This is an excerpt from the Rural Bank of NSW’s Agricultural Magazine of the Air , which ran on 17 New South Wales commercial stations in 1939 and was still on air in the 1950s.

The program actively promoted ideas of progressive farming by sending Australian farmers to the USA and approaching the BBC for talks on new approaches to agriculture overseas.

This is an excerpt from an episode that promoted play reading as a leisure activity for rural families.

It can hardly have been by chance that the play used as an example in this program was Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), a searing social commentary in which a town turns against the local doctor when he attempts to reveal how polluted its popular spring water has become.

The narrator of the radio program used the message of the play to urge that change be accepted by rural Australians, as can be heard in this clip.