‘Where’s our transmitter?’ How the Whitlam dismissal nearly silenced radio 4ZZZ

At noon on Monday, December 8, 1975, John Woods, a TV journalist from Adelaide fired from his Channel Nine job for taking part in a gay rights march, spoke into the microphone in the basement of the student union building at the University of Queensland.

“You are listening to 4ZZ-FM in Brisbane, bringing you stereo FM rock on a frequency of 105.7 megahertz,” Woods said.

“4ZZ-FM is Brisbane’s first new radio station in over 30 years, and first ever stereo FM station …

“While some people may not enjoy some of the material we put to air we certainly don’t deny them the right to switch us off. To attempt to impose limitations or restrictions on public broadcasting is to seriously threaten a fundamental liberty, that of free speech.”

He then played a song intended as a statement: Won’t Get Fooled Again by British mod rockers The Who.

Volunteers, announcer Helen Hambling (second left) and station engineer Ross Dannecker (centre) getting ready for a 4ZZ-FM (4ZZZ) test broadcast, 1975.Credit: Greg Perry/State Library of Queensland

The birth of community radio in Queensland did not happen in a slow news week. That same day, journalist Roger East was murdered in Dili – East Timor having been invaded by Indonesia the day before. Australia was heading into a snap election one week later, following the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in November.

Indeed, the premature ousting of Labor was just one in a series of unfortunate events that almost stopped 4ZZZ in its tracks.

Just prior to the government’s sacking, the Labor minister Moss Cass had approved 12 licences for community radio stations, including one for a scrappy bunch of radicals, feminists and music fans in the University of Queensland’s student union.

4ZZZ’s future was thrown into jeopardy following the Whitlam Dismissal in 1975.Credit: Michael Howard

“When [Malcolm] Fraser was put in as the interim prime minister, there was no guarantee that those licences would ever get signed off on,” says Heather Anderson, author of new book-length history of 4ZZZ, People Powered Radio.

Ultimately, the acting Postmaster-General in Fraser’s caretaker government, Peter Nixon, reluctantly decided it was a fait accompli. “The ink was still wet on the licence when they went to air,” Anderson says.

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Queensland’s first community radio station began the way it would continue for the next 50 years: amid the fires of dissent and oppression.

In July 1971, hundreds of peaceful protesters against the tour of the South African Springboks rugby team were attacked, pursued and beaten by about 500 police in Wickham Terrace, given carte blanche by premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The student union hosted a fiery public meeting the next day.

“People were angry as all hell because of the bashings,” recalls Jim Beatson.

Beatson was studying for an honours degree in Australian history, on the history of communism in Queensland, and as a member of the Labor Party had been active in the Brisbane radical movement of the 1960s.

Local media were indifferent to the bashings or had actively taken the side of the police. An alternative voice was desperately needed.

“And John Stanwell out of the blue said: ‘Why don’t we set up draft resister radio?’ ”

Stanwell, a law student who would later spearhead the station’s fundraising through ‘Joint Effort’ gigs, explains: “In Melbourne and Sydney at the university campuses, the Draft Resisters Union, which was the public face of the anti-conscription movement, ran a sort of protest pirate radio, and got huge media coverage.”

Beatson, who had experience of pirate radio having spent two years in London, consulted an academic and learned that pirate broadcasts are easily triangulated and shut down. He realised the only way to go was to obtain a legal and permanent radio licence.

The beauty of this approach was the fact radio licences came under federal jurisdiction – free from the hectoring of Joh’s goons, unlike left-wing publishing ventures such as the newspaper Beatson worked on, The Brisbane Line, which lasted three issues in 1968.

Trish NiIvor and Jim Beatson reading for the 4ZZ-FM (4ZZZ) test broadcast at the 1975 University of Queensland Orientation Week.Credit: Greg Perry/State Library of Queensland

After Whitlam’s election in 1972, Beatson, editor of the student union paper Semper Floreat, Alan Knight, and engineering student Ross Dannecker formed the University of Queensland Media Committee to lobby the federal government for an FM licence. Beatson made trips to Canberra and Sydney, attending a conference in 1974.

“All these Trotskyites from Sydney and Maoists from Melbourne were there, and they stood up and started talking about how minorities weren’t having access to the media,” he recalls.

Inspired by the UQ Media Committee’s music expert, Stuart Matchett, Beatson stood up and told them: never mind minorities – majorities weren’t being served by the current system. “We wanted FM radio because the biggest-selling music in Australia was LPs like Deep Purple and Pink Floyd, not [singles], which dominated commercial radio.

“Everyone said it was the speech of the day, and we went from being a collection of unknowns to being thought of as the smartest people campaigning.”

“They weren’t just lobbying for Triple Z to get a licence,” Anderson notes. “They were lobbying for the federal government to establish a community radio sector.” (There are now around 450 community radio services across the country.)

“They weren’t just lobbying for Triple Zed to get a licence, they were lobbying to establish a community radio sector.”

Heather Anderson

Following the conference Beatson met with Jane Blaxland at the government Media Department about their licence application.

“And she says, ‘Jim, the problem for your group is nobody in Sydney or Melbourne’s ever heard of you. You need people writing letters, like at least one a day,’” Beatson says.

A team of seven volunteers was rallied – including Helen Hambling, who would become one of the station’s first full-time announcers, and future Four Corners producer Marian Wilkinson – to contact community organisations to write letters of support to the PMG and to Whitlam’s Minister for the Media, Moss Cass.

