No Australian station would touch Pride of Warriors; the film’s completion was instead financed by Al Jazeera English. Scheduled to go to air in mid 2009, the film was pulled following publicity in the Jakarta Post. Later, after the Indonesian elections, it was broadcast with little promotion. Jono van Hest, Jeni McMahon and David Batty, the directors of Pride of Warriors, overcame West Papuan censorship by smuggling in half a dozen digital cameras and compiling four personal accounts by witnesses of persecution and resistance.

The film’s particular feature is the first-person address of its protagonists. In this example of ‘citizen journalism’ we meet Eddie Waromi, now President of the West Papuan Authority, part of an alliance of West Papuan resistance groups, who was imprisoned for twelve years for raising the flag. His nineteen-year-old daughter Yane tells of being drugged and kidnapped on her way home from university. Her ten persecutors apparently included Indonesians and Papuans, who tortured and terrorised her, taunting her about her father’s activism. Matias Bunai of the highlander country reports on the violence experienced by the tribes, and the determination of local people to maintain cultural traditions. Tadius Yogi, a veteran of the guerrilla war, now advocates against armed resistance in favour of non-violence and seeking international support. Finally, dancer Lovina Bisay was interrogated following her part in a performance by the Sampari Dance Group in the capital Jarapura. The performance referenced the Biak Island massacre of 1998, when the local community raised the Morning Star flag and as a result dozens, including children, were killed by Indonesian forces.

A more recent short film, West Papua: A Journey to Freedom (Erin Morris, 2011), is narrated by Herman Wainggai, one of the forty-three West Papuan refugees who escaped to Australia in January 2006. He had spent two and a half years in prison for his involvement in organising peaceful demonstrations. The film follows Wainggai toWewak, Papua New Guinea, where he meets with a number of student activists who have travelled by boat from the west, through waters patrolled by Indonesian forces, for a week-long workshop in non-violent resistance. Herman’s father is among the smuggled-in visitors, and we witness their emotional reunion.

Refugees from the occupation of West Papua feel their exile deeply. There are now at least 15,000 West Papuan refugees in camps in along the PNG–West Papuan border, and PNG landowners do not necessarily welcome them, yet in this film we see encouraging scenes with PNG human rights NGOs meeting with the group and expressing their solidarity with the refugees’ plight.

Many of the student activists provide testimony to the camera: ‘Even though we only organise peaceful demonstrations, people get arrested and tortured by Indonesian authorities like the police and the army. Terror still continues. Family members of activists experience terror by Indonesian intelligence’. Student Marthen Manggaprouw is critical of the so-called Special Autonomy (2001) status of West Papua, claiming the budget for Special Autonomy actually goes to police actions, not for the benefit of West Papua. There are a number of testimonials reporting savage oppression of West Papuan citizens at the hands of Indonesian police and military, along with footage showing the Indonesian military man-handling demonstrators in Manokwari in 2010, and atrocities committed in an ‘Indonesian paramilitary police video’ from 2009.

Late last year, as I met with director Charlie Hill-Smith to talk about Strange Birds in Paradise, Tom Allard from The Age was reporting from Indonesia on the controversy surrounding leaked footage that proved human rights atrocities were being committed against West Papuans by Indonesian forces. The story concluded, as Allard’s so often do on this subject, with the fact that the Prime Minster’s office and the Department of Foreign Affairs had decline to comment. The Lombok Agreement (2006) between Australia and Indonesia appears to constrain critical public comment by Australian governments on Indonesian ‘internal affairs’, such as the contested future of West Papua.

This is nothing new in our relations with Indonesia. Australian governments and media were complicit with the silence that attended the events of 1965–6 when Indonesia’s President Sukarno was deposed, and some 800,000 ‘communists’ were murdered while the dictator Suharto established the thirty years of his despotic rule. The attempted armed destabilisation of the Indonesian archipelago, supported by US and Australian covert action, in the years preceding the 1965 coup remain a shameful betrayal of Australia’s early collaboration with Indonesia’s birth. Australia collaborated with Dutch intelligence in destabilisation programs in West Papua (Irian Jaya) in the late 1950s and again in the mid 1960s, according to Toohey and Pinwill in Oyster, their 1989 book on ASIS. Indeed, they claim ASIS supported West Papuan independence organisation the OPM with training and finance in the early 1960s for the purpose of destabilising Sukarno’s claims on the island’s western region, formally part of the Dutch colonies.

