This is the story of one of the ABC’s best-kept secrets.

ABC Radio Australia was never intended to be a great secret. It was just the nature of the service that few Australians knew about it. When I hosted its breakfast program for nine years, I could count on one hand the number of people who knew what I was talking about when I told them I worked for RA.

Most people mistakenly thought it was the same thing as Radio National. I would have to explain, yet again, that this was our version of the BBC World Service, a worldwide broadcaster.

RA was founded at the start of World War II by prime minister Robert Menzies as an antidote to the disinformation being broadcast by Australia’s new enemies, Germany and Russia. The idea of Australia Calling, as the service was initially named, was to provide an antidote to this propaganda, to counter that aerial bilge with factual, balanced and fair reportage.

So with a small team of English, Spanish, Dutch and French broadcasters, a minuscule budget and some tiny transmitters in antiquated shacks in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia joined the short-wave age in December 1939.

Despite the low power, Menzies’s words were heard across the world:

“The time has come for us to speak for ourselves.”

These 10 words led Australia into a new era. At that time, Menzies was an avowed Britophile, whose government had, only two months before, followed Britain into a world war. Now we were demanding our own voice.

This demand for independence would escalate. Within a few years, Australia would displease Winston Churchill by choosing to form close ties with the United States.

During those war years, the battle for the minds and morale of Australians intensified. The axis powers’ propaganda became more hysterical, claiming, among other things, that a Japanese armada was assembled to Australia’s north, about to invade.

In challenging this propaganda, the Australia Calling broadcasts had to straddle an ethical razor blade. For example, the network deliberately chose not to broadcast news of the deaths of soldiers when Japanese midget subs attacked Sydney Harbour in 1942. Nor did it broadcast information about looting by Australian servicemen after the Darwin bombings. The broadcaster believed these stories would be disheartening for Australians listening in occupied territories to the north. This wartime self-censorship may have had the best intentions, but imagine the danger to the service’s credibility if these excisions were discovered.

As the war progressed, more language services were added and plans began for a large transmitter to replace the shacks. Shepparton in Victoria was chosen to house the massive array that could send strong short-wave signals right across the world. When these transmitters were opened in 1945, they were so strong that they were used in the immediate post-war period by then-immigration minister Arthur Calwell to reach into Western Europe as a publicity tool for his post-war immigration scheme.

So strong were Shepparton’s transmitters that in 1948 they were used, successfully, to test whether radio waves could reach the Moon and bounce back to Earth. Although shortwave was not used when the Apollo missions eventually shot for the Moon, Shepparton proved that space was not a communication black hole. RA had played its part on the race to the Moon.

Despite these success stories, the newly renamed Radio Australia had become perceived by the opposition to be so much of a tool in the Chifley Labor government that when the conservatives returned to power in 1949, the service’s founding father Menzies planned to shut RA down. But in one of the most intriguing chapters in RA’s history, the British Secret Service MI5 made an official protest, claiming the powerful Shepparton transmitters were central tools in information dissemination behind the new Iron Curtain. Menzies reversed his closure decision.

RA now began one of its heydays, changing from a government-operated service to an international broadcaster, not dissimilar to the BBC’s own short-wave service. The audiences appreciated its work. In the early 1950s it came second in a poll of world short-wave listeners. Surveys throughout the 50s still regularly had RA at the or near the top of the popularity polling, tag-teaming with the much more heavily resourced BBC for top position. And the letters from listeners almost filled rooms at RA’s small offices in Melbourne.

In the 1960s, war would again feature in RA’s story. Australian soldiers were being sent to Vietnam, and RA provided news and entertainment succour to the soldiers. Presenter Margaret Wood was particularly popular, becoming known as “the serviceman’s friend”. More women were being heard elsewhere on RA: Jocelyn Terry began hosting specialist shows for Antarctica, and Desley Blanch presented music request programs.

In the 1970s RA’s journalism expanded. A tranche of young newspaper journalists were hired to form the service’s first specialist reporting bureau. From this small start, Sue McCallister, Geoff Heriot and Graeme Dobell went on to have distinguished careers in international broadcasting. They were soon joined by journalist Sean Dorney who would become a household name in the Pacific.

The language services would expand too, with Indonesian journalists Nuim Khaiyath and Hidayat Djajamihardja for the Bahasa service and Warium Benson and Caroline Tiriman for the PNG Tok Pisin broadcasts.