In Anderson’s book, Wilkinson recalls “spending hours and hours and hours and hours on Triple Z work to get the station started ... It was full on. It consumed our lives”.

“They’re the unsung heroes,” Beatson says, “this group of feminists that literally rang every church, every sports group, saying ‘if we get a licence, you’ll get a spot on the station.’

“Jane Blaxland rang me up and said, ‘Jim, your campaign’s been unbelievably successful, we are getting at least six letters a day coming in.’ ”

John Stanwell at 4ZZZ in 1975. Stanwell was the first Finance and Promotions Coordinator at the station.Credit: Daryl Jones/Radical Times Archive

If they needed further encouragement, Beatson was invited to join the Media Department’s Working Party on Public Broadcasting and flown to Sydney to work on policy for two months. The white, chauffeur-driven government Mercedes-Benz that picked him up from his parents’ house in Pinjarra Hills much amused his mother.

Aware that a crisis was looming for Whitlam, Cass fast-tracked cabinet approval for 12 experimental FM licences, one of them for 4ZZ through the University of Queensland Student Union. Beatson, always ahead of the game, had already ordered the transmitter.

The station was due to begin broadcasting on December 1, 1975. Organisers from the Workers Industrial Union instructed volunteers on how to lay bricks, and the studio was built entirely by volunteers, led by architecture student Kevin Hayes.

But after the dismissal, things got hairy.

“I rang up the agent in Sydney and said, ‘Where’s our transmitter and antenna? We need it ASAP.’ And he said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ And two days later he rang back and said, ‘It’s been lost on the wharf in New York. They’re searching for it now.’

“He said, ‘[The transmitter’s] been lost on the wharf in New York. They’re searching for it now.’”

Jim Beatson

“I reckon what happened was – and I’ve got no proof of this – Malcolm Fraser rang ASIO, ASIO rang the CIA, and organised for the transmitter and the antenna to get lost. Because it didn’t arrive for another six months.”

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable theory,” says Anderson, with a laugh. “There were definite connections with the CIA and what was happening in Australia... It probably didn’t matter, because ultimately, Triple Z only ended up with a low-power licence to begin with, so they wouldn’t have been able to use that transmitter [at first]. But it did cause major concern.”

Then a new problem loomed. Beatson received a call from one of his friends from the working party, advising that Special Branch files on 4ZZ’s leading figures were currently sitting on the new minister’s desk. Because protesting was effectively illegal in Queensland, anyone arrested at a protest had a record. Beatson himself estimated he had been arrested 16 times over his opposition to the Vietnam War.

“And then we were told that Fred Green, the head of the PMG’s department, was flying up to see whether we were suitable people to hold a licence.

“And so I said, ‘we need a cleanskin.’”

The only member of their inner circle who had never been arrested was the engineer, Ross Dannecker. Beatson and Stanwell were hastily sacked by the student union and Dannecker appointed station co-ordinator. When Green arrived he met with Dannecker and some female volunteers, conservatively dressed.

“We weren’t entirely sure that it would work, but we knew the formal titles were pretty well irrelevant to the huge team we created,” Stanwell says.

The ruse did work. “He went back to Melbourne and said to the minister, ‘they got rid of all the radicals. The station coordinator, he’s apolitical,’” Beatson says.

The station went to air on December 8 on a home-made low-power transmitter. The next year, all radio call signs were required to have three letters, and the station officially became 4ZZZ.

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“It’s an incredible achievement that they were even able to start, to secure the licence,” says the subscriber-funded station’s outgoing manager, Jack McDonnell, who volunteered with 4ZZZ for seven years before taking the reins two years ago.

It’s been McDonnell’s task to organise the 50th anniversary celebrations, which he regards “a massive honour”. A special all-day broadcast will take place on December 8.

The station’s annual Hot 100 countdown – a tradition older than Triple J’s by 13 years – will take place on December 7 instead of January 1 to mark the anniversary.

With more than 3500 current subscribers, Triple Z’s future looks bright, McDonnell says, despite the “algorithm-based music environment”.

“I think the station will continue to grow over the next 50 years, connecting and broadcasting the voices of our communities.”

Anderson says that the story of 4ZZZ is one of resilience. “Whenever there’s been times of crisis, that’s when the broader community has stepped up. There was never an option that Triple Z was going to cease to exist.”

Beatson would leave the station shortly after it started, returning briefly in 1980 and again in 1993, when he negotiated with the former Communist Party of Australia to purchase the Barry Parade Building that is the station’s permanent home.

Now 80 and retired to the Gympie region, he believes the glory days of Triple Z were the early 1980s under Andy Nehl, now the Head of Griffith Journalism School, when it broke stories such as the Boggo Road Gaol Riots.

“The Triple Z project was led by people with big ambitions, with a professional outlook on how things worked in the grown-up world,” he says.

Marian Wilkinson would become deputy editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, executive producer of Four Corners and one of Australia’s most distinguished journalists. John Woods, the station’s first voice, worked extensively in radio, opened a restaurant in Ballina, and died in 2001.

John Stanwell, who now lives in Melbourne, would go on to be a rock promoter, to work at La Boite theatre, and at the Australia Council.

“If I was the individual that said at a meeting, ‘we should start a radio station’, it was not very thought through,” he says. “However, the actual idea, it turned out, had legs.”

Heather Anderson’s book People Powered Radio: Fifty Years of Australian Community Radio Station 4ZZZ (Palgrave Macmillan) is available direct from the station, retailers and the publisher. Andrew Stafford’s classic book Pig City (UQP), which recounts the origins of 4ZZZ, is still in print.

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