A New Technology (to 1930)

  Wartime anxieties deriving from the uncoded transmission of the whereabouts of an Australian naval convoy had led to the impounding of all privately owned wireless telegraphy sets in 1915. Governments sought from very early on to exercise control over the airwaves as resources, both for military purposes and to police property, and as a source of revenue. The first public demonstration of radio took place in Sydney in 1919, an event sponsored by the Amalgamated Wireless Company of Australia (AWA). AWA and the Royal Australian Navy were in dispute over the direction the new medium should take and the framework within which it should operate. This struggle for control between AWA and the navy featured the former championing the rights of the lone user and the latter criticizing any moves toward private control.

As in the United States, when the medium's commercial and governmental potential became clearer, the private and public sectors grew increasingly antagonistic. A major conference was held in 1923 to try to sort out these differences. AWA obtained approval for a "sealed" wireless system, to operate on a competitive basis. Broadcasting companies-which often manufactured and distributed receivers-ware to be licensed by the government, with audiences subscribing to particular stations. The sets were then sealed, confining listeners to the stations they had paid to hear. By the following year, cost pressures and differences within the industry led to two further conferences and the establishment of a new dual system for broadcasting: "A" licenses, funded by listeners' subscriptions-with the government retaining a proportion of the levy-and "B" licenses, financed by advertising. The A stations were required to provide a comprehensive service that would cater to all sectors of the community. The Bs, lacking the safety net provided by access to the license fee, were free of such obligations.

Much of the nation was not catered to by this fledgling industry. Concerns about rural areas, along with the legal mechanics of copyrights and patents, led to a Royal Commission into Wireless in 1927. The government was determined to maximize the capacity of the new medium to bind the equally new nation together. After failing to persuade individual license holders in the A.sector to pool their resources for a nationwide grid, in 1928 the government announced that it would acquire all A class stations, in large part as a result of pressure from rural areas. The new national system would be operated by the post office, with programs provided by the private sector. The successful bidder for the contract to provide programs was called the Australian Broadcasting Company.

There was considerable innovation at the programming level: 1924 saw the first transmission of Parliament, the first radio play, and the world's inaugural broadcast from an airplane. Four years later came the first ecclesiastical opposition to beaming church services into people's homes. (Religion went on to gain a unique guarantee of airtime in Australian broadcast regulation of all sectors, because Christianity was seen as central to the moral fiber of the nation but marginal to media profitability. Such provisions were of dubious constitutional legitimacy, but they remained unchallenged for decades [Horsfield, 1988].) By 1930 there were 290,000 sets across Australia, with 26 stations in 12 cities. The Labor Party's campaign platform included a promise to abolish license fees if elected.

A Broadcast Medium (1930s)

  By the beginning of the 1930s, radio was firmly established. The critical event was the creation of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1932 as a public broadcaster, still funded by licenses, in place of the three-year-old private Australian Broadcasting Company. Its enabling legislation obliged the commission to raise the educational and cultural levels of the public. One of its early chairs, W.J. Cleary, described the task of the ABC in 1934 as promoting "the finer things of life" by elevating the populace "to find interests other than material ones, to live by more than bread alone."

The first overseas transmission from Australia took place in 1933, and big increases in the sale of radio sets coincided with the ABC's descriptions of play from the 19 34 cricket series between England and Australia. By the middle of the decade, the audience for radio was growing by 8,000 people each month. Complaints were made about the heavy schedule of advertisements on the commercial stations, although regulation prevented ads on Sundays. The commercial stations, now represented by the Australian Federation of Commercial Broadcasting Stations, were adjusting to the growth of the industry by networking and borrowing programs from overseas, notably Lux Radio Theater and radio serials. The advent of the serial and the network were linked. Multinational corporations owned the major advertising agencies, and they placed pressure on the commercial stations to deliver a big audience to clients who desired nationwide exposure for their output. They also frequently colluded with each other to rein in recalcitrant networks, assisting compliant groups and undermining others by manipulating schedules. The ABC's net­ working arrangements were falling into place by 1939, with two metropolitan stations established in each capital city.

