|
Geraint Evans
joined the Welsh language program team at Radio 2EA in 1990.
When it became part of the national SBS Radio network in
1993, he became head-of group for the Welsh program until
it stopped being last year.
He was also involved in the Celtic Studies Program
at the University of Sydney where he taught modern Welsh
and coordinated the modern Celtic Language Teaching Program.
In February this year, he wrote an article called 'Death
of the Diaspora' for Planet magazine to discuss the affect
of advances in communication technology on isolated language
communities, drawing on his experience at SBS. Tim Dixon
met up with him to talk about his time at SBS Radio and
what he's been doing since.
TD: How was the program structured?
GE: For most of that time it was a weekly one hour program
of news from Wales and Welsh music and interviews. The news
bulletin was, I always thought, one of the most important
parts of it. And that would be 20 - 25 minutes of the news
from Wales for that week, including voice grabs and interviews
of major stories in Wales.
TD: What did you enjoy about producing
the program?
GE: I liked being able to use Welsh every week and to stay
in touch with major issues and policy and news in Wales.
I liked interviewing people who were visiting Australia
and it was nice to have so much feedback from people all
over Australia who would listen to the program. Often it
was their only contact with the Welsh language.
TD: What sort of people were listening to the show?
GE: There were three main groups of Welsh people who would
listen to the program. There were older people who had come
from Wales and been in Australia a long time. There was
another group of younger Welsh people who had grown up in
Wales with Welsh radio and Welsh television and Welsh schools
and there was a third group of people who had only ever
lived in Australia but who'd learned Welsh because of an
interest of some kind. There was probably a fourth group,
I should say, as well, of people who used to listen because
they liked the music.
TD: What was your aim in putting the program together?
GE: My aim was determined by the charter of SBS Radio whose
primary function was to provide Welsh language news and
entertainment for all Australians and to participate in
language maintenance. That's the charter position for all
language groups on SBS Radio. The programming and the audience
are determined by language community - not by political
or geographic community. And that was the extraordinary
thing about SBS Radio. They didn't provide programs for
people from a certain place. They provided programs for
all people with interests in a certain language. In terms
of the SBS charter, had there been nobody left speaking
Welsh, there could not have been a Welsh program. It was
a program for Welsh speakers, not a program for people from
Wales. It wasn't, as such, community radio.
TD: What differences did advances
in technology make to the program in the time you were there?
GE: It transformed it. First of all, the advent of digital
technology meant that it was possible to participate with
broadcasting in Wales much more easily so I was involved
in broadcasting live on BBC Welsh Radio from Sydney for
special events. The other thing of course was the appearance
of the Internet which revolutionised the nature of news
for all broadcast organisations, but meant that for a group
like the Welsh group, a substantial and up-to-date news
bulletin could be put together every week without relying
on airmail subscriptions to local newspapers.
TD:What does your Welsh identity mean
to you?
GE:Well for me, it's always been defined by language and
my good fortune in having access to the literary history
of Wales in Welsh and for that I can be grateful to the
pioneers of Welsh education in the twentieth century.
TD:Do you support any football teams
back in Wales?
GE:Yes. I grew up not very far from Wrexham and my grandfather
supported Wrexham all his life and my uncle as a boy played
for Wrexham so I always look out for them in the results.
They're not doing very well at the moment. I'm a great follower
of cricket and rugby as well so the trials of Glamorgan
are something I've been watching as the season draws to
an end. I'm looking forward very much to the new rugby season
to see if the reorganised championship in Wales can finally
put together a decent national side to challenge the others
in the Six Nations.
TD:How do you feel about the Welsh
language?
GE:I'm glad you asked that question. Wales is divided really
into those people who think it is dying and can't be saved,
and those people who think that it can be saved and is being
saved. And I'm in the optimist camp. I think that we will
look back on the late twentieth century as an extraordinary
and quite rare example of a national language maintenance
movement which brought a language back from the edge of
extinction and I think the signs are very hopeful.
TD:Could you tell me about your research
at the moment?
GE:Yes. I spent a year as a visiting research fellow In
Cambridge until July of this year and a lot of the research
I did was on the earliest days of Welsh printing in London,
particularly the work of William Salesbury who was involved
in writing many of the first books to be printed in Welsh,
between 1547 and 1551. So I spent a very interesting time
with photocopies of sixteenth century maps of London, walking
around Holborn looking for the location of particular buildings
where he was known to have stayed and trying to reproduce
a sense of the Welsh community in London at that time and
it was interesting to see how many significant buildings
there were all in the one
place - The Bishop of Bangor's Palace, The Bishop of Shandalf's
Inn - the places where Salesbury lived and where the Welsh
books were printed
TD:I also read in 'Death of the Diaspora'
that you had been researching the history of the Welsh in
Australia.
GE:Yes, I've been involved in that for some time. I had
an outstanding PhD student called Lesley Walker who's just
finished a PhD on immigration from Wales to New South Wales
between 1850 and 1900 which I hope will become a book. It
is a remarkable piece of research where she has looked at
every known Welsh person who migrated with an assisted passage
during those fifty years and she has been able to work out
patterns of immigration particularly through Sydney up to
Newcastle. I also, last year, wrote an article on the Celtic
Languages in Australia for the New Encyclopedia of Celtic
Studies that will be published later this year and next
year.
TD:A few years ago, you gave a talk
for the Dylan Thomas Society which was well received. Do
you plan to do anything similar in the future?
GE:I was delighted to be asked to give the annual Public
Lecture of the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia in 2001.
I've been involved in teaching the literature of Wales at
the University of Sydney for a number of years and Dylan
Thomas is rightly celebrated as one of Wales' greatest writers.
My interest is in looking at, in particular, Welsh writers
who write in English and Welsh writers who write in Welsh,
side by side to work out what kind of national story they
tell together and that has really been the major development,
I think, in the academic study of the the literature of
Wales over the last fifty years.
TD:Thank you for your time. It's been
great speaking with you.
GE:It's been a pleasure.
|