Mark Worth, Janet Bell and Anna Grieve, the creators of Land of the Morning Star (2003), were unable to get into West Papua, but they were able to gather the most

extraordinary archive footage, much of it from Holland. The film spells out West Papuan political history as a series of careless betrayals. It chronicles the fate of West Papua through its colonial eras, noting the role of the Kennedy administration in persuading the Dutch to give the country up to the Indonesians in 1962, and Suharto’s role as the Commander of ‘Operation Mandala’ occupying the country in 1963.

Land of the Morning Star opens with the raising of the Morning Star flag in 1999, and a speech by the remarkable West Papuan activist Theys Eluay: ‘The truth is we have never been part of Indonesia …’ It concludes with Eluay’s strangling murder at the hands of the Indonesian Special Forces, Kapassus, in 2001. The film includes a number of important interviews including with former Australian diplomat Gordon Jockel, who by way of apologia (or is it irony) says the Indonesians manipulated the Act of Free Choice (1969) by methods ‘traditional in their own country’. Also interviewed are former West Papuan politicians Wim Zonggonau and Clemens Runaweri, who describe how they fled across the border to PNG with the intention of travelling to New York and exposing the 1969 electoral fraud before the United Nations. They recount how Australian officials prevented them from leaving PNG. Sadly, these Australian actions repressing West Papuan voices against Indonesian militarism might also be described as a practice traditional in their own country.

Land of the Morning Star was made eight years ago and within the constraints of Film Australia and the ABC. The filmmaker Mark Worth died before the film went to air; in many ways it was his life’s work. It remains one of Film Australia’s most worthwhile achievements.

* * *

The events of January 2006, when asylum seekers were intercepted, interned at Christmas Island and later granted asylum, despite Indonesian demands that they be repatriated to Indonesian custody, form one strand of several of the films mentioned. In Charlie Hill-Smith’s Strange Birds it is refugee exile Donny Roem who provides the harrowing tale. The story of these young people recalls that of the contingent repatriated to Australia from camps in West Papua during the rise of Japanese expansion in the Pacific War, when the archipelago was a Dutch colony. From the 1920 the Dutch kept Indonesian intellectuals and independence activists and their families concentrated as exiles in camps in Boven Digul, West Papua. They were transported to Cowra in mid 1943, because the Dutch feared the prisoners might align themselves with the Japanese. The Australian government was misled by the Dutch about the ‘crimes’ of these prisoners. When H.V. Evatt finally realised these families were political prisoners, they were released and became the very effective cadre organising support in Australia for post-war Indonesian independence.

The Strange Birds DVD contains a number of informative and entertaining ‘extras’; among them ‘Penis Gourd’ (1999), a ‘tourist guide’ on trekking in West Papua. The short film follows Charlie and his friends as he crosses through the ‘back door’―the ‘tradesman’s entrance’ to Indonesia from Papua New Guinea―in the manner of a television entertainment travel show. Shortly after arriving beyond the Baliem Valley in the West Papuan highlands, Charlie and his fellow trekkers are welcomed by the Jani people with generosity and high ceremony. Fascinated by the culture of the penis gourd, Charlie declares, ‘Curiosity may have killed the cat but it had me standing naked in a highland village … half highlander and half Sydney Mardi Gras’: he ends up bedecked in feathered headdress, neckband, breastplate and penis gourd. The film overcomes vulnerability to the uncomfortable charge of paternalism―the white hero/journalist appropriating the suffering of the natives―by its ironic self-mockery, the creator leaping literally naked into comic complicity with the knowing Jani.

Charlie finds the West Papuan capital Jarapura entirely reminiscent of Java, with this kind of detail taking the project well beyond the factual entertainment genre that it at first deploys. Our trekkers visit one particular village on the Papuan border that has become a refuge for families who have had to flee the highlands since the early 1960s. Around sixty families of refugees from the highlands have relocated in this village alone since Papua achieved its independence in 1975. In interviews they tell us why: ‘Indonesians are in every village. There is no law … we raised the new Papuan flag and had to flee’.