In 1930 there were only a handful of commercial stations in Australia; two years later, the number had risen to 46. With more stations came greater uniformity: cutting production costs, standardizing formats, playing greater amounts of recorded music than was the case anywhere else in the world, and selling blocks of time to specific sponsors so that programs were created around the products that paid for them. Networks were established to satisfy the demands of advertisers for a national reach, with the encouragement of American­ owned advertising agencies. In the 1940s, following governmental anxieties about monopolistic practice, the networks emphasized the autonomy of individual stations, which were said to rely on networks for resources rather than acting as mere conduits.

By the close of the 1930s, there were well in excess of 1 million license sales and perhaps four times that number of regular listeners. Two of every three dwellings had a set. And despite its early reputation as technologically complex, the potential of the medium to ameliorate the drudgery of domestic work even as it encouraged a habit of consumption made the female listener a target. "The men behind the microphone, in a very real sense, modulate all other sounds. To some they are folk heroes; to some women-phantom lovers" (Walker, 1973 ). This was also the period when the child audience was discovered: "If children were off sick, they were sometimes allowed to have the bakelite box in bed with them for the drip dramas, the afternoon children's serials and-if they were privileged-the quiz shows with tea on a tray in the evening" (Kent, 1983).

Wartime and Beyond: Diversity and Australian Content (1940-55)

World War II dramatically increased the role of the state in radio. The war brought about security restrictions on broadcast material as well as the notion that the citizenry must receive expanded coverage of global events. This expansion of service and contraction of autonomy led to both the formation of Radio Australia as an international network (and its wartime takeover by government) and the imposition of strict censorship. ABC news followed the government's line on the primacy of the Pacific theater of war, and most of these bulletins were relayed to the commercial stations. The diminution in the amount of rebroadcast British opinion and the sense that the ABC was becoming an arm of state propaganda led to serious protests from listeners. Another side effect of the war was the belated­ and short-lived--opportunity for women to work as ABC news presenters. They were hired in large numbers in the absence of able-voiced men on military duty. But after the war, no woman would read the national radio news again until 1975.

In 1942 a law was passed to regulate non-ABC sectors of the industry and to provide a guarantee against political directives being issued to the ABC. The new act imposed an Australian music quota of 2.5 percent of commercial airtime. In 1949 the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) was created as a statutory authority to regulate the industry.

One cannot draw an indelible line between the program output of the commercial stations catering to public demand and the ABC catering to public education. Both had high costs of production in comparison with today's emphasis on music or basic talk. In the years after the war, the ABC spent nearly £1 million a year on production, and the commercial stations only slightly less. Recorded material from outside Australia took up less than 5 percent of commercial airtime. Both sectors devoted a good amount of these sums to locally written plays. The ABC devoted a quarter of broadcast time to "light" and "dance" music, with much less "serious" music. This decade also saw the first episode of the ABC's popular Blue Hills soap opera, which was to continue until 1976. At the other end of the spectrum, the commission was required by law to broadcast Parliament from 1946, partly to raise the profile of politicians in the community and partly because of the Labor government's concerns with press bias against it.

The rationing of newsprint during the war delivered advertisers to radio on an unprecedented scale. The war also cut off the commercial stations' supply of transcriptions from North American drama, which led to the substitution of local product. A star system was created, with high-quality serials designed to capture nighttime audiences and block programming to retain interest at a particular point on the dial throughout the evening. Although commercial radio could not match the ABC's claim to having been the first network anywhere to broadcast all of Shakespeare's plays, it expended a comparable amount on drama in the 1940s. The commercial stations produced documentaries on nature, history, and medicine; devoted only about 8 percent of airtime to advertise­ments; broadcast cricket from overseas; and generated the preconditions for illegal off-course betting on horse races through coverage from every imaginable track.

