Join us in congratulating Dr Michelle Arrow from the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations who received the 2014 NSW Premier’s History Awards – Multimedia History Prize for her radio documentary Public Intimacies: The 1974 Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

“This is the first radio documentary I’ve made and it was based on research I undertook whilst on a fellowship from the National Archives of Australia,” said Michelle.

Public Intimacies revisits the 1970s, a time of social and cultural transformation in Australia, and the events around the Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Her documentary outlines the successes and failures of the commission through archival material and interviews, bringing to life the political debates behind women’s and gay rights.

“I became interested in the Royal Commission on Human Relationships when I read a brief reference to it in an Australian general history book and I was immediately intrigued by the idea of it,” said Michelle.

“One of the things that struck me about the Commission was the way people spoke so freely about their intimate and often painful personal experiences and it seemed to me that such stories would be best told on radio.”

With help from ABC colleagues Catherine Freyne and Timothy Nicastri, Michelle says she learned a lot from the experience.

“Radio enables you to work with voices, sounds and songs of the past in a way that evokes the past in an intimate register,” she said. “Radio is collaborative, but it also offers a higher degree of autonomy than a television documentary and I loved crafting what was a very large unwieldy story into a tight 52 minutes of radio.”

Read more about Dr Arrow’s work.