At the start of this year Carla Vella was appointed Managing Director of Sea and Mix FM on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. Carla had moved herself and her young family north five years earlier leaving a role as SCA Head of Radio Sales Sydney.
She joined with SEA FM’s breakfast team of Luke Forrest (Foz) and Brooke Smith notching up a year on air together, after a fair turnover for that station in the slot and just post Caroline Hutchinson, the beloved MIX FM announcer also departing after more than two decades on air alongside Mark Darin on breakfast there. Annabelle ‘A.B’ Brett replaced her with Caroline saying:
“I love listening to Mark and A.B., its a fantastic show.
A.B is a dear friend of mine, she is kind, smart and super talented. Mix FM was so lucky to hire her.”
In July, Todd Widdicombe, who had been hosting drive on Mix for 11 years with Sami Muirhead, and working alongside Sami for 19 years all up, also announced he was departing radio. His reasons were deeply personal:
“At the end of September last year, one of my brothers, Joshua, he was 41 and he took his own life, and it broke my heart. And about three weeks later, a really old friend of mine, Marty, he did the same. All we ever do is say, I missed you this time, but I’ll see you next time, then suddenly there’s no time. It’s a really personal thing, and I know that I speak to loads of people when I say this, when we lose people in our lives, My God, how hard is it when they make that choice themselves to leave you and I’m just not I’m not okay.
I just can’t keep doing the radio show every single day and giving you my best without actually stopping and going, you know what? In the unlikely event of an emergency, the oxygen masks are falling from the ceiling, and apparently, I’m meant to put mine on first.”
A couple of weeks later Sami decided to leave Drive too, saying:
“Todd, your leaving forced me to dare to imagine there may be more to life than always running so fast to keep up the juggle of work and life. I want to try being a Mum Taxi for a while, to create a safe and happy home for my autistic son, to be there for my other son’s health and devour every minute of my daughter who swears she’s leaving home in just 3 short years.
So begins a new era of calm and slower days on the horizon. And who knows what the future holds for Todd & Sami. I am waiting to do that podcast together on book reviews and talking about our feelings.”
Sami’s last day. Left to right – Sami Muirhead, Henry Bretz, Archie Arenson and Ben Erbsland
In August too Xtra Insights released survey results for the Sunshine Coast. Mix was No 1 and Sea FM two. Both had overtaken ARN’s Hot FM in every day part except evenings.
In this unpleasant time of the year in the radio world where nothing seems secure I reached out to Carla Vella because what I was seeing at Mix and Sea seemed the antithesis of that, despite a year of change, or as Carla prefers to say, ’evolution’.
The survey results were one obvious showcase of a station flourishing and in good health, but there were others, like A.B. and family on the beach sharing that she had everything she’d ever wanted which must be such sweet relief after being let go from Triple M’s Rush Hour QLD just weeks after winning an ACRA. Caroline still popping up and in especially when it came to Mix’s annual Give Me 5 campaign.
Let me pause there before I continue. In 1999 Mark & Caroline found out that premature babies were being manually bagged on the Sunshine Coast into an ambulance to keep them alive during the trip to Brisbane. The aim that first year was to purchase two Transport Cots. They did. A decade later they were able to replace the initial two with even better ones. Over 25 years Give Me 5 has raised more than more than $8 million for chronically ill children of the Coast. In 2024 it was $552,918 in just one month which is astonishing generosity from the Sunshine Coast community.
The Mix team with the 2024 Give Me 5 amount raised
Then there’s Archie and Bretz, who will replace Todd and Sami next month. I happened to see that there was a Mayoral Ball for Sunshine Coast kids on the weekend and Archie was there representing Mix at the event alongside his colleagues despite not yet having started on-air. How’s that for community engagement right from the outset?
Mix and Sea are owned by Great Southern Land Media (GSL Media) the only two radio stations they own. The Sunshine Coast has a population heading towards 400K and not that far off catching Newcastle or Canberra, both considered provincial markets, part of what Carla described to me as the ‘great migration’, of which she was a part of, and young people and families choosing lifestyle over metro city costs and busy-ness.
Carla said:
“It’s a really interesting and unique market and our focus remains firmly on being all local, all audio.
We were so blessed and privileged to have Caroline in a seat for over 20 years and Todd and Sami for ten years on air with us, and then ten years within the community outside of this business.
We’ve started to say change is a swear word around here. It’s evolution. Evolution is always happening in and around us, and they were at a life stage where they had to go, what do I want for myself in the next 5 to 10 years?