The Challenge of Television and Pop Music ( 1956-70)

  After 19 5 6 television, along with the importation of Top 40 techniques from the United States and a focus on youth as desirable potential consumers, transformed radio listening. Radio shifted from a medium dominated by variety and quiz shows and drama serials to one of popular music, "talkback" (talk radio), and sports. Other enforced changes included a move toward additional use of actuality in news broadcasts, both to compete with television and as a consequence of improvements in taping facilities. Revenue and profits grew in the late 1950s to double their pre-television figures. In 1961 there were 6.5 million radio receivers and 10.54 million people in Australia.

The ornate receiver in the living-room corner of the 1930s had given way by the 1960s to an object that was on the move: the tube was replaced by the transistor. Prior to television, 40 percent of radio set sales were for console and table receivers. In 1960 these made up just 19 percent of the total. The turn toward portables (41 percent of sales) and car radios (26 per­ cent) led the recently formed Australian Radio Advertising Bureau to characterize the trend toward "outdoor listening" and "indoor one-person audiences." Forty percent of Sunday listening was now outside the home, principally at the beach.

Overseas influence increased independently of the new medium: the ABC was importing discs for programming, and the private Macquarie network was owned by British interests from 1951 to 1965. Macquarie came to make extensive use of current-affairs material from U.S., New Zealand, British, Cey lonese, and South African sources. Programs in languages other than English were strictly limited.

The ABCB doubled the Australian music quota to 5 per­ cent-although frequently this was not adhered to-and it also allowed advertising jingles on Sundays. A study of children's radio serials warned of the unholy effects on young people that exposure to radio could bring. Moral panics abounded with the shift toward playing rock and roll records, the turns of phrase of which provoked numerous complaints by 1960-61. About 7 percent of music on commercial radio met the ABCB's tests of local content. Talkback became possible when legislative changes in 1960 allowed stations to broadcast material using the telephone.

Expansion and Crisis (1970s-2000)

  Between 1948 and 1972, Australia's urban population more than doubled, but only one new commercial radio station was added. The Labor government of 1972-75 opened up use of FM, issued additional frequencies on the AM band, and developed public access. Australia was decades behind other countries in the introduction of FM radio (despite initial trials as early as 1947) because television had been allocated the very­ high-frequency (VHF) waveband. Space was found on VHF for FM signals to exist alongside those of television. By 1978 there were well over 200 commercial and ABC AM and 5 FM stations, plus 50 public access outlets. Of the commercial stations, approximately one-quarter were owned by newspaper interests.

The ABCB was succeeded in 1976 by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT). Its first major document, Self-Regulation for Broadcasters? was a critical statement of the rationale for significant-albeit limited-private-sector self-determination in the industry. Nevertheless, the renamed commercial representative, the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters (FARB), criticized the report for its extrapolations from the model of television to radio. FARB's other protectionist activities at this time included trying to shut down the ABC's youth station in Sydney and threatening legal action to restrain the government from granting community radio licenses. The new ABT opened up the system of license renewals to public participation. It also began to show a real concern with cross-media ownership.

The ABCB had raised the Australian music quota to IO per­ cent of airtime in 1973, with the ABC electing to follow suit. The figure was increased to 15 percent in 1975, with major implications for both programming and the local record industry. Twenty-two million records were manufactured locally (mostly made from imported masters) in that year. By 1980, when commercial FM commenced operations, rock music and its Australian substratum were embedded in entertainment programming. A major review of Australian content on commercial radio in 1986 led to new rules, which provided that 20 percent of music broadcast between 6 A.M. and 12 midnight must be Australian. Conversely, restrictions holding advertising to 18 minutes per hour were lifted.

