“We’re looking out through a window to a field of weeds and sand and stones”: The Stadium Broadcast,a Radio Memorial

Introduction

A long sequence of earthquakes affecting Christchurch city and the broader Canterbury region began on September 4, 2010, with the most damaging aftershock on February 22, 2011: a magnitude 6.3 quake located under the hills on the southern edge of the city (Geonet, n.d.). In the central city, 1,240 buildings had been demolished between the September 4, 2010, earthquake and February 20, 2015 (Gates, 2015), in addition to 7,050 houses in the east of the city along the Avon River (Stylianou, 2014), as a result of damage, land instability, and the relative costs of repair or rebuild. In response to this large-scale erasure of the city’s built environment, the national government appointed a planning body, the Christchurch Central Development Unit in 2012 to redesign the central city.

This article focuses on the Stadium Broadcast, a postquake social art project that engaged with a specific Christchurch location, the sports ground Lancaster Park, which has been closed to the public since the February 2011 earthquake. It was established in 1881 and developed into a sponsored stadium primarily for rugby and cricket in the late 1990s, known most recently as AMI Stadium on Lancaster Park. In the planning process for rebuilding the city, Lancaster Park’s future was for many years unresolved, subject to insurance claims, and conflicting assessments of the damage it sustained. The Christchurch Central Development Unit plan proposes a new covered stadium in the central city, but its cost, location, and necessity are contested. In the meantime, cricket matches have moved to a new facility and rugby games to a temporary stadium.

For the Stadium Broadcast, Australian artist group Field Theory (2014a, 2014b), with the support of local art organizations, established a temporary radio station in a caravan in Lancaster Park from November 14 to 17, 2014. During the 72 hours of continuous broadcasting, the Stadium Broadcast created a radio space in which to collect memories of Lancaster Park, excavating histories of the old stadium, and gathering responses to its current condition and speculations on its future. This article examines how the radio format of the Stadium Broadcast provided a resonant space in which to reconstruct the history of the park, and articulate the importance of place in postquake Christchurch. This discussion contextualizes the broadcast in local theorizing about the transitional city, and in broader reflections on liveness, space, and memory in radio. The article argues that The Stadium Broadcast was a radio memorial that inscribed the stadium through words and radio waves across the space of the central city, redistributing its physical structure across the empty spaces left by other buildings that contained their own stories and memories.

Radio, Space, Memory

Radio sounds and radio waves trace particular patterns in the urban environment, describing forms of space that overlay or interweave the visually understood structures of physical space. Many theorists have now identified differences between the shape of space understood through sound and through vision, beginning with the publication of McLuhan and Carpenter’s 1960 article “Acoustic Space” (Cavell, 1999; Gow, 2001; Schafer, 2007). Critiques of what Smith (1994), for example, calls the “persistence of an ideology of the visual in cultural geography” (p. 233) are now well established (Barns, 2014; Connor, 1997; Matless, 2005; Rodaway, 1994; Smith, 2000). Rodaway (1994) uses the term Auditory geography to describe the “sensuous experience of sounds in the environment”; the properties of the city that can be heard, or more actively listened to (p. 84). By foregrounding the experience of sound, auditory geography describes a more immersive experience of space than is encountered visually. Because our bodies make and physically sense sounds, the auditory world surrounds us and we participate in it. Like the related concepts of acoustic space and the soundscape (Schafer, 1994, 2007), the space of the auditory “has no favored focus. [. . .] The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear, however, favours sound from any direction” (Carpenter, cited in Schafer, 2007, p. 83). In auditory space, Connor (1997) observes, “one can hear many sounds simultaneously, where it is impossible to see different visual objects at the same time without disposing them in a unified field of vision” (p. 207). Walking through a city, for example, the ordered space understood through visually interpreting the location of physical objects in relation to each other is experienced simultaneously with a permeable, multilayered, and immersive multiplicity of sound.

