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'Aurora Calling' The Results of a Joint Observation' by Catherine Ryan A fictionalised two-episode radio drama, inspired by the book Frost Bytes. |
Broadcast on: Sunday 7th & 14th December 2008 at 3pm (repeated Friday 12th & 26th December, 9pm) Australia's ABC Radio National Perth 810 AM; regional centres 621 AM Available Online: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/airplay/ (from the day after broadcast) 'Aurora Calling' is ABC Radio's Top Choice for December 2008 in 'Limelight Magazine'. To find transmitter frequency in your state in Australia click here.
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| In 1995, Catherine Ryan read a newspaper book review and was immediately sucked into the story of two Australian auroral physicists, Pene Greet and Gina Price, and their book Frost Bytes. It hit her with such force that she is still writing about it thirteen years later, and wondering why?... |
What struck me? I had powerful resonances with the polar landscape, the distant upper atmosphere, cyberspace, and the personal internal territories that are the book's locations. That it was two women, living and working in what had mainly been explored and defined as "male" territory. That their book was a melding of personal and professional lives. That it was about a friendship, not competition, under distance. The magnificence and mystery of auroras. The new (at the time) e-mail technology and the possibilities it created. It was distance and proximity, oppositions, disjunctures and unities, intimacy and isolation, scientific knowledge and unpredictability, hidden and opening out on many levels. And, most powerfully, that this was all simultaneously literal and metaphoric.... ….Maybe the play is thus a metaphor in and of itself. It's the aurora between earth and sun, the electronic messages travelling in space, the play between human and physical environment, friendship between two women, between women and dogs, and the spaces of breath. |
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'Aurora Calling' on Australia's ABC Radio
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