It was, in many ways, an inauspicious beginning.
Forty years ago the radio station now broadcasting as 3RRR launched with an opening address from the president of the RMIT council – followed by 25 minutes of literature reviews.
The Melbourne of 1976 was a very different place. Community radio was a new and radical idea, regarded with suspicion by many politicians and overt hostility by commercial broadcasters. It didn’t help that the people keenest to make use of the university’s temporary educational licence were enthusiasts for music the rest of the city found almost incomprehensible.
The station quickly became the only place in Melbourne you could hear punk rock – even if, in the early years, you had to be within the campus to get reception.
As Mark Phillips records in Radio City, his history of the station, the early years of Triple R were gloriously chaotic, dominated by legendary figures including Bohdan X, the British-born frontman of the band JAB, who used his Friday-night show to introduce listeners to the best punk and post-punk artists.
“I used to love Bohdan X,” Tism’s Humphrey B Flaubert recalled, “because he was the most shambolic, crap radio announcer I’d ever heard in my life. He just sounded like he didn’t give a fuck and there’d be lengthy pauses and he sounded like he was pissed the whole time.”
In the same period, Martin Armiger’s New Wave Breakfast Show would frequently begin with 20 minutes of dead air as the hungover host struggled with the early start.
After someone played a Richard Pryor sketch in which the comedian used the word “motherfucker”, the station promised broadcasting authorities that offensive tracks in the record library would be daubed with nail polish so that they couldn’t be accidentally aired.
Such precautions didn’t prevent another near-fatal scandal later in 1978. The muckraking Melbourne tabloid Truth used the headline “Archbishop Slams Radio Beauty” to publicise Sir Frank Little’s outrage about Triple R playing what the tabloid dubbed “sex music” by the “attractive feminist” Robyn Archer.
These days, of course, the woman whose songs once so discomforted Sir Frank is better known as Robyn Archer AO, a mainstay of Australian culture.
That progression’s typical of Triple R’s own evolution. The station’s alumni is a roll call of today’s entertainment talent: Greig Pickhaver, Dave O’Neil, Brian Nankervis, Kate Langbroek, Marieke Hardy, John Safran, Dave Hughes, Ross Stevenson, Francis Leach, the Coodabeen Champions and many, many more.
Perhaps more importantly, the alternative culture Triple R championed has, over the past four decades, taken over the mainstream.
In 1978 the station celebrated its Christmas party with a gig at RMIT’s Storey Hall, headlined by Nick Cave’s band the Boys Next Door – a group that, back then, you couldn’t hear anywhere other than public radio.
These days Cave is regarded as a kind of expat national treasure, so much so that it’s hard to believe he once posed in a T-shirt proclaiming “A good cop is a dead cop”.
Quentin Crisp notes somewhere that “time is on the side of the outcast”, since “those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis”.
There’s something of that in Triple R.
From its scrappy beginnings, the station now operates from purpose-built studios it owns in Brunswick, with more than 200 volunteer broadcasters producing and presenting more than 60 programs and scores of regular segments reaching approximately 440,000 people each week. It hosts live music in its own performance space; it produces outside broadcasts throughout the state; it sponsors myriad, gigs and festivals and other cultural events.
There is no comparable community broadcaster anywhere in Australia – and perhaps not anywhere in the world.
In some respects, the (relatively) polished shows you hear on today’s station seem a long way from those humble beginnings back in 1976. But in other ways, the values forged back then have only become more paramount.
After all, the station remains funded primarily by listener subscriptions – and that’s a business model entirely at odds with 21st century values. You can, after all, listen to the radio without paying a cent. Why, then, should anyone subscribe?
The deep affection that Melbourne has for Triple R goes back to the sense of community that the station has built and maintained. Subscribers don’t just fund the station. It belongs to them and they belong to it. Listeners become volunteers; volunteers become broadcasters. The people who pony up a subscription each year are the same people who come to the gigs and call in to correct the breakfast newsreader’s mangled pronunciation.
Back in 1976, the station’s first listeners spoke of how its broadcasts helped them find their tribe. Forty years later, in a society in which market values increasingly dominate, the need for human connection seems more important than ever.
That’s the reason Triple R still matters.
• Jeff Sparrow is a presenter on the Triple R Breakfasters show. The exhibition On Air: 40 Years of 3RRR is showing at the State Library of Victoria from 18 November until 27 January