Connor (1997) argues that a shift away from single perspectival space toward auditory understandings of space was intensified by the development of radio in the early 20th century and, in particular, the way wireless transmission escaped the “material mediation” of previous wired technologies (p. 208). He identifies the characteristics of radio waves as a metaphor for the way sound is able to “pervade and to integrate objects and entities which the eye kept separate,” and refers to radio transmission as sound becoming “the enacted form of electromagnetic fluctuation itself” (pp. 207, 208). However, the physical characteristics of radio and sound waves are so different that it is useful to consider the ways in which radio waves themselves describe a form of spatiality that is not at all auditory but exemplifies “plural, permeated space” (Connor, 1997, p. 207). Radio transmissions are ephemeral, fleeting, overtly intangible, and always moving across space. Christchurch, like all cities, is overlaid with radio transmissions. They flow across visible spaces, permeating physical structures, such that the people and objects of the city are “bathed in radio waves” (Cage, quoted in Milutis, 2006, p. 98). Radio, then, creates two kinds of spaces that are, in Carpenter’s words, “made by the thing itself, not space containing a thing” (quoted in Rodaway, 1994, p. 114): the plural permeating spaces of radio-mediated sound, and electromagnetic, radio, waves. Spatiality is a metaphor for radio waves understood in practice by many radio artists (Black, 2010), in concepts such as “electronic/digital space,” “sound objects” and “radio space,” “electromagnetic ‘Hertzian Space’” (Black, 2010, p. 201), “radiophonic space” (Friz, 2008), or as a material for making art (Kanouse, 2011, p. 201).

For a city in “transition,” in which the physical presence of buildings and empty spaces has been in an ongoing state of change because of earthquake damage, demolition, construction, and alternative land uses, a fluid and open sense of auditory spatiality may make more sense than a visually-based desire for order. As the city has been reconfigured since February 2011, it is often noted that people find it difficult to locate the self in space, because the physical markers of space have gone (Parker & Bennett, 2013, p. 4). The long series of earthquakes redefined the materiality of the city, and with its physical structures “gone” and/or reconstituted, the auditory geography of central Christchurch was transformed. Diggers, demolition, birdsong, and near-silence replaced the sounds of vehicles and people, once the buildings against which sounds resonated had largely gone. At the same time, however, the sounds and transmission patterns of radio stations have changed comparatively little since the earthquakes. Prequake radio stations continue to broadcast with little change in transmitter location, evidencing the medium’s “rugged and inexpensive materialities” (Bessire & Fisher, 2013, p. 364). Sound and radio waves are articulated by a complex system of transmitters, microphones, music sources, and people, located in broader structures of ownership and control (Fuller, 2005), in which the physical and auditory configurations of radio are intertwined. In that sense, the Stadium Broadcast was produced by the February 2011 earthquake, the empty disused stadium, the studio and sleeping caravans, the networks of online and broadcast transmission, and the artist networks that brought Field Theory to that location for that project. These are elements of what Bessire and Fisher (2013) refer to as “radio fields—the specific constellations of cultural, political, and socioeconomic ‘relations of force’ [. . .] occasioned by radio media” (p. 364). The Stadium Broadcast’s radio field encompassed the relations of force shaping post-quake Christchurch, and the cultural, political, and socioecomic past and future of the city.

In contrast, the passage of transmission and content means that radio’s ontology of liveness makes it inherently fleeting, transitory, and always already a memory. As a form of secondary orality, in Ong’s (2013) terms, radio shares the quality of sound that it “exists only when it is going out of existence” (p. 32), such that stopping the movement of sound is impossible—unlike a moving image “frame fixed on the screen,” sound freezes only as silence (Ong, 2013, p. 32). While the content of radio can be recorded and replayed, radio’s simultaneous electromagnetic transmission and reception can only be experienced, in auditory space, moment by moment. Ephemeral, and strongly connected to the site of hearing, radio is closely associated with memory creation and recollection, shaping both collective and personal memory (Labelle, 2006; Liebes, 2006; Tacchi, 2003). As LaBelle (2006) observes, hearing the radio in a specific place and moment creates a strong connection between sound, space, and time, demonstrating some of the overlay of radio sound in the spaces of everyday life (p. 23).

