Beyond the Crystal Set

An interesting history of the early days of Australian radio is provided by Dr Jeff Langdon in a lecture that he gave in 1995 to the Australian Centre for Moving Images in Melbourne. This history is a truncated version of the lecture given by Dr Langdon.

In 1916 David Sarnoff of the Marconi Company in USA was one of the first to see radio as a potential medium for communication from one point to many ( broadcasting ) and for entertainment and information as well as communication.

First Steps towards Broadcasting

By just after the end of Wrrld War I there were hundreds of amateur broadcasters using the radio telephony medium to broadcast. In Australia there were 900 such amateur users of the new invention. Most of these operations were very tentative affairs – single operators transmitting recordings and talking. The first “broadcast” in Australia was organised by George Fisk of AWA on 19th August 1919 where he arranged for the National Anthem to be broadcast from one building to another at the end of a lecture he’d given on the new medium to the Royal Society of NSW.

The Sealed Set Scheme

The radio manufacturing industry in Australia, led by George Fisk of AWA, lobbied the Government for the introduction of radio broadcasting in these early years. In May 1923 the Government finally called a conference of the main players. This led to the sealed set regulations where stations could be licensed to broadcast and then sell sets to ‘listeners-in’. The receiving device would be set to receive only that station. 2FC in Sydney was the first to be licensed on 1 July 1923 but its opponent 2SB ( later to be called 2BL ) was first to go to air officially starting on 23 November that year. 3AR and 3LO went to air on 26 January and 13 October 1924 in Melbourne.

However the sealed set scheme wasn’t taken to by listeners, only 1400 people took out sealed set licences in the first 6 months of 1924. It was quite easy to avoid the licence fee by building your own set or modifying one you’d bought to receive more than one station.

A and B Licences

The industry realized it had shot itself in the foot with the sealed set scheme. It lobbied the Government to introduce a two tiered system, the ‘A’ licences to be largely financed by listeners’ licence fees imposed and collected by the Government and ‘B’ class licences to be offered to anyone else who wanted to have a go. The B stations would have to generate their own revenue through advertising. A class stations could advertise too but few did.

By July 1924 the Government accepted this compromise proposal. This system was an amalgam of the British system where the non-commercial BBC had a government-imposed monopoly and the USA where the free market was the driving force. ( The first radio advertisement was on WEAF in New York in February 1922. A ten minute talk by the advertiser cost him $50 and recouped $27,000 in sales! ).

The ‘A’ class stations were the original sealed set stations plus one in each other State capital city – 2BL, 2FC, 3AR, 3LO, 7ZL in Hobart, 5CL in Adelaide, and 6WF in Perth. By the end of 1924 the number of listener licences was close to 40,000. It doubled to 80,000 by the end of 1925. The two tier system was working.The first ‘B’ class station on air was 2BE in November 1924. It went bust in 1929. So the oldest surviving ‘B’ class (commercial) station is 2UE which went on air on Australia Day 1925. South Australia’s first stations were 5CL ( A ) – 20th November 1924 and 5DN ( B ) – 24th February 1925.

When the British Government nationalized radio in 1926 by buying out the British Broadcasting Company and forming the British Broadcasting Corporation the Australian Government held a Royal Commission into Wireless. The Government didn’t immediately follow the British lead but did encourage the ‘A’ class stations to amalgamate in order to maximise efficiencies and maintain standards.

The Australian Broadcasting Company

In 1929 the Government did nationalize the transmission facilities and contracted the provision of programming to the Australian Broadcasting Company a consortium of entertainment interests. This company was nationalised in 1932 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission Act.

So in 1932 the two tier system was finalised; the national broadcaster, the ABC, with 12 stations and the commercial sector ( with 43 stations ).

Frequency Modulation – Not!

In the USA Edwin Armstrong had invented FM broadcasting, a much superior medium in the early thirties. It was higher in fidelity, could broadcast in stereo and wasn’t subject to electrical interference like the AM system.

In Australia experimental FM broadcasts were commenced in 1948. However after an Inquiry into FM in 1957, where little interest was shown, the Government authorised the use of the international VHF FM band for television in 1961. This remains a peculiarity of the Australian broadcasting space and a problem both for the continuing maintenance and operation of TV transmitters operating in this band and for listeners resident in these areas that suffer a lack of FM radio services.

