by Mark Colvin
Chapter 19
A Deliberate Middle Finger
LIKE MOST YOUNG Sydneysiders at 11 a.m. on 19 January 1975, I wasn’t at the Double J studios for the station’s first broadcast. I listened with friends in our share-flat in Coogee. In fact, I was convinced I had missed out altogether on the chance to be in on the station’s first year.
As I recall, 2JJ test broadcasts had been ringing through our flat for a couple of days—they’d been playing wall-to-wall music—but this was the launch, the mission statement, and the first time we could hear the station’s spoken voice. The minutes leading up to eleven o’clock felt momentous: a complex montage of sound and music, culminating in a Cape Canaveral countdown and the unmistakable opening chords of Skyhooks’ ‘You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good in Bed’. Then the voice of Holger Brockman, admitting he was nervous, something you didn’t usually do on the radio in those days, and welcoming the audience. And on to the second record, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
It may seem quaint now, but at the time, every element of this—every track, everything about the way it was framed—meant something to a generation that felt frustrated and deprived of its own voice. Sydney radio then was dominated by commercial stations, and the most powerful when it came to the youth market was the Catholic Church–owned 2SM. Like all the other commercials, 2SM was limited and conservative in its choice of music: limited in the sense that it had a high-rotation format which only played a certain rota of records; conservative in that a large amount of music was simply banned on moral grounds. They even bleeped out the ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy’ in John Lennon’s ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’.
The opening Skyhooks track was one of those the commercials wouldn’t allow you to hear. It came from an album, Living in the 70’s, that had registered huge sales with the public, but some of its best tracks were on the commercial radio blacklist. Kicking off with a song that was explicitly about sex—especially on the Sabbath—was a deliberate middle finger not only to the rest of the Sydney radio industry, but also to the ‘moral majority’. It said a couple of other things, too: its economical length and unforgettable hook said this was not just going to be a station that played long, self-indulgent guitar solos or whole sides of Frank Zappa albums, and that this was going to be a station that supported Australian music.
Then there was the significance of Holger Brockman. His voice had long been familiar to 2SM listeners, but not his name. As was common in commercial radio in the 1960s and 1970s, he’d had to broadcast under a pseudonym, because ‘Bill Drake’ was less likely to put off the audience. Even the nervousness, whether deliberate or not, made a statement of its own: it said this was going to be a station that spoke naturally, not in the pumped-up tones of specially trained announcer-clowns with ‘stacks-ofwax-revive-forty-five’ slogans, and who introduced records with the same hype that they used to advertise motorbikes or icy poles.
And as for ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, that was also an obvious up-yours to the wowsers, for its explicitly satanic content alone. Released in 1969, it had never been played on commercial radio: it was six minutes long, and the commercials’ rotation formats allowed for nothing longer than three. The choice of a Stones classic also said up-front, ‘We’re going to be playing the stuff you’ve been listening to. There’s a lot of it, some of which you already know, but even if you’ve been shopping at import stores, there’ll be some you don’t. Let us experiment for you.’
It was a great beginning, and it reminded me most of my teens listening to John Peel and Kenny Everett on pirate radio in England. I wanted in, but my cadetship would not formally be over till the passing of a full year, and I was therefore not eligible for the short hop across William Street to the 2JJ offices until mid-February—and even then, a vacancy had to open up. As it turned out, I only had to wait a few weeks. The Double J newsroom on launch day consisted of Ros Lawson, John Arden and Tony Maniaty. John, who I would run across years later in his role as a distinguished Rome correspondent, decided the place wasn’t for him, and ABC News management called me in and told me that since my cadetship was officially at an end, I was next in line.
I had just turned twenty-two, and I was now one of just three journalists given the job of bringing some kind of news service to an audience of young people our age—a news service that reflected their interest in music, drug policy, the environment, unemployment and education, as well as the standard fare of traditional ABC journalism: politics, economics, crime, transport. Given that, in the early days, the first bulletin was at 6 a.m. and the last at 10 p.m., there were three shifts: early morning, day and evening. So, effectively, straight out of a year’s cadetship, I was producing my own news bulletins every day, though with the invaluable help of the experienced and unflappable production assistant Patti Winter.