The ABC's movement into a more national focus took two significant steps in the mid-197os: a national network of classical music set the seal on the higher tone to its mission, and youth station 2JJ appeared in Sydney (2JJ would later go national over the period 1989 to 1991). The ABC was reconstituted as a corporation in 1983 and charged with the responsibility to provide "innovative and comprehensive" programs "of a high standard" in order to "contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community." The formation in 1977 of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) increased ethnic broadcasting. The period also saw the advent of radio for the print-handicapped and the formation of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). CAAMA began broadcasting by Aborigines for Aborigines halfway through 1980. The federal government allocated A$7 million to Aboriginal broadcasting in 1992, as opposed to A$65 million to ethnic broadcasting, some indication of the groups' respective political clout. By 2000 there were five licensed Aboriginal stations and special services for tribal peoples. As community radio managers moved onto an increasingly commercial footing, their stations began requiring Aboriginal groups to pay for time on the air. Thus, the amount of access available to indigenous people was strictly limited, emphasizing the importance of opening up the opportunity for Aborigines to control their own stations.

By 2000 there were four sectors of Australian radio, arch­ing across the FM and AM bands: the ABC, the commercial stations, the SBS, and community (previously called public) stations.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation

  The ABC operates a variety of services. It offers a rural network extending across the country, in addition to metropolitan AM stations that mix talk, music, and news from local and national perspectives. Radio Australia is a single shortwave, multilingual, international service of news, music, and information that claims to be heard by 50 million people outside Australia. There are five national services: Radio National (variously, "Radio to Think By," "The Truth of Australia," or "Mind Over Chatter"); ABC Classic FM ("fine music"); JJJ­ FM ("Radio That Bites"); ABC News network (alternating between political proceedings and news); and Dig Radio, an internet network. Finally, Radio Australia broadcasts to the Asia-Pacific region.

The ABC is expected by government and management to combine broad popularity (the metropolitan stations' breakfast programs) with authoritativeness (news and current affairs) and innovation (music markets neglected by commercial broadcasters but desired by cassette and compact disc manufacturers). Further, the ABC tries to ensure "that listeners across Australia hear viewpoints and perspectives not broadcast on other stations." Numerous marginal groups regard the ABC as their access to the center. At the same time, the commission continues to refer to "those original aims that saw the ABC come into being in 1932: to draw the country together by bringing radio of special quality, importance and relevance to all Australians."

For people who grew up with the ABC, their referent is never simply its actual broadcast output. It is also the meaning of the ABC, as Australia's foremost institution of information and culture. And for the first 25 years of its existence, it had an exclusively audio presence, a presence that continues to be enormously significant. The commission's remit is basically contradictory: a comprehensive service that should complement market-driven services, simultaneously both popular and specialist.

Commercial Stations

  Commercial stations meet the needs of advertisers by attracting large audiences. The larger the number of listeners, the more the commercial stations clamor for independence from surveillance by the state: popularity, they argue, guarantees their being in step with public values and attitudes. And this in turn is their claim on the advertising dollar.

Once pilloried for their lowbrow teenage audience, commercial stations are now taken to task for ignoring this group in favor of the aging young and its taste for recycled popularity. Instead of the teenage record-buying public, 25- to 39-year­ old consumers are sought by metropolitan FM stations because of their conspicuous propensity to purchase. AM stations have found their niche (considered by many to be comparatively unprofitable) in a mythic suburbia that is fond of convivial chat, of inoffensive music, or of sports radio.

The 1980s were the decade of FM. FM prided itself on the "extraordinary sophistication" of its audience research methods, targeting ever more specific categories of listener. The research is divided in five ways: focus groups for qualitative information from a few listeners; audience tracking, to find out whether listeners are loyal; callout music research, or playing music down the telephone line to gauge reaction; auditorium music tests, where respondents sit en masse and listen to hundreds of tunes; and lifestyle research, which systematizes the habits of the audience.

The commercial stations' daily cycle is differentiated through announcers defined as individual personalities rather than by a range of music. Disc jockeys are the effective markers that distinguish one service from another. This loss of diversity has been assisted by deregulatory forces. The ABT's successor, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), has replaced the single quota of Australian music with more targeted quotas specific to particular station formats (up to 15 percent for rock stations, down to 5 percent for easy listening). Regulation of offensive content has, however, continued, and stations are subject to a code of practice designed to prevent programming that offends community standards concerning violence, drugs, suicide, or hate speech.

