One of the founders of Radio 2RPH, Barbara Blackman AO died in Canberra on 4 October 2024 surrounded by family and close friends, at the age of 95 years.

Barbara was a writer, poet and artist’s model, with a lifelong passion for music.

In her early twenties she was diagnosed with a degenerative condition leaving her legally blind. After a period of despair, Barbara worked through the depression to reconcile with blindness, which she later described as a ‘gift’ and a ‘different kind of seeing.’

Picture of Barbara Blackcman taken by Rohan Thomson

She was married to the famed Australian painter Charles Blackman for 27 years, with a second marriage to French philosopher Marcel Veldhoven.

Fifty years ago, in a key turning point for broadcasting in Australia, the Whitlam government issued the first licenses for community broadcasting, opening up the use of radio for a myriad of new purposes. Always the activist, Barbara saw an opportunity.

Professor Neil Runcie was Chair of Australia’s first FM radio station and the second community radio licensee: the classical music station 2MBS-FM in Sydney. Barbara approached Neil with the idea of using radio as a way of giving people who were blind or with vision impairment access to published material – newspapers, books and magazines.

Runcie took up the challenge, researched similar stations that had emerged in the US, and started a community-based lobbying campaign for what was then called ‘radio for the print-handicapped’.

Barbara Blackman, together with Professor Runcie, Elizabeth and Sam Gillis, Joan Lederman, Professor Ron Postle and others, formed the Board of The Sydney Radio Foundation for the Print-Handicapped, which vigorously agitated for the establishment of Radio 2RPH. Their efforts succeeded with the launch of 2RPH broadcasting radio reading services in 1983.

Barbara Blackman was an extraordinary, talented person of enormous drive and energy, surviving great challenges in her life to leave a wonderful literary legacy and having been instrumental in achieving on-going services of critical importance to people living with disability.