Much has been said on — and about — talk radio. It might not surprise the perspicacious reader to know that in Australia, where names are re-named or altered and shortened for convenience, talk radio is actually known as talkback radio. It is, arguably, a rare instance where a name — talk radio — has actually been lengthened. The Aussies prefer keeping things short, simple and understated.

While America may have the Rockies and Europe may have the Alps, we just have the plain and simple Snowy Mountains. Likewise, with deserts: Africa’s got the Sahara and the Kalahari; India, the Thar; China, the Gobi, Australia’s got one too — the Great Sandy Desert. But Australia’s talkback stations are as vibrant with opinion as you might encounter anywhere else in the world. It is reckoned that talkback in Australia has “historically been an important political forum and functions much like the cable news television in the United States with live and ‘saturated’ coverage of political issues”, to quote Wikipedia.

Talkback, for all its talk, has its backers and its critics. As the American educator, filmmaker and author, Jackson Katz, is credited with saying, “If journalism is the first draft of history, then talk radio provides an early glimpse into how the meaning of political events will be spun for ideological and partisan purposes.”

And the late Donella Meadows, pioneering environmentalist, scientist and teacher, had this to add: “What I hear every day on talkback is America’s lack of education — and I don’t mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesising the small truths possessed by each of us.” What I heard the other day, however, on talkback in Australia, caused me to pause and rethink. I’ve been one of its critics too. I’ve shuddered at times at the vitriol that can be offloaded, in this age of outrage. But, as I said, just the other day, an elderly man, a senior citizen, called in to say that he’d just been attacked and his wallet stolen. It wasn’t a wafer-light wallet, too, like mine. It happened to contain $1,500 (Dh4,056).

As it turned out, this apparently was all that the man possessed. He’d just withdrawn the sum from a bank or something. My early scepticism that he may be a scam artist didn’t really take hold because I felt it was exceedingly difficult to ‘act’ the panic and the shaken-toned anxiety in his voice. It would have taken a professional actor to sound like he was, on the brink of tears.

In a broken voice, he wondered if talkback could help use their sources to trace the thief and perhaps rescue the wallet before it was emptied. Within minutes of this brief phone call, the radio station’s switchboard went ‘hot’. Calls started coming in from people who were not merely irate at what had happened. They wanted to help. So a special line was set up to attempt to raise the said sum within a specified time. The entire exercise didn’t take long.

Strangers from all corners of the city called in to offer whatever they could, a small sum of five dollars, a bigger amount of $100 dollars and so on. When the tally had reached $1,300, just two hundred dollars short of the target amount, another call came in, from a person who claimed he was a baker by profession. He wanted to donate a thousand dollars! “But that would take us way over the amount that the gentleman lost, just limit it to two hundred dollars,” said the radio host. It didn’t put the baker off. He insisted and had his thousand dollars accepted.

The lost-wallet man ended up getting a lot more than what he had lost and it must be added that the public response — the generosity of strangers — left him a blubbering, speechless mess. I, meanwhile, am re-evaluating my rather rigid opinion of talkback.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.