A true pioneer of Australian radio, Bryon Quigley passed away on Sunday morning at the Blue Mountains District Hospital. The funeral is on Thursday 2 December, 2pm at Leura Memorial Gardens.

He was a man with Radio pumping through his veins having worked at 2GB, the ABC, the BBC and then starting the full time radio program at AFTRS.  He was also responsible for training indigenous broadcasters both in Australia and the South Pacific.

So much was Radio in his genes that his surviving daughter Katya Quigley presents mornings at ABC Mid North Coast.

Below is piece sent by her and written by a colleague Tom Hogan. 

I knew Bryon Quigley for more than a quarter of a century. We first met at the old Film and Television School in 1984. Bryon was Head of the Open Program and was soon to become the founder of the Radio Division of the School. The School changed its name to reflect the addition.

Bryon’s background in professional radio covered the entire spectrum of news, current affairs, features, documentary and the arts, with a special emphasis on music. His experience included not just ABC radio but SBS television and a generous contribution to community radio. He and I both worked with the BBC in London when we were somewhat younger.

As a teacher and mentor, he was naturally gifted. Students of radio, within Australia and overseas, loved his culturally sensitive, kindly, gentle and thoughtful attention to their learning needs as well as his obvious wealth of experience.

In 1985, he and I began our own version of “teaching roulette”. I was asked by Fiji’s Minister of Education to run a course in Educational Broadcasting with the help of an experienced colleague. I chose Bryon. He was somewhat amused to find the new mini-bus we’d been lent for the six-week course, held just outside Suva, was labelled SEX EDUCATION in BIG letters!

In the early 1990s, we both worked at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore as Senior Lecturers in Radio Journalism. I followed Bryon at Macleay College in Sydney teaching the same subject and he and Toni and I met again often when I returned to Singapore to head Radio Production at one of the country’s universities in the mid- 1990s.

We’ve kept in touch over the years. He was always proud of Katya’s rise and rise in the world of radio and of Toni’s own commitments to teaching and her pioneering efforts in being the first of her gender to be heard on Australian commercial radio.

How to sum him up? It’s difficult but here goes. He was a man of remarkable intellect and compassion, of integrity and honesty, of an encyclopaedic knowledge of classical music with a collection to match, the possessor of a unique and pleasant voice, a great story-teller and conversationalist, a self-effacing gentleman with a wry sense of humour who could be tough when the situation demanded, a teacher and highly- prized mentor of those in search of learning, a man who faced his declining health over many years with stoicism, a good friend and colleague who, in my experience, never spoke ill of anyone.

You can’t ask much more of any man than that. Rest in peace, my friend.

Tom Hogan