During the glory days of radio drama in the 40s and 50s, the ABC and commercial entertainment companies were cranking out hundreds of episodes every week — feeding an audience, from Australia and beyond, all glued to the wireless to get their fix of serials like Dad and Dave or The Lawsons.
But the advent of TV put a dent in this golden age, and although radio drama was broadcast regularly on the ABC in the subsequent decades, the 2000s saw it decline — culminating with the ABC axing its radio drama show in 2013.
Cut to 2020, and audio fiction is enjoying a renaissance.
Homecoming — American indie podcast studio Gimlet's first foray in audio fiction — marked a key turning point, attracting the voices of big-name talents like Oscar Isaac, David Schwimmer and Catherine Keener; it was subsequently adapted into a critically-acclaimed Amazon Prime series starring Julia Roberts.
Amazon's Audible, having already cornered the market on audiobooks, has started producing scripted audio fiction, releasing their first Australian content last year, including works by a major playwright (Louis Nowra's The Goodbye Party) and best-selling novelists (like Nikki Gemmell's The Invisible Women's Society).
And weekly radio drama has returned to the ABC, with a new radio program and podcast: Radio National Fictions.
"In the last six months there's been a massive increase in audio fiction in Australia," says Erin Kyan, the co-creator of Australia's first LGBT audio drama, Love and Luck.
"Which means that most of it has been in production for much longer — but it's just popping off at the moment."
Just like streaming has irrevocably changed TV, podcasting has transformed radio.
The biggest podcasts are still non-fiction (whether it's Serial, Radiolab or The Joe Rogan Experience) but as funding and air time for radio drama has declined, audio fiction podcasts have been gaining momentum.
"I think audio fiction has been bubbling away and very slowly growing with independent creators," says US podcast critic Elena Fernandez Collins.
Fernandez Collins says a key release that spurred on other indie creators was American podcast Welcome to Night Vale, in 2012.
Using the form of a radio show to explore the spooky happenings in a small fictional town, the podcast became a pop culture phenomenon and spawned two best-selling novels.
Another critical title in the form's evolution is Limetown (2015-2018), about the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of people from an American research facility.
Limetown is now a novel and a Facebook Watch series starring Jessica Biel.
There are many other fiction podcasts from around the world that have pushed the form into new directions (and the BBC has continually produced radio drama) but Fiona Pepper, presenter of RN Fictions, told The Stage Show that audio fiction has potentially had a bump from the monumental success of serialised podcasts Serial and S-Town.
"Audiences have become obsessed and interested in listening intently to stories and becoming attached to characters and locations," Pepper says.
"I can't really afford to go to the theatre or to gigs or to movies and most audio fiction series are free," says Nathania Gilson, a Melbourne writer and podcast reviewer for The Big Issue.

One of Gilson's favourite fiction podcasts is Alice Isn't Dead (produced by the Welcome to Night Vale team), which uses audio diaries to tell the story of a truck driver looking for her missing wife.
"When the main character is talking, it feels like she's just talking to you, not the audience; it's kind of like you're in on a secret," Gilson says.
The accessibility of the form also appeals to Lauren Gunderson, America's most produced living playwright.
Audible commissioned Gunderson to write a play for both the stage and your ears, and last year The Half-Life of Marie Curie opened off-Broadway and was simultaneously released as an audio drama.
"I grew up in a place that didn't have a tonne of theatre and I didn't go to New York until I was much older, and so the idea of having new plays that are on New York stages in my headphones would have been transforming for me," Gunderson told RN's The Stage Show.
US podcast critic Elena Fernandez Collins says the resurgence of audio fiction has had a positive impact on queer representation.
"Fiction audio is easily some of the queerest fiction I've ever seen, which honestly carries so much weight in a time where queer-baiting on screen is considered 'queer representation'," Fernandez Collins says.
This on-air representation is driven by the behind-the-scenes creatives who aren't hampered by the gatekeepers of the publishing, TV or film industry.
"With podcasts, you don't have to get a publisher to okay what you want to write, you don't have to get a studio to approve your script … I can make this and nobody has to say 'yes' to me making it," says Fernandez Collins.
The result is fiction podcasts like "weird-west audio adventure" Caravan, written by Tau Zaman and centred around a queer protagonist of South Asian heritage — and Love and Luck, a queer love story told entirely in voicemails.
The ABC's place for creative audio fiction from Australia's best writers and emerging creators.
Love and Luck is made by Erin Kyan, a self-described "fat, queer, disabled, trans man", and his partner Lee Davis-Thalbourne, both based in Melbourne.
It launched in 2017 and has now surpassed 400,000 downloads.
Kyan says that the relatively low cost of producing podcasts has been a boon for marginalised media-makers; for the second season of Love and Luck, he and Davis-Thalbourne made 52 episodes on a budget of approximately $5,000-$6,000 and paid everyone involved.
 We're so accustomed to being just 1 per cent of the media, so if we're more than that, we think we're a lot".
He also points out that audio fiction "is still very white".
"There are 10,000 tiny reasons why [audio fiction has taken off again] but I think that the indie fiction sphere has gotten big enough that the people with money noticed," Kyan says.
In 2019, Audible Australia launched its first Audible Originals, including fiction— for example, Mark Humphries' media satire Riot Act — and has plans to expand this area in 2020, including releasing an audio season of cult Australian TV series Danger 5.
Ben Naparstek, director of content for Audible Australia, sees their offerings as "essentially binge-worthy TV series for the ears".
Another release on Audible's slate is the scripted sci-fi project Beyond Strange Lands, which is part of a two-project partnership with Screen Queensland that Naparstek says "will help incubate talent and ideas from the film and TV world".
Using audio fiction as a proof-of-concept for screen projects is something other state screen agencies and production companies are also exploring.
"State of the art sound design is one of the beauties of audio fiction … You can evoke, in a very immersive way, a distant world or landscape using premium sound design in a way that would often be prohibitively expensive on TV," Naparstek says.
"It's hard to break into screenwriting, and the trajectory used to be web-drama — but that's waned and now an increasing number of screen ideas begin with a podcast idea," says Pieter Aquilia, the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) head of screenwriting.
In recognition of the resurgence of audio fiction, teachers from the radio and screen courses of AFTRS in Sydney are collaborating to better teach this form to their students.
"Students were asking for it … they wanted more opportunities to play in that space," says AFTRS' head of radio, Fyona Smith.
Kyan, who has led the way in audio fiction in this country, isn't concerned by the form going mainstream.
"Audio fiction doesn't have the same sort of competitiveness as other podcasts — if someone listens to one, they are more likely to listen to another," Kyan says.
"All I ever wanted was more people to start thinking about audio fiction and treating it as a real thing — and that's actually happening now."
