We go into another radio year with a monumental change

We go into another radio year with a monumental change: for the first time in over half a century there's no John Laws or Ray Hadley on air, both having retired from the business. This marks a huge adjustment for the broadcasting landscape of the Harbour City.



It also means that the News-Talk giant 2GB has to manage its second major on-air crisis in recent years... First the loss of Alan Jones in breakfast and now losing Ray Hadley in mornings. There's a bit of a theory in our industry that Ray was actually the mortar that held the place together... Always there, always reliable and always number one in his critical time-zone. Now over the next 11 to 12 months we get to test that theory. And we also get to find out about another issue that has bedevilled programmers for many, many years... If you do News Talk what matters most... THE PROGRAMME OR THE PRESENTER? Can 2GB lose its breakfast and morning hosts and just keep bubbling along on the format?

This year's surveys, now underway, will help radio academics answer that. And I am right in the middle or this question because it's the one your reporter wanted so desperately to ask back in 1979. Sorry, but we're going to have to wade through a bit of ancient history here in order to travel further down this complex road. I was hired by GB GM Ron Hurst to re-fashion the news component. We had a lengthy phone call and I made it clear that I would recommend switching the place into NEWS/TALK/INFORMATION.

It was a hell of a gamble for the GM but Ron was up for it and I flew up for a long, face-to-face, which turned out to be extremely honest. In case you're planning on doing a treatise on this for your Uni of NSW Masters this is some of the stuff we sifted through at this Sydney meeting in '79. My first recommendation was to run the programme purely on format. No superstars. This went against all the prevailing wisdom which said you had to have a very high profile identity to do this format especially in the vital breakfast arena. Fail breakfast, you fail... Period. My philosophy was simple enough. You can't put the future of a major metro radio station in the hands of one superstar. You risk creating a monster... Who'll end up running the whole show given half a chance. It's a potential nightmare. Trust the format. I warned it would take 3-months prep to get it ready for launch day and I'd need a lot of help from the programmers. Our plan was to launch NEWS TALK INFO in breakfast and drive for the first 6 to 12 months and then transition to other areas.

As luck would have it my old buddy Geoff Brown, of 3MP fame, was actually in the house, already part of the programming team. We were hot to trot and Geoff would have absolutely loved to have got his hands on this ground-breaking format. As it happened we didn't get much of a chance to have any deep discussions. Virtually as I walked in the front door of Sussex Street, Ron Hurst walked out the back. Well, he was assisted in finding his way to the exit as I remember. And that was pretty much the end of the great experiment. The horse had bolted.

In recent time Sydney has been remembering the Lindt Café siege, marking the 10th anniversary of that awful event, but this was not the first Islamic Terrorist attack in Australia. For that we have to go back over 100 years to the Battle of Broken Hill. On Jan 1, 1915 two "Ghan" Camel Drivers, believing they were under orders to take part in a Holy War, opened fire on a picnic train carrying revellers to Silverton. The gunmen killed four picnic-goers and left another seven wounded before a party of soldiers and police brought them down in a final shootout. This was the Battle of Broken Hill, a little known piece of our early history.

Many year ago newspapers and radio and television outlets around the world carried the famous series "Ripley's Believe it or Not". The original started out in 1918 as a cartoon in the New York Globe, being eventually syndicated everywhere. Ripley's team searched around the world to come up with the most astounding and bizarre stories. I only mention this because I recently discovered a tale that would have won pride of place in Ripley's.

I was reading, or rather re-reading, one of my copies of Australian Golf Digest when I encountered Guy Yokom's story of the Payne Stewart tragedy of 1999. It remains one of the saddest incidents in golf. Payne was a golfing superstar of the era who was among six people on board a Learjet 30 which crashed in South Dakota. No one on board survived. The pilot and passengers all fell unconscious when the cabin suffered a catastrophic loss of pressure. The plane continued on auto pilot till the fuel ran out. It went down at 9.30 that morning. Payne Stewart was married to an Australian girl, Tracey, and her parents were actually visiting when the tragedy occurred. Payne had bought his mother-in- law a beautiful new wristwatch and she was wearing it when she went sightseeing in Florida on the day Payne and his team took off on the ill-fated flight. She raced back home to her daughter when she heard news of the tragedy. It wasn't until later that day when she checked the time and realised her watch had actually stopped working some time earlier. The hands were locked on 9.30... Believe it or not.

We enter another year which means another season of golf around the world. This what I'm hoping to see in 2025... Minjee Lee starts winning again on the LPGA. Brother Min Woo has a breakthrough victory on the PGA... Rory McIlroy wins his fifth major, hopefully the Masters... Jason Day gets back into the winner's circle on the Big Tour and fellow Aussie Aaron Baddeley finishes inside the top 125, to keep his card for another year. Oh and one last question... Is it possible that Tiger could have just one last win on his CV this season... Could the Great One do it one last time for us as the ultimate highlight for '25?

Watching SKY NEWS one afternoon when one of their commentators praised somebody for his "depreciationary sense of humour". "Hang on," I thought," does he mean deprecatory?" But I've been reflecting on that and now thinking maybe he was talking about someone with a really funny economic sense of humour!

I was sitting down in a Norwest Shopping Centre recently when this bloke came up and sat beside me, saying he was taking a brief break from his job where he'd worked pretty much all his life. He got up saying he'd better not take too much time off or he'd be in trouble. He left me with this Aussie classic: "For 42 years I've been pretending to work for this boss and for 42 years he's been pretending to pay me."

ANDY'S GONE WITH CATTLE

"Our Andy's gone to battle now, 'gainst drought the red marauder. Our Andy's gone with cattle now across the Queensland border. He's left us in dejection now, our hearts with him are roving. it's dull on this selection now since Andy went a droving... And may good angels send the rain on desert stretches sandy, and when the summer comes again, God grant 'twill bring us Andy."

– Written by Henry Lawson, first published in Australian Town and Country Journal, 1888