Other extras provide compilations of interviews with a number of commentators―extensions of arguments introduced in summary form in the film proper. George Aditjondro, from Gajah Mada University, says there is a psychological dimension at work in which the military, having ‘lost’ East Timor and to some extent Aceh, now hang on to West Papua with ‘trigger happy’ anxiety. He explains how the TNI finances around three-quarters of its budget from business in West Papua, legal and illegal. Damien Kingsbury claims the Indonesian government is today trying to separate the military from its business activities, noting progress on this front is ‘very, very slow’. Illegal militias are a well-established feature of the TNI’s practice; they also support themselves through ‘business’. Kingsbury says many of the military leaders who ran East Timor as a personal fiefdom have been relocated to West Papua, where they conduct the same kind of operations. Then there are the Islamic militias like Laska Jihad, infamous for its assaults on the civilian population in Ambon some years ago. This group, trained in West Java by Indonesian military officers, was formally disbanded after the Bali bombings, but has established subsidiary organisations that continue. More recently Laska Tabligh brings together into what Kingsbury ironically calls ‘home defence units’, militant Muslims who have arrived in transmigration or as business migrants to West Papua. While these militant groups are less immediately under the control of the TNI, they are supported by Indonesian military leaders to counter the local Melanesian independence movement.

According to Arief Budiman, ‘The world does not scream about the 100,000 people killed in West Papua because there is no exposure about that and the West Papuan people are not clever in dealing with the media’. Other interviewees note that journalists are not permitted to come to West Papua. Jacob Rumbiak, a former child soldier in the West Papuan resistance movement, cites the evaluation of Protestant and Catholic Church organisations in Papua who estimate four times this number killed since the infamous Act of Free Choice. (Citing a study from Yale, West Papua: Journey to Freedom affirms this

figure of 400,000.) George Aditjondro suggests West Papuans should align themselves with other Indonesians seeking to establish a federal structure of Indonesian provinces (like the former Soviet Union) and in this way move gradually toward independence. West Papua can be seen as the ‘last frontier’ of Indonesian militarism as more democratic processes are pursued in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, and if Indonesia is to develop in this way it needs to deal with the its military behaviours in West Papua. Anglican priest Peter Woods, who witnessed and bravely recorded an Indonesian assault on demonstrators objecting to the ruinous exploitation of the Freeport gold mine in 2006, thinks there has been collusion of the Australian Government with Indonesia because West Papua is ‘an embarrassment on our doorstep’ and conscripts the Good Samaritan to remind us of our neighbourly responsibilities.

* * *

At the time of writing, despite its festival invitations and other accolades, Strange Birds in Paradise has not yet found a broadcaster in Australia. This brings new meaning to Charlie’s observation in the film that today there is a saying among Melanesians, ‘Oz-tak-lihat’ (‘Australia doesn’t see’). The film was rejected at several stages of development and production by both Australian public broadcasters. This cannot be because the film is not important, well made, imaginative or accurate―it is all of these and more. Exquisite animation sequences by Juan Serrano and Joanne Fong create a wonderful imaginative space for both hope and despair, for example in the depiction of the invasion of 1963, and the incarceration and escape of Jacob Rumbiak. The film builds its narrative around West Papuan exiles preparing and performing a ‘sing sing’ concert in collaboration with David Bridie, a long time supporter of West Papua. The music becomes another vehicle for an emotional connection with the people and their aspirations.

Strange Birds was invited into competition at the world’s most prestigious documentary film festival in Amsterdam in 2009, where it was received with enthusiasm by packed houses at several screenings. It won the IF Award for Best Documentary 2010, and at the Sydney Film Festival in 2010 it was a finalist along with The Snowman, another startlingly impressive Australian documentary, also so far inexplicably denied to Australian broadcast audiences by both the ABC and SBS. When I spoke with Charlie Hill-Smith late last year about his experience in looking to the ABC for a presale on the film, he told me the response was unequivocal: ‘Not interested, just not interested’. Over the course of the film’s production and release, it was rejected on six occasions.

Like Hope in a Slingshot (Inka Stafrace, 2008), an independent Australian film on the West Bank, Strange Birds in Paradise was rejected without any good reasons. In the case of Hope in a Slingshot, the film was acquired and then the decision reversed; the reason given for its rejection was that the ABC would require another film to ‘balance’ its point of view. Other recent instances of important local documentary denied to Australian broadcast audiences by our public broadcasters include Steve Thomas’ very moving first-person essay film Hope, on the Siev X case and Australia’s asylum seeker practices. And remember Jeff Daniels’ 10 Conditions of Love―finally purchased as an acquisition after its extraordinarily controversial release at the Melbourne Film Festival.