Caroline is the Queen of the Coast and will be the voice of the Storyteller Suite, launched this November with our new app-based platform, Listen Sunny Coast. She jumped at the opportunity, which I think speaks volumes to the type of culture and business that we have on our hands here at GSL. Todd and Sami have a podcast in production to hopefully launching soon too.
There are two elements of it. One is to partner with businesses and commercial partners to bring their stories to life. Then there’s emerging talent that is coming out of the Sunshine Coast that we want to hero on their way up.”
It’s our new digital audio home where all of our content will live. You can stream your favourite shows live wherever you are, catch up anytime, and dive into original podcasts. I’m really excited about it because it’s more than just a platform, it’s our way of giving the Sunshine Coast a space to connect, discover, and be inspired by its own voices. Plus, it’s all local.”
There’s something in this that is decidedly old school but still modern. I can’t think of too many other stations who have allowed their talent to step back on their terms but still lean into their strength at the network, again on their terms, in other areas (Susie O’Neill with the Nova Network is another example). You want to find out what more you can be? We support you and there’s still space here for you too.
For the radio industry I really want to see this work as a template for what it can offer as a career not a job.
The other approach that Carla and GSL are taking which is different is to drive the network strategy by show, not station:
“Strategy by station is the traditional way but I was very intentional, in partnership with Ben (Ben Erbsland), our programming director, to ensure that every show had space to develop its own unique delivery to its listener base. What Foz and Brooke stand for and what you expect to hear from them on Sea FM brekkie is actually quite different to what you’ll get with Elly and Taz on the drive home, and that deserved respect in terms of delivering content to the table that mattered to them.”
Sea FM Drive’s Elly and Taz flicking the switch on the repeater
That made an impact to the survey result, so too did turning on repeater frequencies to give their Noosa and surrounds audience a better listening experience last year:
“Noosa has its own rhythm and personality, right? You cannot ignore that and it helped strengthen and extend the proposition and extend the proposition more deeply into that region. Now our signal is very strong right from Caloundra to Noosa. And as that population is growing, every single hub across that region is growing.
The Sunshine Coast is a powerful regional market. The people, our listeners, are our partners. Our partners are what make up our business. Our partners are our friends. It’s intrinsically linked as an ecosystem. We’re all in this together.
What we don’t have here is red tape. We’re not syndicated. We don’t have to bypass a lot of things to be agile enough to bring the commercialisation dream to life. And we don’t have to fold into the national vision of anything we write. We are local at its finest and I think well poised to be the leading entertainment company on the Coast and that is a differentiator between us and any of our competitors”
Archie and Bretz don’t start for another week yet but Carla already knows they’re a great fit:
‘It’s their values as human beings, you know. That’s another big part of what I’ve been focused on is making sure that our values are inherently linked at every single step or touchpoint in our business. It doesn’t matter who is representing, whether it’s our sales team in the commercial space, if it’s myself, if it’s our talent on air, if it’s the team around them, we’re all singing from the same hymn book on our value proposition. And you feel it when you get here.
I’ve had some really lovely feedback from people who have visited our stations over the last ten months that I’ve been here and commenting on the difference in the energy and just the vibration of the place, which for me, obviously as the leader of the business at this time, just shows us that we’re on the right track.”
That they are.
Archie and Bretz commence on Mix FM Drive on the Sunshine Coast on Monday November 3 and can be heard from 3-6pm weekdays.
On a final note this is Sami’s list of things she loves:
I love a can of Coke with a red striped paper straw in it. I love tiny pansies raging out of cracks in the ground in my garden. I love how my dogs do actual pirouettes upon my return when I leave the house for just minutes to check the mailbox. I love prawn rolls. I really love prawn rolls. I love white bread with fresh roast chicken swimming in mayonnaise. I love this time of year we can swim before work and after work. I love my son’s tiny hands. I love my daughter’s perfect blonde curls. I love actual linen napkins. I love mustard. I love doing wordle with my son. I love the first smell of coffee in the morning. I love drinking that coffee in a quiet house with all my babes asleep just before the sun comes out for the day. I love yellow and orange and mustard. I love the smell of fresh washing. I love a really good margarita. I love old records. I love warm garlic bread and cold Frosty Fruits. I love finding toy cars in my handbag. I love Summer Rolls. I love reading people’s tattoos on their arms. I love the thrill of every new book knowing it will take me away. I love libraries. I love Taylor Swift’s new song called Opalite. I love broken shells as they remind me life is hard but still beautiful. I love typewriters. I love fresh mint. I love Netflix. I love Friday nights at home. I love that you read to the end.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo. Email: [email protected]