Commercial rents were extremely low in the 1970s, and Double J had an enormous amount of office space, much of it half-empty. But otherwise its budget was tiny. It was set up explicitly as an experiment, using the ABC’s old standby parliamentary transmitter, and 1975 was effectively a probationary year. Its founding had been a Whitlam initiative, and as ABC Deputy General Manager Clement Semmler made clear on his retirement in 1977 in a Sydney Morning Herald interview, he was one of those who had fought against it from within: ‘2JJ should never have been introduced. Its music is only fit for commercial stations.’ Those who opposed the station from outside the ABC ranged from bishops (of more than one denomination) to the Festival of Light’s crusading Reverend Fred Nile.
There was an abiding sense of impermanence about the place, reflected in a scarcity of furniture and equipment. The two coordinators, Marius Webb and Ron Moss, had desks by a window in a big room that also served as a meeting place. Then there were desks and chairs dotted around cubicle offices. But in the communal areas, apart from a few old sofas rescued from skips or people’s houses, and some beanbags, most people, when we had meetings, sat or lay on the floor. The newsroom was a frosted-glass box in one corner, just big enough to cram in two or three people at a time.
In retrospect, the saddest thing for me about the lack of funding is that the tape budget was so low. As journalists, we edited by ‘dubbing’—transferring sound and voice from a tape on one machine onto a tape on another. It not only required real skill to record like this on the fly without your edit points being audible, but in the absence of fresh tapes, it had one gigantic drawback: every edit you did meant you were wiping over another recording. And if there was no money for tapes, there was certainly none for setting up and collating an archive. The result is that very little audio remains from the first few years of Double J.
Another consequence of the lack of budget was the studios. They were tiny and cramped: I believe they’d originally been dug out of the basement of the ABC’s tower-block offices in Forbes Street during World War II, for use in emergencies. So basically, we were broadcasting from a bomb shelter. Our offices, meanwhile, were down the hill at 177 William Street.
What did that mean in practice? To get the 6 a.m. bulletin to air, you gathered up your scripts and tapes, dashed to the stairwell, ran at breakneck speed down several flights of stairs, then ran up the sandstone Forbes Street steps. Often enough it was raining, sometimes there was a drunk passed out on the stairs, occasionally a prostitute would be engaging a client against the balustrade, and by 8 or 8.30 a.m., the pavement was regularly blocked by schoolgirls arriving for the day at the adjacent SCEGGS (Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School). You then ran up what was known as ‘Cardiac Hill’—probably only 30 or 40 metres, but very steep—shot in past the commissionaire, raced down some stairs, swerved down a corridor, and, panting, fell into the studio. Then it was back down the hill to knock out the 6.30 a.m. headlines: Patti took them up while you started preparing a new bulletin for 7 a.m. The same at 7.30, 8 and 8.30 a.m. It was an insane system, given the ease with which someone could have rigged up a line straight from the office to the s
tudio, but this was the 1970s ABC, where even the issue of a stopwatch required forms in triplicate, signed and countersigned, in processes that could take weeks or months.
Taken together, all these factors meant that, effectively, the Double J newsroom was running hard throughout that first year just to keep up. We had no Canberra correspondent, for instance, in what quickly proved to be one of the most hectic and intense years of Australian federal politics of the twentieth century.
