Frank Avis' Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio

Frank Avis continues his career, in Melbourne

2008-01-11T12:00:00+10:00

I arrived in a major mainland capital in the mid-'60s, ironically not as a career move but due to personal tragedy. My life was clearly in chaos and I was lucky to have my friend Woody, now working in Melbourne TV, to look after me.

My first appointment was with 3UZ to see if I could get some work with their news team.

I did an audition and News Director Clive Waters took me into his office, apologising that they had nothing to offer at this time, but asking if he could make a call on my behalf. This was astonishingly good of him. I've no idea why he went to all this trouble but within an hour the tape had been dispatched to 3XY's John Burls and I found myself starting at the XY newsroom the following morning.

I walked in and was handed the 9 AM bulletin which I read reasonably well.

Minutes later General Manager Bob Baeck called me in, said he was impressed and I was officially hired.

Bill Passick was News Chief and I remember Ian Major as the Footy/Sports Chief (absolutely lovely man), Ray Woods was in the Programming chair, Frank Welch in Accounts, and the famous character Wally Chamberlain was the Chief Engineer (you couldn't understand what "character" really meant in radio until you met Wally). Please add to the list of XY identities: Bill Acfield, Vi Greenhaulgh, Jeff Warden, Paul Konik (the laconic Mr Konik), Johnny Young (soon to be found YTT on TV), Barry Seeber, Jeff Sunderland, Bruce Mansfield (anyone who wants to know what radio is really about needed to hear Bruce sign off to Jeff at midday—some of the funniest and most inventive material I've ever heard), Graham Berry, the living legend Jack Dyer doing the footy with Maj, Cyril Stokes, Pam Peters (Mike's Secretary), David Shoreland, Wayne and Maurie Kirby, Geoff Hiscock, Ken Hibbins, Alf Minister, Clyde Simpson, John Magee, Barry Looms, Iven Walker, Paul Sime, Col Denovan, John Boland, Laurie Bennett, Jack the cleaner (who became something of a legend), Jim (the dear man who answered the front door and manned the switchboard at night) and many others. Sorry, my memory no longer behaves properly.

Of course, we were joined at various times by celebrities like Graham Kennedy and Mike Walsh who did 9-2 during this period. In fact Mike did a really good mixed music/interview series from 9-11 and Graham had lots of fun doing 11-1 with Moondoggy at the panel.

I worked particularly closely with the Mike Walsh show and my favorite moment was the brainwave I had when I heard Phyllis Diller was coming to Sydney, but wouldn't be playing Melbourne. When she arrived I rang her management and said what would it take to get her on a plane to Melbourne briefly where Mike Walsh would declare it "Phyllis Diller Day". Her only obligation was a brief appearance in Mike's show around 10.30 and then to be guest at a special luncheon, including 100 lady listeners.

I was thinking, she's going to ask for 100's of Dollars, I think the Manager was particularly concerned, but her response was amazing. Nothing. No money. Get her a plane ticket and a hire car with driver and she'd fly down. It was a wonderful day. Phyllis, who turned out to be a really lovely person, was greeted like royalty, which she regarded as only fitting for a person of her status. She was a very big star at the time, even in Australia, so this turned out to be quite a coup.

This was also the time when Tiny Tim came to Melbourne and we came up with this plan to get him exclusively on to the Mike Walsh Show. In fact, we took the suite next door to Tiny's room at his Melbourne hotel where I stayed that night to make sure he could be intercepted in the hallway the next morning. I did a series of tongue-in-cheek reports through the night, updating the Tiny Tim story, always ending with the same tag line, "This is Frank Avis. I'm just a suite away from Tiny Tim." I don’t know why but I always thought that was really funny.

Anyway, my insider in the entourage gave me a call at 9:30 and I was waiting in the hallway, ready to pounce, when Tiny left his room. He gave me a terrific interview, including a few bars of "Tip Toe Through he Tulips" (God, it was awful) and we raced the tape back to Carlton, edited in a few Mike Walsh questions and, fair dinkum, you would have thought he was sitting there in the studio.

Ah, what happened to Tiny Tim? And to Miss Vicki? I'm not sure I recall the answer but instinctively, I know it wouldn’t have been good.

There were several really big stories in Melbourne during this period.

The disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt. Washington stations rang us for interviews for weeks and they kept asking the same question, "How is it possible the Prime Minister was allowed to go into the surf alone?" I think if he'd been an American he would have had six Secret Service agents swimming out there with him.