Artist Sarah Kanouse (2011) draws on the memory-building role of radio in “radio memorials,” works that use small-scale transmissions to create spaces of commemoration, in a practice that explicitly treats radio waves spatially. She also draws an analogy between the particular spatiality and materiality of radio waves and the creation and recollection of memory:

As a material, radio is eternal and ephemeral; profoundly elemental, yet invisible and unstable. Electromagnetic radiation, of which radio is a type, can move infinitely through the vacuum of space. On earth, however, transmissions are limited temporally and geographically. Radio waves dissipate, can be blocked by objects and are distorted by the interference of solar radiation. Taken as metaphor, these material characteristics echo the selective and hazy processes of cultural memory. (p. 202)

As a material for memory, “the radio memorial functions as what James Young has described as a ‘counter-monument’ in that it refuses to fix historical meaning. Instead, it performs the contingency and instability that is characteristic of all acts of memory” (p. 202). Kanouse’s own works are intentionally invisible interventions, possibly inaudible, depending on whether anyone within the transmission range is listening, but her intention is to explore the “ghostly presence” of the broadcast in space rather than any moment of reception. The spatial presence of the radio waves carrying a particular sound is more important than whether the sound is heard.

A spatiality of flow and multiple perspectives, as evoked by the aural, reflects the form of Christchurch city described as “transitional” in local theorizing. In Christchurch, the new creative and environmental organizations that responded to the earthquakes adopted the term transitional to describe their projects, to move away from perceptions of limited and time-bound “temporary” events. The transitional was then included as a component of the official plans for rebuilding the city (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, 2012; Christchurch City Council, 2011a, 2011b). In those official documents and other City Council uses, the transitional tends to be conflated with the temporary, and with art events that attract visitors and residents to the central city. In the more critical responses to those plans from arts and architecture organizations, the transitional is framed as an open-ended experimental and creative space between a known past and uncertain future, with a potential for influencing the future, and not simply marking the time before the new city is established (Bennett, Boidi, & Boles, 2012, 2013; Bennett, Dann, Johnson, & Reynolds, 2014). Like other transitional art projects, The Stadium Broadcast was built on public engagement, using active strategies to draw responses from people who had stories to tell of Lancaster Park (Anderson, 2014). In these, the stadium was articulated as a site of memory, in which memory was enacted as an “active social process” (Lavrence, 2005, p. 32), through story-telling by visitors who narrated the space in a form of “traumatic storytelling” that may reconcile loss (Davidson, 2009, p. 340). It resonated with other public art projects that engage with public space and memory (e.g., Bishop, 2016; Curtis, 2004; Message, 2005). The broader transitional materiality of Christchurch was a recurring theme throughout the broadcast, as the hosts reflected on the experience of being in the city, and conversations returned to the ongoing trials of navigating around road works, and particular developments of postquake businesses.

This article explores the way the Stadium Broadcast functioned as a radio memorial, creating a lived history of the stadium through sound and radio waves in a spatiality that extended beyond its physical space into the city. It was an expression of the transitional city, a work that moved in both form and content from the past to a speculative future. This research is grounded in my own experience of listening to the broadcast and visiting the stadium during the broadcast, in an audio ethnography along the lines proposed by Susan Smith (2000). Recordings of the broadcast were posted online, and so textual analysis of the content outside the broadcast moment refers to those sources, albeit disconnected from the space and time of transmission. References to those recordings are notated by the numbering system used by Field Theory to catalogue them in the online archive on Spreaker.com, with the time at which the quoted words begin within each recording. Because the recordings are not time stamped, it is not possible to give consistent times and dates for every piece of quoted material. Textually, this analysis focuses on the aspects of liveness, intimacy, and aurality in the broadcast talk (Chignell, 2009). As a text, the broadcast does not conform to the usual genres of radio analysis (Tolson, 2006), being primarily a live, long-form art-radio performance. However, it includes elements of sports radio, talk radio, phone-ins, features, and media event.

