'Radio Wars': Radio Australia's struggle

Radio Wars: Truth, propaganda and the struggle for Radio Australia; Errol Hodge; Cambridge University Press, 1995; 324 pages, A$29.95

MELBOURNE, Australia (JP): Now, I understand how I ended up living in Australia. For what it is worth, it was thanks to Radio Australia. Since as early as I can recall, my parents always tuned in to the shortwave broadcast, and I grew up subliminally influenced with an awareness of Australia, if nothing else. I wish I could ask my late father and mother why they chose to listen to Radio Australia, and what they thought of its news and commentaries. I want to know if they would have confirmed that the objectives of the Australian government in broadcasting to the region were relished.

With its current broadcasts of 4-and-a-half-hours a day in nine languages, including Indonesian, Radio Australia claims a weekly audience of approximately 10 million.

Errol Hodge's Radio Wars not only details an honest historical account of Radio Australia, but it also tells a poignant story of a familiar journalistic struggle. The struggle between editorial independence and professional integrity on the one hand, and the temptation to capitulate to pressure from the authorities on the other.

In Radio Australia's case, persistence in editorial independence carried the risk of closure from withdrawal of funding. The overseas radio service was launched in 1939, several months after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, as a propaganda tool. Its brief was to explain Australia's and Britain's wartime policies to the peoples of the countries of Asia and Pacific. Though it was later run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ultimate control of its service lay in the hands of the Department of Information and the Department of External Affairs. Attempts to gloss over news reports were justified by the above departments as necessary in the name of national interest.

After the War, as the nation matured in the Cold War environment, the power play continued. However, the struggle inside Radio Australia for editorial independence often overlapped with the need for efficacy. With the Australian journalists' general tendency to report events as they were, not only did the service get into hot water with foreign government authorities, but as the result, had to face the wrath of their own government officials. Worse still, these officials had the power to pull the strings that could unravel the rug on which the journalists were standing.

The book also traces successive Australian governments, and their attitudes in the international political arena, from that of Sir Robert Menzies' Liberal government to the present Prime Minister Keating's Labor government. It is interesting to note that the more conservative powers were more inclined to impose restrictions on the freedom of editors and journalists to choose what to report and how they would report it. A significant change of environment occurred after Gough Whitlam came to power. Within three weeks of becoming Prime Minister, Whitlam roundly endorsed Radio Australia's independence from the government, "Radio Australia will continue to be completely independent, completely free to report news as it truly is."

As it turned out, this carte blanche was not the ticket to the heaven of "report happily ever after", because the service ran into continuing conflicts with foreign governments, whose version of the "truth as it is" was different from that of Radio Australia's editors and journalists. These differences of opinion would have remained what they were, probably even enlarged the scope of debate, if they had not led to action harmful to Australia's relationship with the particular countries. In some cases, they even brought the expulsion of the service's correspondents from those countries, thus closing the areas from direct coverage.

At this point, it was argued that cultural sensitivity when covering countries in the Asia-Pacific is crucial. Guidance from the Department of External Affairs (now Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) experts was reluctantly accepted. Where the border between sensitivity and censorship lies is still an open question, to which an answer is not easily found.

Toward the end of his book, Hodge brought up the question whether the shortwave radio service was still relevant, with the advent of Australia Television, which broadcasts to the same area as the radio. However, considering the technical and financial limitations for viewers to be able to receive ATV's transmission, and the huge numbers still of shortwave radio audience, Radio Australia, it seems, has a long life expectancy.

If one can float through and weave past the numerous names that keep orbiting into the already starry sky, it is a very enlightening book. It even has comic parts evocative of the British television series, Yes Minister. It is the first book with such comprehensive account of the inside story of Radio Australia, which at the same time, throws light on much of the nation's foreign policy.

-- Dewi Anggraeni