The Westgate Bridge collapse. I spent all afternoon at the scene and I remember Danny Webb and I were standing together when they found one of the last of the bodies. We looked at the remains and the man had no face. Danny and I looked at each other, filed our last reports, and went home. That was enough for anybody. This disaster incidentally gave me one of my first great examples of how to use radio "sound" to advantage. I often used the edited tape when I did my news lectures at AFTRS. The caller came in around midday and luckily we ran tape immediately, getting his introductory words. He said, "I think... I think... I just saw the Westgate bridge fall down." There were long pauses in between and a bit of static. Normally we would have tightened all of this up to give us a 30-second grab, but considering the gravity of the story – I think the death toll was over 30 – I closed my eyes and listened to the sentences. In the end I left in a lot of the pauses and the static. The static gave the eyewitnesses account a sort of eerie quality, adding to the atmosphere. I haven't got the tape anymore but I still remember how it sounded that day.

Then there were the bushfires. Tthis raises another unusual memory. I remember the bushfires were burning across Western Melbourne and one of our reporters had been stopped on the Geelong highway amid fears the fire would cross the road. I’m not sure who it was. I have memories of John Magee or maybe Frank Marston. Anyway he called me on the two-way and said a convoy of vehicles was going to attempt to head South and he wanted to join them to get closer to the fires. I said, "Of course, what are you waiting for? Get in the line and go!" I don’t know why this happened but some minutes later I called the reporter and asked if he had set off. He said he was just about to but he had a bad feeling about the trip. I responded that I had the same feeling and we called it off. That afternoon, the fire swept across the highway at Lara and I don't think anyone in the convoy survived. Strange, hey?

Oh yes, and I have to recount another weird story from those days. I know it sounds strange all of these odd things happening during my career, but this one was really quite unusual and was witnessed by a large number of people including police, who actually arrested me briefly during their investigation.

The morning papers started to run stories about a suburban house which was having rocks rained down on it every night. I can’t remember where it was, I think one of the middle-class Southern suburbs. Anyway we went down and did several interviews and it transpired the people in the house believed that the rocks were coming from one of the houses above them. Apparently there'd been a falling out with the neighbours some time back.

Just how these people managed to throw hundreds and hundreds of rocks in a few minutes wasn't addressed at the time.

So the police finally got sick and tired of the whole thing and sent half a dozen patrol cars down to the house and nearby streets to personally witness the phenomenon.

A few journos, including myself found out, and couldn't resist taking part in the operation.

I parked up near the neighbours, who I'd been told, were the prime suspects.

Anyway, around 9 PM there was this hell of a commotion as all these rocks rained down on the house, right on schedule.

I'd turned off my lights so I wouldn’t be seen by the neighbours and gunned the news car up the street to see if they were throwing the rocks. Unfortunately, there was a police officer nearby and he pulled me up, thinking I was acting very suspiciously, and was in the process of taking me in for questioning when another officer I knew intervened. The bottom line is that the rocks never came from the "offending house" and after a few nights they just stopped altogether. We never found out where they came from.

PS. I'm not making this up. Check the Melbourne Sun's files. It'll all be there.

It was also during this time that I filled in as the football moderator when Ian Major made the unexpected decision to switch to 3KZ. So I entered the world of Aussie Rules doing the Thursday night teams with Jack Dyer (along with Barry Cable and, after that, Bobby Skilton) and Saturday afternoon calling. We did the second half of the Seconds game and then the main game with updates from our round the ground reporters. I absolutely loved Jack Dyer and Bob Skilton and I would often joke about how unfair it was that jack hadn’t won a Brownlow Medal as Best and Fairest (Bob had won three) as he was such a fair player who wouldn’t hurt a flea. The fact was of course that Dyer, they didn’t call him Captain Blood for nothing, was one of the most feared players of the 30’s. When Jack went through a pack he always seemed to manage to emerge intact on the other side leaving half a dozen opponents on the ground behind him. One day he shirt fronted one bloke so hard that they had to carry him off the ground. The opposing coach ran on to the ground and threw a blanket over the player, covering his whole body. Jack looked over and thought, "What are they doing that for?". The opposing ruckman looked at Dyer and said, "Jeez Jack, you've killed him." Dyer was useless for the rest of the game. He couldn't kick straight and he kept pulling out of contests in case he hurt somebody and Richmond got done.