The Stadium Broadcast

The Stadium Broadcast was fundamentally a web and transmission radio station based in a caravan on the site of a demolished spectator stand at Lancaster Park (see Figure 1). From there, five members of Field Theory broadcast for 72 hours a program dedicated to the role of the stadium in the sporting, cultural, and social life of the city. The broadcast’s duration, from 10 a.m. Friday to 10 a.m. Monday over the long Christchurch Anniversary Weekend, was an endurance performance intended to echo the cricket test matches once played there. Broadcasting from a caravan located the project in the long history of live sports broadcasts from mobile outside broadcast units, and Lancaster Park was itself the site of many national and international broadcasts. From the caravan, Field Theory referenced both the mobile forms local radio stations took after the February 22 quake, and the global reach of international sporting fixtures, via a web stream.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Field Theory, The Stadium Broadcast.

The transmission aspect of the Stadium Broadcast was enabled by particular policy allowance for low-powered FM radio in New Zealand, while the social value of the broadcast emphasises the loss of locally focused radio in New Zealand’s concentrated industry. Radio in New Zealand is dominated by an internationally-owned duopoly that shares the commercial radio audience across matching radio formats, counterbalanced by the public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ), and a number of more socially, culturally, and locally focused access, student, Iwi (Maori), and ethnic stations (Myllylahti, 2014). For Christchurch, this means a radioscape almost entirely dominated by networked radio transmitted in from Auckland and Wellington, with only small-scale independent stations maintaining a focus on the local. The political and economic contours of New Zealand radio broadcasting shape the particular materiality of all stations, and The Stadium Broadcast’s transmitted presence on 107FM was enabled by a class of transmission license that requires no license for low-power FM broadcasting in the “guard band” at the top and bottom of the FM frequency block. The broadcast’s profoundly local focus, as a low-powered station with a program about a single space within the city, runs counter to the overarching structure of New Zealand Radio.

The program included prerecorded and live interviews with significant figures in the stadium’s sporting history; memories of the space contributed by members of the public; recordings of significant events there, including visits by Queen Elizabeth, Pope John Paul II, and evangelist Billy Graham; and discussions of many sporting encounters. The music comprised a loose interpretation of artists who had performed in the stadium, or cover versions of songs by those artists, including U2, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, and Dire Straits, and the limitations of the musical selection illustrates the city’s marginal position in international touring circuits. Prerecorded material included interviews with significant figures from the ground, including the trainer of local rugby team The Crusaders’ curtain-raising horses. Other guests were invited to speak about specific topics, including fashion, food, and religion. Interviews included local people sharing memories of working and attending occasions there like school balls, parties, weddings, and ash-scatterings, among the more high-profile sporting and musical events. The artists-as-radio-hosts reflected on the experience of living inside the Park, described the environment and surrounding area in some detail, and shared stories, histories, and observations of the space. Over days and nights, these elements were held together by sleep-deprived on-air “decay,” or “transcendence” described by one host around 2 a.m. on the first night shift (SB4: 2-31-08), as late night conversations veered away from the subject of the stadium to the experience of the broadcast performance and interpersonal proximity. Paddy Scannell (2014) observes that “the demonic problem of live speech-act-events on radio and television is the ever present possibility of their breakdown, either through technical error or human performance failure” (p. 98). In this context, “human performance failure” was structured into the art-media event, so that the way in which live speech acts broke down was as integral to the overall experience as the audience participation and archival recordings.