The Whitlam government was by now in a precarious state. Labor had won the double-dissolution election the year before, but its leader had made a series of miscalculations which endangered his ability to govern: notably, assuming that state premiers would follow convention when it came to replacing retiring or deceased senators. And in March 1975, the danger became greater. Billy Snedden, the ineffectual and uncharismatic leader Whitlam had defeated in 1974, fell victim to a leadership challenge from the extremely determined Malcolm Fraser. Snedden might possibly have exercised some compunction about exploiting Whitlam’s self-created Senate weakness, but Fraser said, in his first speech as leader of the Opposition, that he had none:
If we do make up our minds at some stage that the Government is so reprehensible that an Opposition must use whatever power is available to it, then I’d want to find a situation in which Mr Whitlam woke up one morning finding the decision had been made and finding that he had been caught with his pants well and truly down.
Add to this a growing awareness, through a string of media revelations, that Whitlam and a cabal of senior ministers had authorised a massive loan of deeply questionable legality, and rumblings of a sex scandal involving the man who was both deputy prime minister and treasurer, Jim Cairns, and you get a picture of a fast-moving national story which was consuming Canberra, but which we had to cover at a distance.
It helped that by the middle of the year, our complement of journalists increased to four. There were Lee Duffield, Nick Franklin, Jim Middleton and me. I was by far the least experienced. We somehow provided basic coverage of state, federal and international news in terms that 18–30-year-olds could understand, and with the addition of the extra pair of hands, started being able to broaden the scope of what we did. But events in Canberra were magnetic, and it was hardly as if we had no stake in the outcome: the general assumption within the station was that any change of government would almost certainly mean the end of Double J. Not necessarily, as you might assume, because the station was politically left-wing, though some of it was. I prefer to describe it with another epithet: subversive.
If I could take you back in a time machine to that station in that year, it might not strike you instantly as such. The station output that played through the speakers in every office was as likely to consist of Fleetwood Mac or Electric Light Orchestra as it was Frank Zappa or John McLaughlin. I occasionally catch myself listening to a ‘classic hits’ FM station and thinking how much it sounds like early Double J. But that’s the nature of time passing: today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s classic. And especially in 1975, there was a huge backlog of great music: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the solo work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, the early, bluesy Rod Stewart, Maria Muldaur, Bob Dylan, Santana, Minnie Ripperton, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Al Green, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley … some of these artists were just starting out, some were in their prime, some were already dead. But for our audience, even if they’d heard some of these artists’ singles, Double J was an album station, and as such most of what they were hearing was new.
That in itself was a subversion of the status quo, but it was the station’s attitude that infuriated its opponents. From the casual irreverence of breakfast presenter Alan McGirvan and his companion ‘Captain Goodvibes the surfing pig’, to the first documentary the station aired, The Ins and Outs of Love, this was a station that wasn’t going to play by the old rules. It was sex and language as much as politics that had bishops and politicians demanding the station’s closure. Yes, those were more likely to be issues that raised the ire of small- and large-‘c’ conservatives, but they were in essence social, and not political, questions.
This engendered a certain sense of siege. Double J was both a loose-knit organisation, with an almost anarchistic way of self-government, and a very tight social group, with a strong sense of its own identity against the world. And that put me and my immediate colleagues—as journalists seconded from the ABC newsroom, with one other, John Francis, seconded from ABC Current Affairs—in a peculiar situation. We were trying to evolve a form of journalism which reconciled a point of view, that of the young people we were broadcasting to, with the traditional values of balance and ‘objectivity’ enshrined in ABC journalism. In my view, this was not impossible: it’s possible to reach conclusions from a given set of facts, as long as you don’t reverse the process, starting with the conclusions and hammering the facts to fit them. Nick Franklin, for instance, was a huge influence on me, with his dogged, combative style of interviewing providing proof that you can be persistent and curious without being rude. And our dealings with the nascent industry of spin-doctoring in our coverage of state politics made us more determined not to take anything or anyone on face value. In that sense, all good journalism is or should be subversive.