     The successor to FARB, Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) claims that So percent of radio listeners tune to the commercial stations. The claim represents its justification for opposing a free-market approach to the issue of licenses: room for new entrants is severely limited by the long periods needed to achieve a profit, and exclusivity is required if local commercial radio is to maintain sufficient advertising revenue to continue broadcasting. FARB opposed using the premium space on the FM band for community radio: commercial stations have the listening numbers in their favor, so they should have spectrum allocation in preference to minority interests.

Special Broadcasting Service

  SBS radio is part of multiculturalism, the federal government's cultural shift in immigration settlement policy from all-out assimilation. An ethnic middle class that lacked access to media outlets and attention to their informational needs started to lobby politicians in the mid-1970s, leading to the creation of the SBS as the body responsible for stations 2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne, stations then on the air on a community basis. The SBS extended these stations' reach via a relay system to Wollongong and Newcastle.

     SBS radio programming was to be along language, not community lines. As the 1980s progressed, the SBS board came to resist an overt discussion of politics by advisory groups while supporting the existence of consultative machinery: an apparent openness to public participation actually masked a very limited agenda for discussion. A further dimension emerged with the mid-198os uptake of anti­ immigration positions by the Liberal and National Parties and the 1990s push from Aboriginal and other people to forge a code of anti-discriminatory guidelines for announcers. Attention has shifted away somewhat from SBS radio since the federal government assigned further development of ethnic broadcasting to the community sectors in the mid-198os, but the Sydney and Melbourne stations continue to attract controversy.

Community Stations

  Community stations differ from the other three sectors in that their mandate is neither governmental nor commercial. They have a much more focused and limited warrant to serve local, special interest, community, or educational needs. This constituency may be highly specific, as in radio for the print-handicapped or for the residents of East Fremantle, or very broad, as in a station catering to jazz listeners from 8 to 10 o'clock and to Spanish speakers from II to I. Apart from the surveillance of the ABA, which issues specific licenses for education, special interests, and geographical locations, they are also beholden to internal systems of management, often related to educational institutions or sources of program sponsorship. In addition to the reporting requirements of regulatory bodies and management committees, the sector has a peak representative body, the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA). The association makes submissions to inquiries into the area, convenes national meetings to discuss common issues, and provides a point of articulation.

     There is a significant democratic, participatory rhetoric associated with such stations. Although most have in-house training and monitor their output, the claim they frequently make is that they transform the passive audience member into an active producer of material, opening up the airwaves to alternative points of view and modes of presentation and demystifying the media. The voluntary nature of this labor also encourages a faith in the value of cooperative management, which has on occasion led to conflict over production values and the basis for making and implementing decisions on programming, finance, and personnel. Such issues can be especially awkward when paid staff seek to control the administration and quality of the station in a way that is seen as replicating the elitism of other forms of Australian media. The CBAA promulgates a "Code of Ethics" that prescribes community accountability, broad media access, participatory decision making by both presenters and listeners, quality balanced with access, no censorship other than legal requirements, and public proclamation of nondiscriminatory station policies.

The Modern Radio Industry

  In 1990 Australia's 150 commercial radio stations earned $450 million in revenue and spent over A$400 million, much of it to employ over 4,000 people. These figures mean that the sector is only marginally profitable, which pushes CRA toward contradictory postures on industry regulation. At one moment it is all for total freedom to decide what is broadcast and when, arguing that program content should be the sacrosanct domain of the implied contractual space negotiated by broadcaster and listener. But when it turns to use the airwaves, CRA wants regulation to prevent masses of new competitors. This is, however, counter to the penchant for open markets that has been very much in evidence among Commonwealth government policy makers.