The Golden Years of Radio

By the early 1940s the Australian radio broadcasting scene was established. There were about 130 commercial stations and a roughly equivalent number of ABC stations. The ABC had national commitments including news, education, parliamentary broadcasting, culture ( including five full orchestras ). The commercial stations were much more local and community-orientated in nature. Their programming was responsive to the local community (see later).

The forties and fifties were the golden years of radio. The regulatory body, the Australian Broadcasting Control Board, created in 1948, had been saying that there was no room for new stations on the AM band and FM had been given to television, so effectively no new competition came onto the scene.

Pressure for Change

In 1961 the experimental FM stations were closed down as the VHF band had been allocated to television. This led Dr. Neil Runcie in Sydney to form the Listener’s Society of NSW which had as its major objective the establishment of subscriber-supported FM fine music stations. In the same year the University of NSW was given a licence under the Wireless and Telegraphy Act to broadcast lectures over a non-broadcast frequency VL-2UV.

These were two of the progenitors of a movement to provide more diversity in Australia’s radio broadcasting. Ultimately this movement led to the establishment of the third tier of broadcasting in Australia, the public or community sector.

Community Broadcasting 

To understand the genesis of this movement it’s necessary to look at Australia in the 1960s.

There was dissatisfaction with the Government in not introducing the quality of FM broadcasting. This emanated mainly from people who wanted fine music on the airwaves.

Secondly there were some Universities lobbying to be allowed to broadcast educational material ( VL-2UV was already on-air but not on the broadcast band ). This group was largely motivated by the Open University experience in the UK and the educational stations in the USA.

The third prong of this movement came from Australia’s ethnic communities. Australia had undertaken the biggest program of immigration in the world after the Second World War. The country’s population had almost doubled in 20 years. By the late sixties this large group of immigrants, many of them from non-English speaking backgrounds, was reaching political maturity. Ethnic leaders were critical of Australia’s media which was then almost totally white anglo-saxon.

The radio industry was particularly bad in this respect. The ABC was very much caste in the BBC mould. The commercial sector was discovering the advantages of format programming and was slavishly following the youth generation programming developments of the American industry. Pop culture was just being invented.

So the ethnic communities were pushing for more access to the airwaves.

The fourth group seeking change to the status quo was the politically active generation of the ‘Vietnam’ sixties. The desire for a more open media was exemplified by the draft resistors in Melbourne and Sydney that each mounted pirate broadcasts in the late sixties. In Brisbane too the limp response to the Springbok rugby tour demonstrations in 1971 by the mainstream media led students to look at forming their own radio station ( ultimately 4ZZZ).

FM Again

The Australian Broadcasting Control Board held another inquiry into the introduction of FM broadcasting in 1971/72. This eventually recommended the introduction of FM but on the UHF band rather than the internationally used VHF band. Significantly the inquiry also recommended the introduction of public access broadcasting. The then Liberal Government accepted this report in October 1972 but was evicted from power with the ascent of the Whitlam Labor Government on 3 December that year.

The commercial sector ( as in 1957 ) wasn’t interested in spending a lot of money on retooling for FM and it fought its introduction. So when FM was introduced at the same time as the introduction of public ( community ) broadcasting in 1972-75 it was ironic and perhaps fitting that the Labor Government prohibited the commercial stations from access to the new medium. The first use of FM in Australia was for public broadcasting – 2MBS and 3MBS – the fine music stations. The ABC entered the medium in 1976 with the establishment of ABC-FM based in Adelaide.

FM was eventually introduced on the VHF band – the internationally recognised FM band – rather than the UHF band as recommended by the Australian Broadcasting Control Board in 1972. This was a victory of common sense over technological ludditism. The ABCB had been in the pocket of the manufacturing industry which wanted to introduce FM on UHF. They would then be able to sell sets that were only usable in Australia. To this day we are still slowly removing television stations from the VHF band ( Channels 3, 4, 5, 5A ) to allow the full implementation of FM broadcasting in Australia.