Lancaster Park

Lancaster Park itself reflects the development of Christchurch City from wetland to contemporary sprawling sub/urban environment, to a damaged space overgrown with weeds and mired in uncertainty and insurance negotiations. Like much of the city, it was swampy land when European settlers arrived to establish a preplanned town, and the future park was sold as a rural section on the edge of the original urban boundary. In 1880, the land was bought by local sporting organizations and developed as a ground for cricket, tennis, bowls, athletics, and rugby (Slatter, 1974). Once the swamp was drained, it could be watered by an artesian well, and the area was described by a visitor from the parched turf of Australia in 1881 as

the finest cricket ground I have ever trod on or gazed upon [. . . with] its wondrous dead level, its thick and brilliantly coloured grasses, the velvety looking terraces, all forming a picture most rare and refreshing. [. . .] as pleasing a spot for cricket as it is possible to conceive. (Lancaster Park, 1881)

Over the decades, Lancaster Park became increasingly built up and reduced to a single playing space and the stand-encircled stadium form. Immediately after the earthquake, the major concern was whether it could be repaired quickly enough to host scheduled games in the 2011 Rugby World Cup. “Secrecy” over the extent of damage to the buildings and field was reported in local newspaper The Press within weeks (Greenhill, 2011). Whether the stadium could be repaired, and whether it should be replaced, was an ongoing theme of discussion in The Press over the course of 2011, and in 2012, after a new temporary stadium was built in a different suburb, the Central City Recovery Plan located a permanent covered stadium within the central city. That plan was hugely controversial, and the future of the stadium structure was only finalized in March 2017, when the cost of “re-commissioning Lancaster Park as a venue capable to holding top international rugby tests” was deemed so great that the stadium is to be deconstructed, while future use of the ground beneath it remains unresolved (Christchurch City Council, 2017). In 2014, however, the Stadium Broadcast was situated in the midst of a debate about the future of the old stadium, the temporary stadium, and the proposed stadium.

Because the public had been unable to go into the space of the stadium after February 22, 2011, the artists’ and visitors’ accounts of being in the stadium were the most public articulations of its visible condition since that earthquake. The broadcast started with a description of the state of the field itself, and information that listeners familiar with the layout and naming of sponsored spectator stands could have been used to locate the speakers within the area of the park. The introduction was structured like a cricket commentary, shifting between a slow methodical descriptive style, and statements that combined observation and opinion:

In keeping with the context, the 72-hour radio broadcast carried echoes of test match cricket commentary style, fulfilling the basic function of radio cricket, in which the absence of imagery means that “the commentator is central to the creation of the imaginary scene. [. . .]. On radio, we are not simply listening to a game, we are listening to a commentator’s experience of a game” (Tolson, 2006, p. 106). Commentary was explicitly referenced on the Sunday afternoon of the broadcast, when one host remarked that “We’re a couple of guys sitting in a van . . . but we almost feel like we could be cricket commentators,” and the other replied “I love the idea of cricket commentators, the durational aspect of it” (SB13: 00-17-47).

The undulating field was an ongoing topic of observation through the broadcast, including observations such as “I just can’t imagine that this was once the beautiful field it once was. It’s actually quite gut wrenching to see it in its present state” (SB7: 00-13-00) and “Just looking out there now, it just about brings a tear to your eye” (SB13: 02-47-39). Structural aspects of the stadium remain more obscured from view, leading to speculation about what has happened beneath the surface, including the rumors of an empty void meters below the built ground itself. An insight from the moment of the earthquake was offered by one visitor who was nearby at the time: “I can’t remember if I saw it moving that much, but there was dust and that coming out, out of the concrete walls” of the stadium structure (SB2: 01-42-00), reinforcing the difficulty of seeing tangible damage, while being unable to know for certain what the dust means. Further live interviews enabled a deeper reflection on the current, past, and future state of the ground. Liv Worsnop from The Plant Gang, a group dedicated to creating “botanical gestures” in postquake Christchurch, described the variety of plants growing where the playing turf once was, noting medicinal and culinary uses for chamomile, yarrow, plantain, and mullein. The host observed that this new knowledge

changes the way that I look at the field, which is really interesting. Because I no longer see it as a wrecked field, I see it as a, and this is going to sound really corny, but as a field of possibility.