These works are not hard to find on DVD, once you know about them, but they should also be on Australian television. It won’t be long before more and more new work will be available as downloads, and the long promised ‘convergence’ might finally overturn the hegemony of ‘heritage’ broadcasters. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate that Australian public broadcasters―whose legitimacy rests with their integrity in providing a venue for minority voices, and Australian independent creative work―seem increasingly afraid to step outside the diminishing square of their own creation.

By John Hughes

<www.strangebirds.com.au>

John Hughes is an independent filmmaker based in Melbourne. His most recent film, Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia (broadcast on ABC TV in December 2010), won the Australian Writer’s Guild award for best broadcast documentary in 2010.

But the development of which we can all be extremely proud is community broadcasting. We lead the world in terms of number, diversity and quality of licensed community-controlled broadcasting stations. Australia is in the healthy situation of having more licensed community radio stations (358) than the number of commercial (274), ABC (65) and SBS (4) stations put together. Melbourne is the heartland for Australian community radio with nine (the most of any Australian city) well developed and supported stations. On the smell of the proverbial, community radio gives access to the airwaves to people who are otherwise denied it—young people, old people, Indigenous people, ethnic people and those interested in alternative views and non-mainstream music.

Community radio (and television) stations are licensed by the federal government when communities express a need for them. They can be geographic (70 per cent of community stations are in regional areas) or communities of interest. Some fine examples are: SYN-FM in Melbourne, constitutionally restricted to young people under twenty-six, which in one corker of a year trained 4000 young people in how to broadcast; JOY-FM, the only radio station in the world operated by and for the local gay and lesbian community; and Goolarri Media in Broome, active in media and music production and in providing training and employment opportunities for Aboriginal people in their community. In Melbourne, also think RRR, MBS, PBS and CR; think KND, ZZZ and RPH—all treasures.

Community stations are generally operated by volunteers; 23,000 people are currently actively involved in operating the 300 plus stations across the country. There are stations on Christmas Island (growing audience) in the west, Palm Island in the east, Thursday Island up north and Kangaroo Island down south—just about the four corners of the country—and everywhere in between. Most importantly, community broadcasting allows all those people to be part of decision making and ownership of stations—but maybe not for much longer. Community broadcasting is hot national infrastructure with a racy past but a doubtful future.

A Short History
A look at the history of community broadcasting in Australia highlights its purpose and value. Community broadcasting, catering to expressed needs of sections of the Australian population, has developed as a complement to the other two significant broadcasting sectors in the country. What is unique about Australian broadcasting is that all three major sectors—commercial, government-funded (ABC, SBS) and community—are large, well-developed and well-supported. The United Kingdom has only recently started licensing community stations, so has only two mature broadcasting sectors.

Broadcasting in Australia developed rapidly from 1923, when the first four radio stations were licensed. It developed into a hybrid of models in the United Kingdom, where all broadcasting was government-owned (commercial radio did not start in there until the 1970s) and the United States, where there are no government-funded radio stations.

Government funded radio started in Australia when it became apparent that the private sector would not service regional areas as there was no ‘business case’ for doing so. In 1927, a Royal Commission into broadcasting directed the Post Master General (PMG) to take control of a number of radio stations, with a brief from government to extend radio into country areas. The PMG contracted the Australian Broadcasting Company to make programs for the service. In 1932 the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established, funded by licence fees. Forty years later another development in Australian electronic media occurred when established services again failed to meet the needs of a section—or rather, many sections of the Australian community.

The origins of community broadcasting—or ‘public’ broadcasting as it was known until the ABC appropriated that term in the 1990s—is not traceable to any one single movement. During the 1960s and 1970s four distinct and unrelated threads of political, cultural and social movement, and then two more, came together to weave the fabric of community broadcasting in Australia. Educators, protestors, migrants and, oddly, classical music enthusiasts made strange bedfellows, stranger studio mates. Not long after the start of community broadcasting, Indigenous communities and people who could not use print media also wanted access to the airwaves.

The first identifiable group seeking access to broadcasting was classical music enthusiasts. Peaceful, relaxed and pensive, you might think—hardly the types to storm the barricades of the broadcasting regulators. But not so. In 1961, when the government closed down experimental FM stations, allocating the spectrum to television, disappointed classical music fans formed the Listener’s Society of NSW and the Music Broadcasting Society of Victoria. Their objective was to establish FM radio stations to play fine music.

