Chapter 14: Excitement and fun with 3AW

And an important marriage in Bendigo

I was with Radio Melbourne 3AW for five years under news editor Corbett Shaw. Much of it was exciting; a lot was fun. Most importantly, it provided me with journalist skills that would not have been available elsewhere in Australia.

3AW was not just known for its first-class news service. During summer it had a mobile studio which moved around Melbourne beaches.

The mobile studios were very popular, but more important was the shark-spotting service provided by a light plane contracted to 3AW. During the hot weather when many people took to the sea in Port Philip Bay, the plane would fly back and forth around the coast watching for sharks in the shallower waters. Whenever one was spotted, the plane would circle above it, sounding a siren so that swimmers could return to the safety of the beach. The plane was also put to good use during bushfires, warning 3AW listeners who might be endangered by a fire.

When the mobile studio wasn’t in use on the beach or in a shopping parade, it was kept in the 3AW car park and sometimes used as a back-up studio. On one occasion, when it was being used as a back-up, presenter Denis Gibbons, the station prankster, turned the park fire hose on it, almost drowning out the broadcast. I don’t know how the on-air presenter handled the situation, but if it had been me, I would have had to put the blame on a passing thunderstorm.

On another occasion during a sports discussion program, Denis threw a live chook (Aussie slang for domestic fowl) into the studio, along with handfuls of food. Arthur Lyster was the sports presenter and saw the humour in the situation.

Not everyone cared for Denis’s pranks. When he was on air one day, a colleague placed his golf clubs in the boot of Denis’s car. When Denis finished his shift and set off for home, the colleague phoned the police to report that his golf clubs had been stolen by the owner of a car carrying Denis’s registration plates. Denis was stopped by police and couldn’t account for the presence of the golf clubs in his car. Eventually Denis’s colleague phoned the police and claimed that the “theft” had just been a mistake. The police weren’t amused.

Another prank — this by one of 3AW’s engineers — concerned the time pips. For reasons that I now can’t remember, 3AW was the source of the pips, which were fed to the other commercial stations in Melbourne. So on April 1 at 8am, the engineer let the initial short pips go through, but when the main long pip came, he replaced it with a recording of a lion’s roar. Very funny.

A further joke, organised by one of the newsroom journalists, concerned an English reporter who had managed to annoy a lot of people in the short time he’d been with 3AW. When he was out on a story the e and the r were switched on his typewriter. This mattered as the reporter was not a touch typist and needed to look at the keyboard when typing a story. Hence, whenever he tapped e up came r. Things were made worse because the journalist in charge of the newsroom kept telling him to hurry up with the story. Eventually, he was put out of his misery and not long after he left 3AW to return to work with more agreeable people in London.

One final prank: The newsreaders rarely had a chance to check bulletins in advance. One day — I assume it was on one of Corbett Shaw’s days off — a bulletin contained a story saying that the duty newsreader had died. As names were always in full caps in bulletins, he spotted this duff story and put it to one side. Fortunately.

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A huge and very entertaining story was when the Beatles visited Melbourne in June 1964. A Liverpudlian colleague, John Fraser, DJ Tony Doherty and I were the reporters assigned by 3AW to cover the Fab Four's arrival in Melbourne. None of us had expected to be part of such an astonishing experience. There were massive crowds to greet the group's plane when it touched down at Essendon Airport. John Fraser, who had a very strong Liverpudlian accent, had done very little live broadcasting, but he was the perfect choice to cover the arrival. We then raced the Beatles back into Melbourne's Central Business District and found the streets absolutely packed with their fans.

John and Tony did lots of live reports – sometimes having to stand on the roof of the radio car to get a clear view of the scene -- with me acting as producer. We met strong resistance to the live reports from Geoff Manion and the team back at 3AW's studios because they had no real appreciation of the size and intensity of the crowds, and anyway, they thought pop music was rather beneath them.

The TV commentator, Tony Charlton, described the amazing events as "a black day for Melbourne". It took him a long while to live down that remark, particularly as he was often publicly teased about it by In Melbourne Tonight TV host Graham Kennedy. 3AW DJ John Bright also attracted much fury when he announced on air that he would never play any Beatles songs on his program.

The Beatles did six gigs in Melbourne over three days. I had press tickets to one of them, but can’t remember anything other than the ear-wrecking screaming of the fans.

