Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Tuesday October 27th
Mark - Breakfast EP: …
When I came into the foyer of the ABC early yesterday morning, I saw a big display to mark Radio Australia’s 70th birthday.
It made me feel rather mortal, as I was working at Radio Australia when it had its 50th birthday celebrations back in 1989.
For those who don’t know, Radio Australia is the ABC’s overseas service.
Bizarrely, it’s one of the success stories of Australian broadcasting that’s better known overseas than at home.
You may have heard us play a short montage during our programs on ABC NewsRadio this week with tributes to “RA”, as it’s affectionately known, from former PNG Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, Solomon Islands PM Dr. Derek Sikua, and Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.
“It’s a great part of the ABC and it’s a great face and a great voice of Australia offshore”, says Mr. Smith.
It all started in 1939, as the Menzies Government’s own wartime propaganda mouthpiece “Australia Calling” (at one stage it was shared between the Department of Information and the Orwellian-named Psychological Warfare Section) … but was soon taken over by the ABC and quickly established a reputation for independence, accuracy and unparalleled coverage of the Asia-Pacific region.
Often that fearlessly independent coverage of events got the ABC and the Australian government into hot water.
Authoritarian governments, like the Suharto regime, didn’t appreciate RA broadcasting unsanitised and independent news back into Indonesia in Bahasa…or English, for that matter.
It was one of the reasons the ABC wasn’t allowed to base a correspondent in Jakarta for a decade.
When I was at RA in the late ‘80s, we were still mainly broadcasting via the short-wave technology that had been around since the First World War.
One of the most listened-to programs then was the “Propagation Report” — to the uninitiated listener a strange 5-minute listing of solar activity.
In fact, the number and severity of solar flares on the sun had a direct impact on the quality of RA’s short-wave signal around the world.
It meant footy-starved expats in Europe wouldn’t be able to listen to the news or hear Collingwood versus Carlton at the MCG — like I once did on a bus in France.
Now, as well as short-wave, RA broadcasts through a number of local relays, FM transmitters and cable providers in major Asian and Pacific cities.
It was also one of the first radio stations in the world to take internet broadcasting seriously.
There’s no hard and fast numbers of listeners, but here are some pretty impressive figures.
A five-country survey in the Pacific last year showed that 10-15% of the available radio audience listened to RA at least once a week.
In Vanuatu, where a lot of RA material is re-packaged for local radio, that figure is a stunning 58%.
It’s estimated about 2 million people listen to RA in Indonesia every week.
And when RA started broadcasting English lessons on-air about 20 years ago, they were getting hundreds of thousands of letters every year — particularly from China and Indonesia — asking for the free reading material that came with course.
Audience survey experts have estimated that for every letter received, there’s between 20 and 50 more listeners who either couldn’t be bothered or in many cases can’t afford to send letters to request more information.
It’s an amazing achievement in terms of audience reach for a small unit of the ABC in Melbourne that’s been giving the world an Australian perspective for 70 years.