Educators made up the second group, with some universities lobbying for licences to broadcast educational material on air. They had witnessed the Open Universities in the United Kingdom and the educational stations in the United States. In 1961, the University of NSW was given a licence to broadcast lectures over a non-broadcast frequency.

The third prong of the movement came from ethnic communities. In the wake of post-war migration, the media lagged far behind in meeting the needs of Australians whose first language was not English. As a result of migration, the country’s population had almost doubled in twenty years.

Al Grassby, later a Minister in the Whitlam Government, worked in agriculture in southern NSW in the 1950s. Up to 60 per cent of local people had a first language other than English. Grassby started broadcasting European music on 2RG in Griffith, interspersed with segments in Italian for local farmers on topics like ‘How to spray your earth mites’. By the 1970s, Grassby was Minister for Immigration and started a fledgling SBS through small stations in Sydney and Melbourne. The burgeoning political power of migrants ensured that ethnic broadcasting burst out around the country. Brisbane hosted the first full-time ethnic community radio station, 4EB, in the late 1970s. There are now hundreds of languages spoken on community stations around the country, many catering to recent arrivals such as those from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

The fourth group seeking access to the media was the politically active ‘Vietnam generation’. The desire for a more open media was exemplified by the draft resistors and their supporters in Melbourne and Sydney who ran pirate broadcasts. In Brisbane Springbok rugby tour demonstrations in 1971 and their coverage by the mainstream media led students to form their own radio station (ultimately 4ZZZ). As the wave of anti-Vietnam War moratorium marches spread throughout the country, in 1971 students at two Melbourne universities were considering their response to the government’s crackdown on civil liberties and the right to protest. The answer was two pirate radio stations. But these were a token gesture with limited transmission range. Monash University hosted 3PR People’s Radio and Melbourne University had 3DR, Draft Resistor’s radio. Several people involved with the Melbourne stations, particularly those with technical expertise, joined forces to start the Community Radio Federation (CRF) in 1974.

Each of these four groups had one thing in common. They challenged how broadcasting operated in Australia. They wanted control of the airwaves and they lobbied for it, leading to the establishment of the third tier of broadcasting in Australia.

The history of community broadcasting in Australia parallels the changing face of the country’s social, political and cultural environment, changes which began in the sixties and achieved a critical momentum over the next two decades.

Historically, Indigenous communities were badly served by and portrayed in the media. Indigenous aspirations were not part of the agenda of mainstream media. The importance of maintaining Indigenous languages and cultures only emerged as a policy objective in the 1980s.

In 1980, Australia’s first Aboriginal owned and controlled radio station, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association’s (CAAMA’s) 8KIN, started broadcasting, producing videos and making music clips. Not long after, some Indigenous communities in remote Australia started to adapt low-cost video, videoconferencing and radio services to suit their needs, and some, such as those at Yuendumu and Ernabella, started pirate community television stations.

With a Labor Government, elected in 1983, talking self-determination in Aboriginal policy making, and with bureaucrats like Charles Perkins and Eric Willmot driving the process, Indigenous communities were to officially gain control of media at a local level through the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). With the launch of Australia’s first domestic satellite in 1985, remote Indigenous communities had access to telecommunications, broadcast television and radio for the first time. The launch was seen as both a potential advance for Indigenous communications and a threat to the maintenance of an already diminished language and culture.

When the BRACS project was first funded in 1987, as a Bicentennial gift to Indigenous communities, these communities had the potential to use media to sustain their culture for the first time. BRACS gave communities the ability to produce their own video and radio programs and re-broadcast or ‘embed’ this material in mainstream programming by turning off main signals and transmitting their own programs locally.

Then came the blindfellas. Radio that meets the information needs of people with a print disability dates back almost as far as community radio itself. From 1975 a community group in Melbourne presented a regular weekly news and information program on 3CR. Members were aware of the radio reading services then developing in the United States. In 1978, at Bathurst’s community radio 2MCE, station manager John Martin felt that reading the local newspaper on the radio would provide a service to people who could not access print media—not just vision impaired people, but others with literacy problems and those who could not physically handle books and newspapers. One of a young Andrew Denton’s first media experiences was reading out local newspapers on-air at 2MCE. ‘Andrew’s description of the frocks (from the social pages) was magnificent’, Martin has said.