     At the same time, the government was engaging in a detailed investigation of metropolitan commercial radio, resulting in a 1988 National Radio Plan (NRP). It called for the conversion of ten AM stations to FM, ten additional licenses, and new services in the not-for-profit area. This was occurring against a backdrop of huge declines in ratings for AM stations. FM was the band that everybody desired to enter, and the federal government's need for cash provided a useful foil to its laissez-faire intellectual preferences: the new licenses for FM were let by competitive tender. The existing players needed to buy airspace in order to remain solvent or grow as business forces. More than half the stations in the southeastern states' capital cities changed hands between November 1986 and April 1989. In some transactions, prices paid were in excess of 25 times the value of annual profit.

     The upshot of this policy innovation and supply-side dis­ruption was that 1991 found 60 percent of the listening audience tuned to businesses run by Austereo and Hoyts. But this audience potential did not necessarily amount to profitability: Austereo was unable to find bidders for its FM and AM stations in Canberra, which had combined with its Perth license to produce a loss for 1989-90 of about A$8 million. Meanwhile, the extraordinary revival of AM ratings in Melbourne brought into question the automatic equation of FM with profits. CRA emphasized the difficulties confronting the industry, such as the aggregation of television services, the possibility of pay TV, high license fees, competition from a subsidized ABC, and too many competitors in the FM area.

     Despite incurring penalties of $50,000, 5 out of 14 metropolitan AM stations defaulted on their FM-conversion proposals by the end of 1992, because the competitive bidding system had combined with a long and deep recession to strip away the foundations of many companies. Some recompense was available, as the ABA made it possible for a licensee to run more than one station in a ·market, whereas the NRP had tried to acknowledge a problem with concentrated ownership. The success of the original FM stations diminished to the point of a collective loss in 1991, with the advent of new entrants and some renewal of the AM band's popularity (although most of those stations are losing money also). This should come as no surprise, because revenue from advertising is now expected to cover 23 FM stations, compared to 7 before 1990. In the first few months of its operation, the ABA issued 130 virtually free licenses for narrowcasting transmission, mostly covering tiny locations for tourist drive-through information or betting services, areas once covered by the commercial sector.

     But the definition of narrow-and its implications for niche marketing by full-blown commercial services-was unclear, with 124 of the country's 150 profit-oriented stations using almost identical golden contemporary playlists! Blocks of programming, both music and news, are increasingly being purchased by many stations in order to keep a continuous service on the air without employing staff, and news bulletins are generally supplied by a small number of services. By 2002 commercial radio was making around $745 million in revenue a year, amounting to a profit of about $140 million. The sector secured around 8 percent of all advertising revenue to media outlets.

The Future

     Four interrelated factors will determine the future character of commercial radio: technology, networking, imagined audiences, and regulation. The advent of digital technology in Australia offers the prospect of enormously high-quality sound reproduction across similarly enormous distances. When combined with the centralizing drive of networking and syndication to reduce costs, this suggests a southeastern, urban broadcasting center that will swallow up both rural and metropolitan stations through a centrally delivered signal that is customized to local time, weather, and traffic conditions.

     Digital audio broadcasting (DAB) has major implications for how audiences are conceived and addressed in terms of localism as well as age, income, race, values, and routine. DAB thus suggests a further homogenization of programming, but by the end of 2002 it remained a dream.

     Demographic projections say that the average Australian household will increasingly be composed of the delightfully named "unoccupied person," living alone and keen to turn to casual voices in search of anomic relief. In this sense, metropolitan and suburban life become akin to rural isolation, where the regional radio presenter is a major figure and a source of delightful recognition for many people. This will encourage research into people's work and leisure activities and ideological proclivities as part of the surveillant eye of social science. It is also encouraging networks, because CD­ quality commercials for national advertisers can now be transmitted from central locations to stations throughout the country. In 1999, 75 percent of commercial stations had network affiliations, and several were owned by foreign citizens, following deregulation of ownership controls. In 2000 there were 22.9 commercial stations serving just 19 million people-but offering a crushing sameness. Only the ABC holds out signs of difference.