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There was the occasional embarrassing clanger at 3AW, the worst being when a music program was interrupted by a news flash announcing the unexpected death of a famous Australian woman. I can't now remember who the woman was, but the flash was immediately followed by the tune that had already been cued on the turntable by the DJ, unaware of what was to be revealed in the news flash. That tune was The Old Grey Mare She Ain't What She Used To Be.

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On September 24, 1966, Rosemary and I were married in the Forest Street Methodist Church in Bendigo. Although Rosemary’s family had never been religious and I was well on my way to being a full-blown atheist, we agreed to be married in church. We liked the minister, the Revd Harry Mackay, who kept the religious aspects of the service to a minimum. A highlight of the event was the playing of Jerusalem and Trumpet Voluntary by the local dance band trumpeter Reg Bridgland: https://www.preddonlee.com/trumpet.mp3

My best man was my schoolmate, police constable Ronald Winsall, and my groomsman, bank clerk Angus Grieve, a friend from my Quambatook days. Rosemary’s bridesmaids was my younger sister, Alison, Rosemary’s niece, Debbie James, and matron-of-honour was a good friend, Helen McKenzie.

Here’s the wedding invitation, designed in part by 3AW colleagues, journalist Greg Shackleton and his wife, press officer Shirley.

The reception at the Shamrock Hotel was a buffet affair which worked very well because it was much easier for guests to keep sneaking away to get the latest score in the Aussie Rules grand final between St Kilda and Collingwood. (St Kilda won by one point.)

Best man Ron Winsall, not long married himself, said it would be a good idea to take some food with us when we left on the honeymoon because we wouldn’t get a chance to eat much at the reception. He found a small cardboard box and began to fill it with sandwiches, but he was stopped by Rosemary’s grandfather, Dudley James, who accused him of “stealing my granddaughter’s food”). Ron explained what he was doing and Dudley allowed him to continue.

A tradition back then was that the bride changed into a “going away outfit”. This was expected to be a very formal outfit, but Rosemary and I had other ideas and both changed into casual clothes to the astonishment of our more conservative relatives and friends.

Another tradition back then was to keep honeymoon locations a secret. God only knows why. There was no logic to this. Anyway, during Ron Winsall’s speech as best man at the Shamrock Hotel reception, he gleefully told everyone that our first night would be spent at Shepparton, our second night in Sydney and the rest of the honeymoon in the Sandpiper Flats on Queensland’s Gold Coast. To prove this, he waved our travel documents which he had removed from my suitcase. Very funny until we got to Shepparton and found that Ron had forgotten to put our documents, including bank books, back in my suitcase. Next day he had to drive to Essendon Airport and air-freight the documents to Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney for our collection before we headed north to the Gold Goast.

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On my days off from 3AW, Rosemary and I would often drive to Bendigo to see her parents. Val and Jim Batson, and friends from my 3BO days. On one such visit, there was a Victorian State Government Music for the People in Bendigo’s Capital Theatre. The star performer was the internationally-renowned baritone, Ronal Jackson. During the interval, the guests-of-honour, the Mayor Dick Turner and the local State MP, Bob Trethewey, went on the stage to make speeches of welcome. They made a point of heaping praise on the performance of Ronal, almost trying to outdo each other even though neither had attended the concert. There was just one problem, Ronal had been held up on his way to Bendigo and was too late to take his slot in the first half of the show. When he did appear on stage, he joked that he had never before been the recipient of such high praise for a performance that he had yet to give.

By any journalistic standards, the fact that Turner and Trethewey, as guests-of-honour, had not bothered to turn up at the concert should have made the pages of the Bendigo Advertiser. But no, the timid Advertiser bosses were mates of both men and didn’t wish to see them embarrassed.

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The biggest local story in 1967 had to be in December when Harold Holt, the 17th prime minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in the sea near Portsea, Victoria. No-one saw him disappear, as he refused to have a security guard with him when he was off duty. An enormous search operation was mounted, but his body was never recovered.

Although Holt was a keen swimmer he was presumed to have drowned, or perhaps been attacked by a shark. Initial reports spoke just of a VIP missing. It was 3AW’s political roundsman, Frank O’Brien, who revealed it was Harold Holt.

A number of conspiracy theories surfaced about Holt’s disappearance, most famously the suggestion that he was a spy for the People’s Republic of China and that he had been picked by a Chinese submarine.