But there was also the deliberate choice to cover subjects like sexual health, teenage pregnancy, abortion, feminism, the environment, the then-prevalent autocracy widespread in schools, the appalling state of NSW prisons. Even talking about these things got under some people’s skin, to a degree it’s difficult to convey today. Where we believed we were getting our contemporaries to talk honestly about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and homosexuality, the ABC’s own deputy general manager said, in his Sydney Morning Herald interview, ‘Kids think it smart to listen to 2JJ but its programs are filled with smut and innuendo. It exploits the permissive society.’
‘The permissive society’: even the phrase is redolent of the 1970s. A Google data search shows that its use peaked in the middle of that decade, before falling away steeply in the early 1980s, seldom to be used again. Whether we liked it or not, Double J was seen as the vanguard of the permissive society, which made us a target. Against this background, it was probably not surprising that the constitutional crisis which began in October 1975 was as polarising for the station as it was for the wider community.
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Malcolm Fraser’s decision to block the government’s supply Bills—effectively its legal authority to pay for the business of government—felt to many at Double J like a death knell. Many, but by no means all, of our audience felt the same way. Whitlam’s election in 1972 had been to quite a large extent youth-driven, and not all the gilt had worn off three years later. And it was natural that listeners to a Whitlam-initiated youth station might be friendly to the government that created it. Some at the station felt so strongly that what Fraser was doing was unconstitutional that they wanted to campaign against it. They began planning a ‘Day of Rage’ in protest, a move which caused the first major rift between the newsroom and the rest of the station. Since everything was decided democratically at big, loose meetings, and since we journalists were vastly outnumbered, we could do nothing but argue that such a sustained and one-sided piece of broadcasting would be unbalanced, unfair and contrary to the ABC charter, and insist that we would have nothing to do with it.
The Day of Rage went ahead. It was a Saturday, a day when due to our lack of budget there was no news service anyway, so our ‘boycott’ as journalists was, strictly speaking, theoretical. But our fears were realised, as in practice people who wanted to defend Fraser were either blocked from going on air or cut off in mid-conversation. At the post-mortem meeting the following Monday, Holger Brockman questioned whether we really worked for the ABC in the sense of having to obey its charter. Jim Middleton suggested he take a good look at his pay slip, with the ABC’
s name and logo prominently displayed at the top. Shortly afterwards, Lee Duffield got up, walked across the room and put his hand forcefully on the mouth of the Day of Rage’s chief proponent, David Ives, shutting him up in mid-speech. In the shocked silence that followed, Lee said, ‘That’s exactly what you did to those people on Saturday.’ It was a point strongly made, and although there were no backdowns on either side, the fight we put up did help to establish the independence of the newsroom, and to create a (sometimes wary) respect for what we did which would stand us in good stead in the weeks to come.
I was at work early on 11 November 1975, churning out bulletins through the breakfast shift on what was obviously going to be an important day in Australian politics, though few outside Malcolm Fraser’s inner circle guessed just how important. As ever, it was frustrating to have to cover a major Canberra story without a dedicated Canberra correspondent: it meant constant runs across busy William Street to get fresh copy and tapes of the ABC’s press gallery correspondents, and phone calls to whichever reporters in Parliament House, like Mungo MacCallum, had the time and inclination to speak to a tiny ratbag radio station aimed at teenagers and twenty-somethings. Still, in Sydney I was working alongside Jim Middleton, a razor-sharp political intellect with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian political history, who would later, of course, be for many years the ABC’s chief political correspondent.
In my recollection, we fully expected the day to play out as a series of purely parliamentary dramas, with Bills moving from the Lower House to the Upper, and everything depending on how the knife-edge Senate numbers would play out—a game of nerves in which the key question might well be whether Malcolm Fraser’s steely determination would hold the full backing of every one of his senators, or whether one or more of them might cross the floor. (We have learned since from the men themselves that senators Don Jessop and Neville Bonner considered crossing the floor, and had they done so, Bonner said two decades on, the crisis would have ended ‘in a matter of hours’.) We fed constant updates into Keri Phillips’ program throughout the morning as best we could, then when parliament broke for lunch, so, with some relief, did we.