Bruce Carty PhD, broadcaster and author of Australian Radio History, headed to Canberra recently to a conference of the Australian Sound and Recording Association at the NFSA. There he was presented with an award for his sixty years (and still going) of research.
That history, to this point, is available free to download here.
As we head towards celebrations for ABC Sydney’s (formerly 2SB/2BL) 100th anniversary on November 23, 2023, Carty says that 2SB was the third fully licensed station in Australia, and the second to go on air, although now the oldest in continuous operation.
The first, licensed number one and launched in December 1922 in Sydney, was owned by Charles MacLurcan and given his initials, 2CM. The second license was issued to 2FC (owned by Farmer & Co) and the third to 2SB.
When 2CM closed years later the then Federal Government decided to put the 2CM call sign to rest too, in honour of MacLurcan’s contributions to Australian radio.
But what of 2FC?
It first went to air on December 5, 2023. In 1929 it was taken over by the Australian Broadcasting Company, as it was then. It was known as Radio 2 for a long time and became Radio National in 1985. So a major milestone for RN in the next month too.
There is a great deal more you can learn from Carty’s research and website. One further achievement of Carty’s from an entirely different direction is that he held for three years the Guinness World Record for the longest individual continuous broadcast on air of 121 hours on 2CCC (now Coast FM).