Overtures were made to the minister for post and telecommunications for access to the broadcasting spectrum for the provision of reading services —to become known as Radio for the Print Handicapped. In July 1978 the minister permitted ‘The establishment of a special radio communications service for the blind and other people with reading difficulties’.

During the 1960s and 1970s changes in political, social and cultural horizons led to changes in the media landscape. The six very different groups who pressured government for access to and control over the airwaves were joined by others and twelve initial stations multiplied as a response to communities expressing a need for and a capability to operate their own radio and television stations.

The ABC
When community needs have become apparent, as they did in the early seventies, Labor governments have tended to expand government services. 2JJ started when young people demanded a different approach to music than the American Top 40. When classical music enthusiasts became strident about hearing Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on radio, the government responded with ABC Classic FM. When ethnic communities demanded more than English language programs, the government initiated what has become SBS.

Despite the degree to which our national broadcasters are cherished by people who value independent media, they are not enough. Despite the degree to which they are resourced, they cannot cover the diverse interests that have developed in this old and new country. And despite the high quality of service, they are undeniably national broadcasters; government broadcasters: no matter how much they try to dress themselves up as ‘local’ or ‘community’ radio, they are not of the community.

Recently, the ABC received a massive injection of funding to provide what they described as ‘town square’ services—community hubs where people can contribute content. But Australians generally won’t fall for that. Despite the ABC calling itself ‘local radio’, people in Cairns know when the overnight program on ‘their’ local radio is coming from Melbourne. Without ten times the funding, the ABC just cannot be local enough.

The ABC is a wonderful service, but despite its intentions, it cannot cover all media bases in this country. It should stop acting like it can and stop trying to shut out other media from public events. National broadcasters and commercial radio can’t serve the needs of remote Aboriginal communities. It can’t serve specialist music lovers. Will the ABC provide a service as basic as reading newspapers? How many people interested in working in the media do the ABC or commercial radio train each year? The number is a lot closer to zero than the hundreds trained by community broadcasting.

The Achievements
Today a significant proportion of the Australia population listen to community radio. McNair Ingenuity Research figures found in 2008 that 57 per cent of Australians over fifteen—9.5 million people—listen to community radio every month, an increase of 10 per cent since 2006. Qualitative research showed that people like community broadcasting for local news, for offering the ability to connect or create communities and for more accurately representing our social and cultural diversity than other media.

The achievements of community broadcasting are many. Community broadcasters pioneered FM technology when no one else wanted to touch it. They have pioneered new programming formats supporting local musicians, alternative news, current affairs and information, programs in languages other than English and positive stories about Indigenous culture. Community radio, more than the ABC, provides strong support for Australian music. Musicians like Paul Kelly, John Butler, The Saints, Boys Next Door, to name a few, received their first airplay on stations like RTR in Perth, DDD in Adelaide, Edge FM in Hobart, ZZZ in Brisbane and SER in Sydney. Almost 100 Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Stations (the old BRACS) are operating in small communities in outback Australia. These are communities where Aboriginal people want to sustain their culture, language and sense of community.

The Challenges
For all the young people trained by SYN-FM, for all the Indigenous issues covered by the twenty-six full-time Aboriginal radio stations across the country, for all the thousands of hours of non-English programming broadcast every week in over one hundred stations across Australia and for the hundreds of local musicians supported by their local community radio stations, the sector is at a crossroads.

The immediate challenge for community broadcasting is the proliferation of platforms on which people can express themselves. The days are gone when licences issued to community stations were beacons around which people rallied in a heavily regulated media landscape. The internet can deliver New York and New Delhi for your listening pleasure. How do community broadcasters sustain engagement with their communities in the face of this deluge? If massive media empires like Fairfax and News Limited can’t work out how to maintain readership of their daily newspapers, what hope have community radio stations?

Community broadcasting has developed strategies to address these challenges. By returning to its origins, the days when a microphone, turntable and transmitter and a bit of training could turn enthusiasts into media players, community broadcasting can offer people who believe in independent media, social justice and serving their own communities, pathways to digital literacy and digital economies. The community sector has developed a vision that re-invigorates the community broadcasting role in local communities by enabling them to leverage the rollout of digital technology. Community stations can provide the facilities, training and infrastructure for people who support their ideals to connect with digital media. A level of initial funding support is needed to establish this vision.

