An Address to Remember

In 1988 Murray Green, now Victorian State Director of the ABC, addressed the Annual General Meeting of WAPBA (now WACBA) in his capacity as our Association's Past President. The following transcript of that address is reproduced with Murray Green's kind permission.

As we reflect on the last year and the embryonic stages of the West Australian Public Broadcasting Association, I think without getting involved in accolades, one cannot but be somewhat impressed by the extent of achievements in the relatively short period of time.

When we think about the development of Public Radio in this state, now some 12 years down the track - when the first public station went to air in October 1976 a fellow commercial station chided on air, on their frequency, that this experiment in amateur excesses would not last and that the NR on 6NR's frequency stood for "no ratings", and that amateurs couldn't run a radio station - that was the province of professionals and there was a sense in which that unless you'd been trained, unless you had a well modulated voice, unless you were part of the rather remote and indeed elite circle of radio broadcasters you had no right to even stand behind a microphone let alone breathe and talk into it!

That perception of what broadcasting was all about was shattered by the entry of stations like 6NR and 6UVS in 1976 and '77 on to the Perth airwaves. There were stumbles, there were gaps on air, there were records played at the wrong speed but while one can remember the rather horrific anecdotes that form part of that early broadcasting history and indeed one might even add broadcasting mythology, now there's a sense in which the ordinary person, the person next door, the person who had no aspirations for media achievement or media notoriety, had the ability to come and express and share their perceptions of what life in Australia was all about, and in particular what life in Perth was all about and to be seen to be a bona fide broadcaster.

Now I think that's something that public radio not only in Perth but right throughout Australia has done. It has made respectable (and I use that word in the best sense) the Australian vernacular. In other words, Australian voices of all sorts are now heard broadcasting not only in the public sector but also in the commercial and national sectors and we do hear people who don't sound as if they've lived all their life in London broadcasting on radio right across the country. And that sense of not in any way genuflecting to the broadcasting traditions of the United States or Britain has been a part of the unique contribution that public radio has made in this town and right throughout the country.

There's been absolutely phenomenal growth in terms of the number of licenses in the last 10 years. This year there will be some 85 public stations on air around Australia. And just by way of comparison, there are 134 ABC transmitters, and that's not stations but just transmitters that are turning out a signal, and about the same number of commercial stations. So in a ten year history one has seen the phenomenal growth of "radio of the people", if you like.

In a way, that has been a very quiet revolution not reported in a way that it should have been reported because all our resources were caught up with keeping the show on the road and the last thing we thought about was promoting what we were doing.