The ABC's international broadcaster, Radio Australia, started as a wartime anti-propaganda service, played a role in the race to the Moon and has endured through 83 turbulent years.
"The time has come for us to speak for ourselves."
During those war years, the battle for the minds and morale of Australians intensified. The axis powers' propaganda became more hysterical, claiming, among other things, that a Japanese armada was assembled to Australia's north, about to invade.In challenging this propaganda, the Australia Calling broadcasts had to straddle an ethical razor blade.
RA now began one of its heydays, changing from a government-operated service to an international broadcaster, not dissimilar to the BBC's own short-wave service. The audiences appreciated its work. In the early 1950s it came second in a poll of world short-wave listeners. Surveys throughout the 50s still regularly had RA at the or near the top of the popularity polling, tag-teaming with the much more heavily resourced BBC for top position.
Their local knowledge and contacts turned RA into a news gatherer that matured Australia's knowledge of these reporters' home countries. It wasn't without danger, however. Djajamihardja was only one of many journos to risk their lives for a story during the brittle Timor Lesté independence struggle. He was nearly killed by a rock thrown though his car window. He was then dragged out, and a gun was pointed at him as the guerrillas chanted: "Kill him, kill him.
For the Pacific, Isabelle Genoux fronted the cultural program In The Loop. Genoux remembers money was tight, and on one outside broadcast she had to work virtually solo from a hastily built shed in Vanuatu.The existing Pacific current affairs program, Pacific Beat, was tweaked to be FM friendly, with more live content aimed at listeners driving to work.
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