“I was instantly hooked on radio…” Tim Bowden told the ASRA Conference.
“There may be a new golden age of radio just around the corner,” said Theo van Leeuwen, opening the ASRA Conference today.
The Australian Sound Recordists Association’s theme is Radio Waves : 90 Years of Radio Broadcasting in Australia, looking forward as well as back, across the three days of the conference.
You can listen live to the Conference audio stream at this link.
This morning’s keynote speaker, Tim Bowden, opened the conference with tales of his first recordings, done on a wind up tape recorder. The former newspaper reporter told the conference about his first radio interview: “I was instantly hooked on radio, how many words would I have had to write to capture all that irony, humour and humanity in print. I was a believer in the unique power of radio to create pictures in the mind.”
75 year old Bowden recounted his days as a radio correspondent in London, and replayed his recording of Dame Edna Everidge’s first satirical segment on the BBC. Bowden was a war correspondent in Vietnam and a pioneer of many new formats on ABC radio and tv. He pioneered current affairs reporting as a correspondent in Singapore in the face of fierce opposition from the old fashioned news department at that time. “I used a tape recorder, which was regarded as an instrument of the devil by the news department.”
Later, the ABC’s John Spence took delegates on a tour of the ABC’s 80 yeaars in his presentation from ABC Archives.
Bruce Carty told the conference that, while 2SB and 2FC are widely recognised as the first Australian stations, in fact they were the first commercial licences. But there was a non-commercial station on air before these stations went to air. In 1921 Charles McGurkin was granted the first licence for 2CM in Sydney.
2CM was broadcast on longwave 214 KHz at a power of 7 watts. The station received 2000 letters of support in its first week. Every program on the station ended with the words, “don’t forget to wind the clock and put out the cat.”
McGurkin has largely gone unrecognized in modern times for his pioneering broadcasting achievements, although at the time his achievements were acknowledged.
Ben Starr related his personal journey of discovery of Marconi’s work in an afternoon session. He is currently making a tv documentary on the life of Marconi through his recent visit to Bologna Italy. Ben passes on his passion about radio every day to his radio students at TAFE.
The day ended with a tribute to Tony Barrell’s work and a discussion of the important of his contributions to the early days of triple j and to Radio National. Tony enjoyed the anarchic style of program making at double j (later triple j), and found it difficult to go back to the structured hierachy of program making on Radio National in later years.
During that session, ABC Archivist John Spence revealed that it is getting easier to access material from ABC Archives. Some of it is now up on ABC Online’s Pool site and the potential is there to request greater access than ever before, through online platforms.
At the annual conference dinner there were three ASRA Awards presented.
Bruce Leonard received an ASRA for his work unearthing old commercial radio content and creating CDs and a series of radio programs to showcase the material.
Husband and wife team Tim and Ros Bowden were recognised for their outstanding work producing and presenting ground breaking radio social history programs such as Taim Bilong Masta.