As Jack left the field, expecting to be arrested, there was his victim, as large as life chewing on an orange and winking at him. Jack never pulled out of a contest again. I've spoken to a lot of experts who remember the '20s, '30s and '40s and most of them say the same thing: if they could have picked a team of all time greats, Jack Dyer would probably be in their first 5 choices. He wasn't pretty but he was tough and relentless. If you’re not a VFL/AFL fan this probably won’t interest you but the WA great Barry Cable finally came across to Victoria at this time to play for North Melbourne and XY signed him up as our special commentator.

He joined Jack and yours truly for the Thursday night teams show. I hadn't realized 'til our first show that Barry had never met Jack and that Jack had never seen him play. I told Jack how brilliant Cable was when I saw him at the '66 Carnival. It was obvious Barry idolized Jack from the moment they met.

Sadly Barry’s form was well down in the first few matches. His famous drop kick was virtually gone and he spent most of his time hand-balling. Jack was increasingly embarrassed as the three of us met every Thursday night. Then one Saturday afternoon Barry started kicking again and it was Jack's great pleasure to name him our Man of the Match in an XY game of the day. Only then did Barry tell Jack what was wrong. He rolled up his trouser legs one Thursday night and the two legs were virtually blue, covered in massive bruising. Barry had been kicked in a trial game apparently and could hardly walk, let alone run and kick, in his first four games. But he never offered an excuse and he never revealed his injury 'til it was virtually healed. He just kept plugging away as best he could. Jack just looked at Barry and nodded quietly in approval. It was emotional stuff. On Thursday nights I walked with giants.

But it all had to end. XY was about to turn to a new format and Bill Passick rang me to say he was switching from AK to CH.9 and would I like to take over? I met N.D Mike Schildberger, took the job and sadly announced I was leaving XY.

They'd been so good to me but I knew it was time to head off to something different... 3AK "where no wrinklies fly", Rhett Walker and an unbelievable format change from Rock and Roll to Beautiful Music.

That's our next adventure...

Frank Avis continues his career in Hobart

2007-12-22T12:00:00+10:00

I enjoyed my stay in Bendigo, sort of. I certainly made some good friends, although boarding so far out of town, at Kangaroo Flat, made it an exciting bike ride to work, especially in wet weather.

I remember I boarded with Mr and Mrs Small who were extremely kind to me.

But after a while I thought it was time to move on in my constant attempt to get into big city radio so I started to send off the requisite audition tapes. One ended up at 7EX, Launceston, and I suddenly found myself facing a tough decision when I got the job. We thought about it and in the end decided, what the heck, go for it, take the trip over to Tassie. So I resigned and then got a phone call to tell me that the guy who was leaving had decided to stay on, but not to worry, the Manager had found me a position at 7HO in Hobart if I wanted it. So, that’s how things were done in those days and off we went to Hobart where we settled in Lenah Valley and finally in a house at Howrah over on the other side of the river. Allan Brown was the manager at HO, Keith Graham was Chief Announcer and I recall John Loughlin (the breakfast star who was the King of Hobart radio), Allan Maney (My cricketing mate), Peter Sharp (who later moved on to Channel 10, Melbourne), Don Bridgen, Tom Paine, Rod Muir, Mike Webb, Sam Anglesea, John Vincent, John Vertigan (Vertie), the McCarthy Brothers, Doug Fry, Bernard Carr, Ray James and Roger Diakovsky.

Brian Hodgman was at the adjoining TVT 6, along with Ray Sherry (ex Stratford actor and later to be labor MP), Ian Woodward (the beloved Woody, another cricket tragic), Shelagh Keating, Tom Warne, Graeme Smith, Gordon Bell, Bill Lee, Tony Kendrick and the wonderful Mrs Wylie in the canteen.

As a matter of fact, my first memories of Hobart relate to Channel 6. My first Sunday night in Hobart was taken up watching the channel 6 movie and, in those days, the end of transmission for the day was marked by the playing of the national anthem. On this occasion the vision was of the Queen at the Trooping of the Colour ceremony. This night, I watched with interest as the Queen, mounted on her trusty steed, was shown upside down and going backwards.

Then there was the wonderful night when they showed the British historical piece, Scott of Antarctica. You know the story, where Scott battles his way to the south pole only to find that he’s been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. His party is then virtually wiped out trying to get back home to base. Pretty rugged material.