Worsnop replied, “And that’s exactly what it is! . . . it’s a bloody field of possibility, but then they’ve mowed it” (SB13: 01-33-20). The playing surface of the stadium is going through a completely natural transition, despite being thwarted occasionally by mowing, with the possibility of developing as a wild space of food and medicinal plants.

The Stadium Broadcast was inherently engaged with the process of transition, by questioning what was there before, how people engaged with and used the space, and what its future might be. This lies at the core of the project, as articulated by two of the hosts when asked by a visitor why they were there:

Discussion with visitors sharing memories of Lancaster Park included reflection on the value of the temporary stadium, which many appreciated for the way it brings spectators in close to the field. For the most part, participants expressed a desire for a new stadium, if Lancaster Park should prove to be too damaged to repair. However, even very strong and long-term fans of Canterbury rugby and Lancaster Park observed that it should not be a priority until houses and roads are fixed (e.g., SB7: 02-42-00). At the same time, the long histories of the space that were evoked are a reminder of the stadium’s many past transitions.

Auditory, Acoustic, Radio, City Space

By opening the gates and inviting people to walk on the field, The Stadium Broadcast reintegrated Lancaster Park into the physical space of the city. Outside the stadium, for most listeners, live and later, the broadcast was most likely heard through the web stream, however it was the low-powered FM transmission that electromagnetically covered much of the central city. All sound distribution mechanisms displace signals from their original source to the listener, in a process soundscape theorist R. Murray Schaeffer described as “schizophonic” (1994, p. 88). Schaeffer frames this displacement as part of modern technology’s erasure of environmental sound, however translating the very localized sounds of Lancaster Park across the city and the internet created a distributed auditory space that drew attention to the Park environment. The broadcast expanded the sound of inside-the-stadium to the space outside-the-stadium. It created an auditory space “outside” filled with speech about and in the park, the ambient sounds around the studio caravan, and the temporally shifted sounds of the park over time.

A live broadcast event creates a sense for the audience of being in two places at once: where they are and the space of the broadcast. This is a doubling described by Paddy Scannell (2014) in the live coverage of news events that interrupt broadcast television and radio flows (pp. 191-24). He observes that “Public events now occur, simultaneously, in two different places: the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard” (quoted in Moores, 2004, p. 21), and Moores argues that this “doubling of place” is “bound up more generally with ‘the liveness of radio and television’ that is also part of broadcasting’s dailiness” (2012, p. 16). The liveness of the stadium broadcast was more akin to the dailiness of broadcasting than the catastrophe-based event television Scannell focuses on, although it was responding to the aftermath of catastrophe. The public media event of the stadium broadcast occurred simultaneously in the stadium and in the places in which people listened to it. More than that, the broadcast event occurred, simultaneously, in two different place-times: the place of the event itself at the same time, and the place of the event itself in a previous time—for example, during the 1963 royal visit, the 1989 U2 concert, the 2006 run-score of cricketer Nathan Astle. Some listeners may have been able to hear themselves, identifiably or not, in the crowd noise of archival recordings, adding another layer to the multiplicity of place and time.

A stadium broadcast listener walking with a radio inside the transmission signal, in the city, would have been immersed in an auditory geography of the present and the multiple pasts of Lancaster Park. This listener may be imaginary, but the radio waves from the transmitter describe a shape in space that loosely traces the stadium into the area of the central city, inscribing the stadium into the fabric of buildings and spaces. The sound of a radio within that space tuned to 107FM would in turn trace a smaller stadium space around itself. The imaginary listener would experience the space and temporal multiplicity of the stadium overlaid on the live sounds of the city immediately around them, in an immersive plurality of sound (Rodaway, 1994). Low-powered transmission waves, however, cannot create a complete and whole space across the city, and at the edges, the signal will fade in and out of reach. Because the transmission antenna was located away from the stadium itself, more centrally in the city, locations closer to the stadium were on the edge of the broadcast signal. On the outskirts of the signal, the stadium broadcast was audible through the hiss, but only with very close concentration, echoing the variability of acoustic emissions from the stadium itself before the earthquake. Significant moments could be interpreted from the roar of a crowd, depending on listener location, wind direction, spectator numbers, and the intensity of the moment. The radio signal evoked that sense of being within audible range of a stadium, and in doing so, it emphasised the absence of that sound.