All politicians in the upcoming election campaign will be asked to support infrastructure development at community stations around the country to enable local communities to better develop new and engaging local programming. This will be achieved through the provision of digital production facilities and digital media training for thousands of volunteers. The outcome will be a 25 per cent increase in volunteer participation, a doubling to 2000 of the number of jobs in the sector, and a huge increase in local program making.

This technology-based community connecting will echo the innovation and energy that characterised the early days of community broadcasting. As the sector has matured, so has its aspirations and there’s little doubt community broadcasters are at their best when being creative, innovative and providing real alternatives to mainstream media.

The other challenge is the digital platform—costly beyond any community station’s budget and with too few listeners to generate any income. The government legislated for community stations to be hosted by commercial radio on the new digital transmissions infrastructure in 2007. The federal government also hamstrung community radio’s future on the new digital radio platform by reducing its relative broadcast power.

Community broadcasting has lost parity of spectrum—for the first time in its history. That is, community stations are no longer being offered the same licence conditions as commercial or government-funded stations. Whereas on the analogue spectrum (AM and FM) community stations have the same conditions as commercials and government-funded stations—the same allowable transmission power and the same transmission areas—the government is only allowing community stations a quarter of the spectrum offered the other sectors on the new digital transmission platform.

Digital radio transmission has enough challenges for all players—commercial stations are yet to establish a business case and the internet is flooding listeners with stations from across the planet—without the government putting community broadcasters a mile behind the starting line by reducing its access to spectrum. Community broadcasters are least equipped to handle the steep rise in costs associated with generating new program streams on new technology.

Just as community radio stations in the capital cities of the mainland states take the giant and unknown leap into digital transmission, they are effectively being chopped off at the knees. This federal government and its predecessor have taken active measures to diminish and erode more than forty years of development of Australian community broadcasting by over 100,000 volunteers.

Why would governments want to destroy community broadcasting? Is it by simple neglect and lack of knowledge of the many benefits brought by the sector to the millions of Australians who listen to it? Or is it by design, and what could that be? Either case is unfathomable. For community broadcasting, the next couple of years will determine whether or not the decades of development are going to be squandered.

Author Bio
David Melzer was living in the Otways in western Victoria when he became enthusiastic about what was then called public broadcasting. He first volunteered at 3YYR in Geelong in 1988; later he was employed as part-time manager. He went on to manage 3ZZZ in Melbourne—surviving the politics of a station that broadcasts in sixty-five languages. He and his family then schlepped to Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, where the ABC employed him to work with the local Aboriginal board to establish an independent station. He spent ten years back in Melbourne managing 3MBS, with a stint once again in the Kimberley, managing the ABC station in Broome. He has spent many satisfying hours volunteering at community stations, including 3CR, 3RRR, 3PBS and 3YYR. He is presently Acting CBOnline Manager, Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

Relevant websites and sources

Australian Communication Media Authority

McNair Ingenuity Research

Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart and Kerrie Foxwell, Community Media Matters: An Audience Study of the Australian Community Broadcasting Sector (Griffith University, Brisbane, 2007), available for free download

Craig Liddell, History of Community Broadcasting, CBOnline

Bridget Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio / UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009.

RPH Australia

Community Broadcasting Association of Australia

Murdoch’s lectures were fairly unremarkable. He outlined his vision for what he calls ‘the golden age of opportunity’. He focused on a number of areas that for him represent the rapidly changing world we now inhabit, including newspapers, education, technology and the rise of a global middle class. The challenge for Australia is to embrace change and ‘not rest on our past achievements’. Complacency is the enemy — we must according to Murdoch ‘avoid institutional idleness … the bludger should not be our national icon’. By contrast, Murdoch invokes a mythologised past — the stoicism and reserve of the pioneers and the laconic heroism of Australian soldiers. These values need to be reinvoked if Australia is to reap the benefits of the future.

The dichotomy between bludgers and heroes has become standard tabloid fodder, yet Murdoch never seemed to get much further. He name-checked a few obvious social changes (growing middle class, rise of Asia) and listed a few concerns (technology, declining education) but he didn’t really develop any of these areas. He merely advocated the market as a solution, as opposed to government interference and regulation. Hence, schools would do better with corporate sponsorship because ‘[c]orporate leaders know the skills that people need to get ahead’. A similar instrumentalism pervaded his discussion of newspapers and technology. The lectures fell short of the kind of reflective depth shown by previous Boyer lecturers — on both sides of the political divide.

