CR, 2021; Mbembe, 2016; Mills, 2007). Edwards’ discussion about Beyond the Bars and the voices of incarcerated First Nations peoples hold the potential to interrupt the settler frame, as it did for the three non-Indigenous authors of this collaborative project.

The collaborative project highlights that a failure to engage with community knowledge makers, here 3CR's Beyond the Bars programme, the Indigenous broadcasters and the Aboriginal peoples incarcerated, demonstrates the persistence of the institutional silencing and structural marginalisation of First Nations peoples voices, their knowledge contributions and their modes of becoming. To overlook this form of self-determining knowledge making which can be ‘revisited’ as well as others specific set of effects elaborated in this section, is to refuse an opportunity to hear ‘Indigenous experiences of settler colonial crime control’ (Cunneen and Tauri, 2017). It also suggests a continued devaluing of community knowledges and practice and a disinterest in knowledge sharing.

In enacting an ethical engagement this collaborative knowledge sharing approached decolonial aims. With Fox and 3CR we created benefits for this 3CR community radio programme. We provided a review of Beyond the Bars programming with Edwards and Fox for 3CR, further disseminating First Nations participants experiences and voices and knowledge about the impacts of with Beyond the Bars. Supporting Fox and Edwards return to an incarceration facility to record a conversation in 2019 with a 2018 NAIDOC week participant was of particular significance, as this was the first time 3CR conducted a follow-up discussion with any participants incarcerated. Moreover, it enabled this discussant to reflect on their experiences of participating in the Beyond the Bars programme. Their discussion also built 3CR's understanding of how this radio programme continues to be important for incarcerated participants.

Conclusion: Learning to Listen Anew

3CR Community Radio has long acknowledged the forms of resistance which have always existed and exceeded the settler colonial ‘deficit’ frames that discursively strove to capture Aboriginal peoples (Fox, 2019). The Beyond the Bars recordings (CDs), Edwards’ filmed conversation and the First Nation participant's articulation of the meaning of the 2018 broadcasts establish how ‘vital’ this form of media can be for participants. Listening to Beyond the Bars CDs or live broadcasts also offers non-Indigenous communities the opportunity to hear from First Nations peoples and learn something of their lives. Listeners are offered the opportunity to hear the intersecting ‘collective, shared stories and dynamic lived memory making’ (Wright, 2016): First Nations peoples narrating their stories, knowledges and modes of belonging.

The ethics of engagement collaborative project, a place-based, ethical encounter with local community radio 3CR's Beyond the Bars live broadcasts and recordings, with Edwards and Fox, we argue, also worked against the assumption that knowledge transfer moves one way: out of the university into community. This collaborative project enabled the university participants to gain an understanding of how this form of media participation – the radio production – assisted with the possibility ‘to be heard’mpa#rsquo;,&nbspto (re)connect with communities, family and Country, while also feeling cared about and ‘remembered’. Beyond the Bars programming can counter feelings of social exclusion experienced by many Aboriginal peoples in Victorian ‘carceral settings’.

We reflect that through careful listening to both Edwards’ and the participants of Beyond the Bars understandings of this radio programme, we encountered a radio broadcast which approaches a dynamic decolonial practice. While this radio cannot dispense with the colonial foundations of the incarceration settings, ‘prison radio’ can create decolonial possibilities. Such radio broadcasts can contribute to interrupting dominate narratives about First Nations peoples and has the protentional for First Nations peoples, incarcerated to ‘remake ourselves’. When Beyond the Bars is listened to by the larger non-Indigenous community it can generate a greater awareness of First Nations people's experiences of their lives ‘in and outside of prison’. This learning also corresponds with one of the projects aims, to ethically encounter Beyond the Bars programme to learn about the decolonial potential of this broadcast.