Anyway, the movie went on and on and on and finally way after midnight, long after the channel’s licence allowed it to stay open, the director decided to send everyone to bed.

There was Scott and his party slogging their way through the snow to the pole and suddenly one of the actors looks up, points off screen and says, "Look!"

At this point, the director pulled the plug and we never found out what they were looking at, or indeed what happened to Scott and his band of adventurers.

What we were supposed to see of course was the Norwegian flag flying at the south pole signifying that Scott had been beaten to the pole and that all of their courageous efforts were in vain.

For weeks afterwards, you’d be walking down the main street of Hobart and suddenly somebody would point their finger and yell out "Look" and everyone walking down the street would fall over laughing.

But my favorite story was the night I was doing the voice-overs from the booth for a Friday night movie.

Now the general idea for the director and his crew was to turn the sound down while they listened to music or told stories or whatever, and then to turn up the audio every couple of minutes just to make sure everything was operating normally.

But no one told us this night that the movie was a murder mystery set in a radio station. At one point the leading actors are in a studio having a heated argument which the witnesses outside can’t hear because the sound is turned off. This is apparently a central part of the plot.

As it happened the director chose this moment to turn up his audio to make sure all was well. Not a sound. He yells out to his team, "The sound’s gone," which is accompanied by several people yelling out "oh shit". When did it go, they’re asking. What happened to the sound? They quickly stop the show and order yours truly to make an announcement along the lines of, "We apologise for the interruption. The movie will continue just as soon as we can restore the soundtrack."

After about 60 seconds a listener rings in and says, "There’s nothing wrong with the sound you bloody boofheads. It’s SUPPOSED to be off. That’s what the movie’s about, if you’d take the time to watch it."

We quickly restored the movie and got back to the important job at hand. Playing poker as I recall.

I started doing a few night shifts and stuff 'til Keith had the brainwave to extend Locko’s breakfast by one hour, putting the two of us together from 9-to 10 for the Good morning Club. Whatever was he thinking? It went totally bananas. Somebody did a survey at one point in the 60s and we had 76% of the available audience. We were virtually allowed to do whatever we wanted, which often involved insulting our audience and the rest of the community. We crossed to Parliament house where the Premier Eric Reece, played by yours truly–the thespian returns–made a series of highly defamatory speeches. We even crossed to the Queen at one stage where her Majesty–again played by you know who–uttered the immortal words on Tasmanian radio.
"My husband and I (long pause) want to… Go home."

Locko and I had an elephant race through the city. We rode a tandem bike from the station to Glenorchy.

I quickly joined Woody as a devout follower of the Sandy Bay football club, something which caused great merriment on air (until we won a Premiership. That shut 'em up.

I even did some work on the original "In Hobart Tonight" with Tom, Graeme, Shelagh, John Sidney at the piano and Bill Lee in the director’s chair.

I personally thought it went ok but it was pretty basic stuff in the 60s, as you can imagine.

One night Shelagh sang "You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun" from is it "Annie Get Your Gun"? Anyway I was supposed to stand in the background, alongside a bale of hay, looking suitably anonymous.

For some reason I decided to chew on this piece of hay and pretend to start choking.

Poor Shelagh could see me out of the corner of her eye and it took all of her professionalism to complete the song without breaking out in hysterical laughter. Let’s see 'em try that on law and Order.

I also managed to start a BA at the beautiful University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, where I played B grade district cricket for a season or two.

Sadly, while things looked to be going well on the outside, it turned out to be much different inside.

My wife was tragically dying from a severe kidney disease and this had a dreadful impact on us all, triggering early morning asthmatic attacks in yours truly which had a disastrous impact on my work.

In the end, the staff was wonderfully supportive and I quit Hobart to have my wife transferred to Royal Melbourne Hospital. She had a kidney transplant, the 13th in Australia, which eventually failed after some 12 months. I only mention this personal stuff because it may explain why my work in this period tended to be a bit volatile as I was under massive pressure with a wife critically ill, two little children being looked after by my 60 year old parents-in-law in Bendigo and me working six days a week.

I was lucky to have good friend Woody looking after me in those days. Well, enough of that.

Before we leave Hobart and head north again it’s time to relate another very strange story which, just like the Yowie, I’ll recount exactly as it happened. Only in this case I am not a witness, just a messenger carrying a very unusual message.

