Speaking Animals, Talking Books: From Radio Play to Digital Download

Ruth Park’s The Muddleheaded Wombat is widely known today through the illustrated children’s books first published in the 1960s. Wombat first reached Australian children as a broadcast voice in a long-running ABC radio series within the Children’s Session. Written by Park and performed by a changing cast, the series ran for more than 3,000 episodes between 1952 and 1972, with repeat broadcasts continuing into the 1980s. Of these thousands of broadcasts, only a small fraction appears to survive; fourteen episodes are now commercially available as a digital “audiobook,” assembled from recordings whose dates and provenance remain uncertain.

This paper traces The Muddleheaded Wombat from written script to radio performance and digital audiobook. I draw on Peter Szendy’s reading of reading in Powers of Reading (2025), in which he emphasises foundational scenes involving at least two figures: one who requires another to “Read!”—whether master or child—and another who reads aloud—whether slave or parent. Szendy’s relations of command and attention provide a way of hearing Park’s radio writing anew. Park’s scripts direct actors who read her words for distant listeners, while her stories comically redistribute authority among narrators and speaking animals as they alternately speak and listen.

Tracing these relations through particular scripts, recordings and ABC children’s broadcasting, I suggest that Park’s The Muddleheaded Wombat makes audible the relations of command and obedience that Szendy finds buried within reading itself. When a selection of these recordings are republished as an audiobook on Audible, those relations change again, preserving performances while obscuring the historical relations through which they were produced and heard. My paper thus offers a way of thinking theoretically about the “talking book”: as an arrangement of readers, speakers and listeners, technologies and institutions, commands and acts of attention.

Monique Rooney teaches in the English Program at the Australian National University. She researches and teaches US literature, television and new media, and Australian literature. Her books include Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), the co-edited collection Queer Objects (with Guy Davidson; Routledge, 2019), and The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Literature and Art (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming 2026). She directs ANU’s Centre for Australian Literary Cultures (CALC) and has edited Australian Humanities Review since 2008. With Millicent Weber and Fiona Morrison, she is developing the research project The Sound of Literature: A Century of Listening to Australian Writing (1923–2023). A 2023 Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, she is currently writing a biography of Ruth Park.

This seminar will be held in-person only