Radio is often analysed in terms of its capacity to engage a vast, invisible audience in the intimacy of their own homes: distance was overcome and time contracted, so that listeners were positioned in a momentary and immersive present. Nonetheless, early radio made constant appeal to history to validate its significance. This paper seeks to draw out the contradictory geography of Australian radio’s first decades to discover the consequences for listener subjectivity of a succession of oppositions: not just spatial and temporal, but the local/metropolitan distinction which is often overshadowed in a narrative dominated by large institutions.