Memory

The stadium broadcast was a project built from memory, in which the abandoned stadium was created, fleetingly, by people standing in that space and reconstructing it in words. In the memories shared on air, moments of great personal and national significance were recounted over the wreckage of the ground, the abandoned stands, and their uncertain future. Many visitors and radio guests expressed gratitude at being given the chance to revisit the space and their own memories. A visitor on the first day of broadcast also recognized the experience as a new memory of the space:

What you guys are doing is amazing, especially for someone like me who’s got such a connection to the place. I can bring the kids down here and get a photo of them on it and it can go in the memory bank. . . . Well done guys, I really appreciate what you’re doing (SB2: 03-29-00).

For those participants who visited the stadium and walked the field before telling their stories, the memories became multilayered, containing the past, present, and future of the stadium. Their accounts often carry traces of emotion (McHugh, 2012), a strain resonating from shock and grief for the city as a whole and that space in particular. In content that directly referred to the prequake past, sounds, stories, and voices of the now-lost city aurally reconstituted the ghosts of the past, layering sounds and memories of the old city into the sound space of the transitional city.

In November 2014, the stadium still stood as its own monument. However, the physical structure was an empty, damaged, version of itself. In contrast, the narration of the stadium by the radio hosts and visitors created a space filled with people and life. In relation to the physical structure, the Stadium Broadcast functioned as a “counter-monument” (Kanouse, 2011, p. 202). The multiplicity of memories recounted included shared experiences of living near it, attending events, or participating in significant moments, but there is no single unifying historical meaning. The whole broadcast performed “the contingency and instability that is characteristic of all acts of memory” (p. 202), as participants performed a range of memory acts—in some cases, recounting events in great detail, and naming the dates and circumstances of multiple significant personal moments. Others struggled with specifics but recalled the overall tone and atmosphere over multiple occasions.

Conclusion

Since the September 2010 earthquake, Christchurch has lost a significant number of buildings from the central city area, and the stadium at Lancaster Park was scheduled for deconstruction in 2017. The Stadium Broadcast created a space to reflect on the role of Lancaster Park in the social and cultural fabric of the city. Its long form radio format facilitated reminiscences from members of the public who would not usually have an opportunity to speak freely on the radio. From one visitor to the next, over the course of the weekend, the conversation ranged widely not only across the history of the Park, including significant sporting and cultural moments, but also more everyday experiences of life in and around the city and the sports ground. As a radio show, The Stadium Broadcast provided a focus on place at odds with the nationally networked placelessness of New Zealand’s commercial radio market. As sound content, the broadcast restored life and stories to a space that was formerly defined by the noise of competition and crowds, but was silenced on February 22, 2011. With a tight focus on the current state of the ground and its stands, the broadcasters opened it up to a broader potential public than those who were able to physically visit it. Listening to the broadcast meant hearing the space of the ground; the undulations of the field, and its wild plants, bees, and birds; and multiple histories of past life in the space overlaid on the surroundings of the listener. The past and present of the stadium were recreated in two places at once: in a caravan within the stadium, and in the place where people listened. Many may have been listening to the web stream far away from Christchurch, but a low-power FM transmission propagated across the central city, tracing out a space in radio waves within which the stadium was reconstructed, and could be encountered through a radio antenna. Across radio space, the stadium was schizophonically redistributed, filling the empty space of the demolished city with memories of some of its past lives. This was a radio memorial, not just to the physical structures around major sporting encounters but also to the prequake city, and its many physical, social, and economic transformations since 1880.