A side bar to this story: The authorities in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern bizarrely chose to name its main pool The Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre. But being Australia, it quickly became widely referred to as “Dead Harry’s”.

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Another huge story was the execution by hanging of Ronald Ryan in February 1967 at Pentridge Prison in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg. Brian Morley, who was then News Editor of 3AW, was one of the official witnesses at the execution. It was an event that haunted him until he died in July 2023. Brian’s powerful account is contained in his blog: My memoirs | brianmorley (wordpress.com) Here are a few sentences from his account:

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3AW was the first Australian broadcasting station to my knowledge to issue reporters with cassette recorders, rather than the very limiting Stellavox miniature reel-to-reel machines that could record just five minutes or so at a time. We used Philips machines which were the first cassette recorders on the market.

The cassette recorders transformed the way we worked at 3AW because they could record half an hour without a break and they gave reporters much greater flexibility. It became standard practice for AW reporters to switch on their cassette recorders the moment they arrived on the scene of, say, a fire or road accident to gather background sounds for laying under the voice report from the scene.”

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My favourite shift was when I was a daytime reporter chasing stories all over Melbourne in the 3AW radio car. Quite frequently, it meant going to Melbourne’s Essendon Airport to interview celebrities arriving for concerts, conventions or TV show appearances. I soon lost any sense of awe or intimidation when meeting these people. They were simply someone who might provide me with a story. But interviews didn’t always go as planned. Take the time Eartha Kitt arrived for a concert in 1963. She came off the plane carrying a baby. She sat down in the lounge with the baby on her lap as I prepared to begin our interview. In what must have been the dumbest of dumb questions I asked her: “Is that your child?” She looked at me in astonishment and replied “Of course. Who else’s would it be?!”

Being a pro, and despite my stupid question, she did the interview, which was not among my best: https://www.preddonlee.com/IDR_interview_Eartha_Kitt_1963.mp3

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Despite Corbett’s determination to be the first with all the big stories, there was one massive failure in February 1964. On February 10 he did his usual 6am call to the newsroom to discuss the possible headline stories for the breakfast bulletins. The call was taken by a cadet who best remains unnamed. The cadet gave Corbett the planned headlines, then added: “And a couple of boats have run into each other off the New South Wales coast.” Corbett didn’t think that sounded interesting enough to be a headline. He would have expressed a different view had the cadet used the correct description of “warships” instead of “boats”. As 3AW’s rivals were quick to report, the Royal Australian Navy aircraft carrier, Melbourne, had sliced in half the Royal Australian Navy destroyer, Voyager, while on manoeuvres, with the loss of 82 lives. Soon after, the cadet moved to another media organisation to advance his career.

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Unexpected events are a large part of a news journalist’s life. One Saturday as Rosemary and I were dressed in our finest for a night’s entertainment somewhere or other, I received a phone call from Corbett saying that a particularly nasty murder had been uncovered in the Shepparton area and I must must go there immediately. I told him that I would have to take Rosemary and he said that was okay. The decomposed bodies of a young couple had been found in the bush. The police were not being helpful, so I went off to see what I could learn while Rosemary remained behind in the bar of the motel where we and the murder squad were accommodated. The detective in charge clearly fancied Rosemary and told her everything he wouldn’t tell me. So I got the story, but not through the expected channel. (It took police more than 10 years to link the murders to a long time criminal.)

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The hypnotist Rocky Martin (later renamed Martin St James) whom I’d first seen in Charlton (Chapter 5), was appearing at the Tivoli Theatre. Because of my keen interest in hypnotism I went along to see his show. Foolishly, I decided to go on stage to get first-hand experience of how he operated. I was among those he “put under” and I won a prize as the best subject of the night. As far as I was concerned that was it, but it wasn’t. He had done something that shouldn’t have been done: he implanted an instruction for when I was back at 3AW next morning. At exactly 10am I stopped what I was doing and ran around the newsroom for several minutes waving a rubbish bin shouting "We must get rid of the leprechauns". After a while I returned to my desk as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. Many of my colleagues had been tipped off about what would occur and found it very funny, but Corbett Shaw wasn’t one of them. He wanted to fire me on the spot, but relented when the circumstances were explained.

Next chapter: My final months with 3AW and my move abroad.

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