Their local knowledge and contacts turned RA into a news gatherer that matured Australia’s knowledge of these reporters’ home countries. It wasn’t without danger, however. Djajamihardja was only one of many journos to risk their lives for a story during the brittle Timor Lesté independence struggle. He was nearly killed by a rock thrown through his car window. He was then dragged out, and a gun was pointed at him as the guerillas chanted: “Kill him, kill him.” To this day, Djajamihardja does not know why he was not killed.

After the turn of the century, RA would have the biggest change in its history. Chief executive Jean Gabriel Manguy set up an ambitious network of FM transmitters across the region, a network that would eventually replace the aging short-wave technology. A push into Asia also started. My program, The Breakfast Club, was hired to be a specialist flow program for Asia in late 2005, and Malaysian television journalist Sen Lam hosted the new Connect Asia current affairs program. Manguy pushed us into critical Asian markets where we could not get an FM licence by organising live simulcasts with sister stations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Malaysia, giving RA a potential reach in the billions.

For the Pacific, Isabelle Genoux fronted the cultural program In The Loop. Genoux remembers money was tight, and on one outside broadcast, she had to work virtually solo from a hastily built shed in Vanuatu.

The existing Pacific current affairs program, Pacific Beat, was tweaked to be FM-friendly, with more live content aimed at listeners driving to work.

The live-flow program format meant that when a major event occurred in our region, we were able to cover it as it happened. When an attack was made on the lives of Timor Lesté’s president and prime minister, Jose Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmao, our program went live with the story for three hours after a listener alerted us by text.

Around the same time, our Fiji FM transmitter was closed down by the Fiji government after we broadcasted criticism of Frank Bainimarama’s coup junta. Our Fiji-based technician was forced at gunpoint to go through the jungle and turn off the diesel-operated transmitter. And this was where short wave came into its own. Short wave cannot be stopped locally, and so the good work of Pacific Beat and the other programs was still able to get to the ears of Fijian people who were wondering what was really happening in their country.

Manguy’s expansion was a highlight but there were many times when RA found itself vulnerable, particularly when governments changed. When John Howard became prime minister in 1996, RA was set to be shut down, but the last-minute intervention of then-foreign minister Alexander Downer got the decision reversed. Nearly 20 years on from that, RA had a big funding cut that saw the axing of many programs, including mine, and the redundancies of dozens of long-running staff.

Then in 2017 the last link to 1939, short wave, was abandoned. Long-time RA technician Nigel Holmes switched off RA at the Shepparton transmitter.

RA’s focus now became online and FM in the Pacific, Papua New Guinea and Timor Lesté, placing RA in an important place as the Australian government started its so-called Pacific Pivot, which broadened its international policy to its Pacific neighbours. This was timely with the shifting geopolitics of the region, which included China attempting to increase its influence with countries such as Solomon Islands which faced the vulnerabilities caused by climate change, a world economic downturn, security fluctuations and pandemics.

Throughout 2021 and into 2022, the ABC lobbied both government and opposition about the need for additional funding for the ABC’s international activities given the rapidly evolving geostrategic landscape of the region. 

It received $32 million over four years in the October 2022 budget for its work internationally and a further $8.5 million in the May 2023 budget over four years for regional transmission and distribution.

The impact of the funding has been swift and significant, boosting the availability of Australian content, deepening media connections and strengthening the resilience of media outlets in the Asia Pacific.

For ABC Radio Australia, the turnaround has been dramatic, resulting in a revitalisation of the network which nearly tripled its Pacific-focused content throughout 2023 and 2024 and is on track to double its FM footprint with the establishment of new services in Palau, Pohnpei FSM, Nauru, Tuvalu, Cook Islands as well as Kokopo and Lorengau in Papua New Guinea and Gizo and Auki in the Solomon Islands.

Additionally, ABC International has launched ABC Asia to serve digital audiences across Asia with relevant news, video and audio content and has increased ABC Australia’s television audiences in Asia to over 10 million monthly viewers.

RA has come a long way in its 85 years. The trip has never been easy; it certainly has not been linear and, in some ways, it has had to operate through changing geopolitics almost every decade while still maintaining the ABC’s independence. It’s been a rollercoaster, but RA is still there. And history tells us it has the stamina to stay there.

Dr Phil Kafcaloudes is a former Radio Australia presenter and was commissioned by the ABC to write the history of the service. Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story is available online at Booktopia. This piece was originally published on ABC Backstory.