Interesting that Australia today is celebrating 100 years of radio. The celebration, to some extent, flies in the face of history. The first radio licence was actually issued, in 1921, to an amateur broadcaster, Charles Maclurcan, who broadcast from the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney, playing classical music.

The push towards radio licences had begun much earlier when Marconi’s company amalgamated with Telefunken to form Amalgamated Wireless Australia, known to many of us as AWA.

In 1905, a two-way wireless telegraphy station had been built by Marconi’s company, operating from Queenscliff in Victoria to Devonport in Tasmania. This got the government of the day active, and a Wireless Institute was formed at a meeting in the Australian Hotel in Sydney. The then Federal Government appointed a ‘wireless expert’ to build a coastal wireless service. By 1911, the first such service began operating but its range was only 500 kilometres.

Governments don’t change. By 1922, after Maclurcan had broken the radio ground, the Federal Government introduced ‘radio laws for the amateur’. Even then, the lobbying began for the introduction of radio broadcasting which led to a conference of main players in the radio manufacturing industry who were selling ‘sets’ so that listeners could listen to a radio station.

100 years ago today, the second radio licence was issued but the first for a public radio station, 2SB, which opened on today, 100 years ago. Entrepreneurialism was alive even then, because the only people who could listen to the radio were those who paid a licence. The ‘smarties’ avoided the licence by building their own radio ‘sets’. Some of us remember at boarding school listening to the radio on our ‘crystal set’.

There were, at first, two classes of licence, the A Licence which would be funded by listeners’ fees; and the B Licence where anyone could have a go so long as they generated their own revenue. Hence radio revenue through advertising.

The oldest surviving B Class station is Sydney’s 2UE, which went to air on Australia Day in 1925.

I well remember on our farm, and my Dad wasn’t the only farmer to ‘rort the system’, but once a year you would see the radio licence man come through the front gate. They were always dressed in suits and the smart farmers knew that the government was after them. We were instructed to race into the house and hide the wireless because they were checking whether you had one and whether you had paid your licence fee. Nothing much changes.

The Whitlam Government abolished the licence fees and here we are today.

Mind you, we should be grateful. Notwithstanding the bias that often disturbs us, we do enjoy a lot of information and entertainment, via radio and television, for nothing.

Have we progressed in 100 years? That is up to the consumer.

I think my Dad got it right. He used to say that the bloke who invented the wireless was smart; but the bloke who invented the knob was even smarter. In other words, turn it off if you don’t like it.