Since the UFO sighting in Bendigo I’d been taking a close interest in these strange encounters and imagine my surprise when I read that one of the U.S authors I’d been reading in recent years was coming to Hobart for a lecture, complete with slideshow, summarising the latest work on UFO’s.

I turned up for the lecture only to find the front seats filled up with forecasters from the local Weather Bureau, most of whom I knew personally through interviewing them about the weather from time to time.

I exchanged pleasantries and asked what they were doing at the lecture, to which they responded by shifting in their seats, looking a little embarrassed and talking about how "it was a slow night and they were looking for something different to do, etc, etc."

At the end of the evening, when we were sitting around talking with the author I sidled over to one of the last of the forecasters who’d stayed behind and said, "Now come on Pete, what ARE you doing here?"

He swore if I ever told this story he’d deny every knowing me, but enough time has surely passed to allow me to summarise his response.

Basically, the forecasters were keen to see what they were finding flying in and out of their radar screens virtually every day. Peter said these objects would often move across the screen at speeds of over 3,000 miles an hour. Sometimes they appeared to stop dead and make a right hand turn.

I was truly astonished. Here where two incidents where I trusted the witnesses totally.

So I was given the go ahead to do a special on UFOs, using my interview with the visiting expert as the basis for the show.

There were quite a few interesting phone calls after the programme went to air but the most mysterious was from a man who said he had been working at a lighthouse in recent years and that he wondered if he could come to see me. The conversation was so peculiar that I arranged to meet him the following afternoon in the 7HO-TVT canteen. I was met by a man and woman ,both in their 60s,who claimed to have been recently retired after serving for many years as lighthouse keepers. They told me they had signed Commonwealth papers which prohibited them from making any comment on anything that happened there, but they were desperate to find someone who could record their story for posterity.

They never confirmed this but I think they had worked at the Maatsuyker Lighthouse in southern Tasmania before it became fully automatic.

The woman told me one afternoon, at 4 o’clock, she looked out the window and saw a circular object hovering over the water. She yelled to her husband and both of them witnessed the object, hovering some 20 metres above the water. It sent down a beam of light and remained there for over an hour.

The husband was able to take several photos of the object and immediately dispatched them to his superiors. The next afternoon the UFO returned at exactly the same time and did the same thing.

The couple sent off urgent despatches to the authorities alerting them of the incident.

The following morning, a team of Government officials manned with cameras and various scientific gear, arrived at the lighthouse. The couple were told they were not to discuss any matters with the visiting scientists and were then told to sign a document in which they were informed all information about the incident was classified and covered under the official Secrets Act. Heady stuff.

At 4 o’clock that afternoon the UFO returned and did the same thing, all of which was witnessed and photographed by the scientists. And it did the same again the following afternoon.

After that the UFO disappeared. It never returned during the last 12 months of the couples’ tenure on the Island.

Nothing was said by the scientists. They simply packed up, said a courteous farewell and disappeared just the same as the object of their visit, never to be seen again.

In the end, the only person left was a young Government information officer who was basically there as the gofer for the visitors. He was packing up, preparing to leave when the Lighthouse keeper looked at him and said, "Someone’s got to tell us… What in God’s name have we been looking at?"

The young man wasn’t keen to get into a long conversation but basically told them that the thing they’d seen was almost certainly "not of this world". He said the scientists, at their nightly meetings, were positive it came from beyond the Earth.

They hypothesised that the "beam of light" the craft sent down every afternoon may well have been extracting something from the water, probably hydrogen, which was converted into a power source.

From what he’d picked up, the sighting married in with several other incidents reported in the USA and Europe where these objects were seen hovering on a beam of light, over water.

I did my best to check these stories but as far as I can ascertain there is no record of such a visit to Maatsuyker Island and certainly no file containing footage of such an extraordinary incident.

Who were these two people? "Method" actors getting in some rehearsal time at my expense?

Two people with serious psychological problems? I can tell you this, if they were actors, they were bloody good. They’ve still got me enthralled. Even more than 40 years later.

Hopefully, my technical support team of John, Janie and Darleen will be able to include a couple of photos, covering the Hobart years, which have been provided by radio historian Wayne Mac. [Support team: photos included]

I know Wayne already has his time pretty well filled with work on his own publications covering the radio industry so it’s especially nice of him to take the time and interest in my rambling memoirs.

I owe you one, pal.

Next time we meet, it’ll be back north to the mainland as my radio career continues.