It’s hard to share Murdoch’s enthusiasm for a ‘golden’ future, given the ruthlessness that accompanies his vision. Often his lectures sounded like a mildly elevated version of the speech a new CEO gives to employees shortly before dishing out redundancies: ‘embrace change — or else’. While accepting that not everything will be rosy, Murdoch glossed over the difficulties. In the style familiar to readers of The Australian or the Herald Sun, Murdoch dismisses contrary viewpoints by diminishing those who hold them. Thus, those worried about the future of newspapers are soaking in ‘self-pity’ which is ‘never pretty’. Anyone concerned about technology is a ‘whinger’. Thanks to global markets we are getting richer. The only ones who don’t like it are the ‘elites’, the trademark term used by News Ltd writers for anyone who disagrees with them.

No wonder Murdoch privileges the pioneer and the soldier — they don’t say much. For all the talk of freedom and diversity in the Boyer Lectures, Murdoch’s record on this score is shaky. Many would argue that Murdoch has waged a war on the public sphere. Rather than foster debate, the Murdoch media evinces a pathological dislike of discussion. Witness the shouting down of political opponents on Fox, or the raft of copponents on Fox, or the raft of conservative columnists in The Australian who vilify rather than debate those who do think differently. It’s hard to take Murdoch seriously on freedom when we remember how all 247 of his newspapers ‘independently’ supported the Iraq invasion, how Murdoch intervened to pull Chris Patten’s book on Hong Kong so as to please his Chinese clients, or how Murdoch dropped the BBC from Chinese satellite coverage and instead carried the Chinese government channel. No wonder, when discussing the golden future, Murdoch relied on the ‘Asian tigers’ whose authoritarian capitalism functions without any ‘elites’ getting in the way.

Behind all this lies the sheer vacuity of Murdoch’s conception of the media. Despite the discussion of newspapers, new media and technology, Murdoch revealed no understanding of the cultural and social role of the media. It’s simply another commodity; the future simply a market waiting to be harnessed. The idea that media might shape our sense of who we are, and continues to mould our sense of national identity, is missing from Murdoch’s vision — as is any reflection on the public sphere. There is no space to ask what the effects on our society are when we alter our relation to the media, or whether commercial media is qualitatively different from other kinds of media. Such questions of course underpin the arguments for public and independent media. No wonder they were missing from Murdoch’s vision of providers and consumers.

In this ‘golden age’ we will inhabit a cultural economy that contains no culture, a democracy that contains no discussion. Murdoch’s Boyer Lectures celebrate a world of ceaseless connection but it’s hard to get excited about his examples — the stock trader with access to real-time prices around the world (a spectacular, if largely unacknowledged, piece of bad timing), the Korean teenager on his MySpace page downloading music, the Australian expat checking on the footy score. Is this the best that Murdoch can do — something that sounds like a Microsoft ad from a decade ago? Anyone wishing to confirm the banality of culture in the techno-marketplace need go no further than cataloguing Murdoch’s moments of enthusiasm expressed in the 2008 Boyers.

So what inspired the ABC to choose Murdoch? He’s a canny businessman but no great thinker. What he does think we already know merely through exposure to the large quantity of the media he controls. Moreover his entire worldview is opposed to the principles that underpin the ABC. Or used to. The ABC has begun to adopt practices not a million miles away from those of Murdoch. For instance, multiple delivery platforms but reduced content; added commercial value to content though the sale of books, magazines and DVD’s; constant repetition and recycling of content; and the creation of media celebrities associated with the broadcaster. The significance of such commercialising activities would be a fit subject for exploration on RN’s Media Report. But that’s been axed along with a number of other programs, as June Factor pointed out in Arena Magazine no. 98.

These shifts in the ABC have helped obscure its role as public broadcaster with a mission that diverges from commercial media. So perhaps it ought not to be a shock that Murdoch was chosen for the Boyers. And now that Murdoch’s company is in partnership with ABC books he can publish and profit from his own lectures. That’s just the beginning. No doubt we will see the ABC carry ads for Murdoch’s publishing house in the near future. In the meantime we look forward to the ABC carrying on with its fierce spirit of independence, and speculate on whether it’s more likely that the ABC will carry any substantial critique of Murdoch in the future, or that Janet Albrechsten and Andrew Bolt will be chosen to deliver future Boyer Lectures.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications Editor.