The Pasta and Dance Routine

Author: Craig Liddell | Source: 2SER-FM | Date: 11-11-03

Emigrate to Australia

Emigrate to Australia

Australia’s population burgeoned after the Second World War as people from various European countries responded en masse to government calls for migrants. By contrast, the media continued to reflect an Anglo-Centric view of the world because government restrictions limited the broadcast of languages other than English. Ethnic communities battled for three decades before making real inroads into getting their voices heard on the airwaves.


As a Dutch migrant in the late 1960s, Ada Hulshoff had only one program available to improve her high school English. “When you were working, the only way really open was to listen to this [English] radio program very early in the morning. It wasn’t very effective,” she chuckles.

Sunday afternoon horse race calls and the BBC comedy series, The Goons, were also a source of bemusement for Hulshoff. “I enjoyed listening to them because of all the funny voices. They were so impenetrable but everybody seemed to love them. They are still a bit of a mystery to me these days.”

Hulshoff was a relative latecomer as Australia’s migration push began after the Second World War when The Federal Government entered into formal agreements with several countries. Between 1945 and the late 1970s, almost four million migrants settled in Australia.

Born just after the Second World War, Hulshoff was one of several migrants who signed up for a ten-pound assisted package deal being offered by the Australian government, which included a one-way plane ticket and a collection of household goods.

Faced with limited housing at home, Hulschoff considered Australia a land of considerable opportunity. Her then husband also thought that his ability to find employment would be easier in the sunnier climes. He had studied tropical agriculture at university – a hangover from the days of Dutch colonialism.

Hulshoff soon realised that both the opportunities to learn English and the diversity of Australian broadcasting were limited. Cold War paranoia sparked restrictions on the broadcasting of languages other than English and only those people with the Queen’s English were heard on air until the late 1970s.

The Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB), the forerunner of today’s Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), limited the total level of non-English programming to two and half percent in 1952. To placate government authorities concerned about the broadcast of politically subversive material, ethnic broadcasters also had to translate what they were saying into English every 100 words.

“There were a few Italian programs on commercial radio,” Hulshoff recalls, “but the legislation at the time was very cumbersome and didn’t make for very good radio either. The whole program ended up in a pasta and dance routine, some Italian music combined with cooking, traditions, and so on.”

Earliest Attempts

Colourful politician Al Grassby

Colourful politician Al Grassby

Despite the government restrictions, some ethnic communities managed to score airtime on commercial radio in the 1950s. One of the earliest examples was a bilingual radio program developed by the colourful politician, Al Grassby.

During the 1950s, Grassby helped to set up the radio program while working for the national science body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in the picturesque Riverina region.

“We had the Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics come to examine what we were doing with farm advisory work,” he explains. “They said we were wonderful with the 40 percent of all the people in the region who spoke English. But we were disastrous with the 60 percent who didn’t have English as their first language.”

Grassby hit upon the idea of broadcasting and publishing in both English and Italian, given that the latter was the first language of many farmers. He also formed a continental music club to fund the one hour program on the local commercial radio station, 2RG Griffith.

“The commercial radio stations of Australia were more open than the governments of the day to bilingual programs,” says Grassby, “because they’d had approaches from all sorts of community groups and they were interested.”

His experience would act as an inspiration for ethnic communities around the country.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) would remain constrained by the limits on ethnic broadcasting and offered little hope for ethnic communities. Commercial stations like 2CH in Sydney and 3XY in Melbourne, however, did have a considerable amount of ethnic broadcasting by 1964 as some language restrictions were relaxed.

That changed during the 1970s as commercial radio became more competitive and format driven. The level of ethnic voices on the airwaves gradually decreased and by 1972 there were only six languages and 36 hours of broadcasting in languages other than English.

Towards Change

Migrant workers pushed for access to the airwaves

Migrant workers pushed for access to the airwaves

Faced with this restrictive broadcasting environment, ethnic communities began to question why they were paying eight cents a day for an ABC that slavishly followed an imperialistic model of broadcasting championed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Commercial radio became further influenced by the United States partly in response to the introduction of television.

Coinciding with the shift in broadcasting during the 1970s, the migrant workers, many of which had been brought out to staff the country’s manufacturing industries, were emerging as a unified and highly politicised voice. The push for access to the airwaves was closely intertwined with the migrant worker’s campaign.

By the sixties, those migrants had reached political and social maturity. They had bought houses in the suburbs, their kids were at state schools, and they realised they had political power. Governments of all persuasions started to talk of the ‘ethnic vote’.

The relationship between broadcasting and worker’s rights is best summarised by former trade unionist and ex-Communist, George Zangalis. He says that for ethnic communities, access was considered not only as a means of communication in their first languages, but also as a medium in which their identity and culture could be sustained and developed.

During the mid 1970s, the infant public broadcasting movement would develop to provide such an outlet, but not without a struggle.



The Beginning of Change



Action also took place on a government level. Al Grassby found himself in a position to improve the state of ethnic broadcasting when he was appointed Minister for Immigration in December 1972, a year after the Whitlam Labor Government was elected.

He abolished the language restrictions that had been in place for over thirty years. In 1975, he also received government approval to establish two temporary ethnic radio stations in Sydney and Melbourne called 2EA and 3EA, respectively.

The Ethnic Australia stations were licensed for three months on an extremely small budget of $48 000. Eight ethnic languages were selected for broadcast and two people were hired to manage the stations. All broadcasters were volunteers.

“It would not have worked if it hadn’t been for many people giving their time,” Grassby believes. “They also brought their gramophone records, because we didn’t have a library of more than one language,” he chuckles.

But political motivations were also at play in the establishment of the two stations.

The previous year, the government had set up a commission to look into poverty. The resulting Henderson Report identified migrant communities as amongst the most disadvantaged groups in the country and recommended they have better access to information. This coincided with both the government’s introduction of a universal health care system, now called Medicare, and Grassby’s idea for ethnic radio stations.

Those three ideas conveniently dovetailed into the politically expedient decision to use the stations as a means to publicise the new public health scheme.

Ada Hulshoff says, “The licences were granted to two businessmen, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. Those stations simply broadcast messages about Medicare. But the response was so enormous that Al Grassby had no chance of closing down those stations at the end of that period”.

For his part, Grassby denies the claim that the stations were merely government publicity outlets. He says that information about government initiatives was complimented by broadcasting details of private programs. The scope of the stations, he says, was much broader than simply the narrow interests of Medicare.

“Don’t forget, it was designed as an Australian series,” Grassby responds. "They of course helped migrants who had just arrived. But the whole idea was to enrich Australian culture.”

Following the three-month broadcast, Grassby commissioned an independent inquiry into the stations. The ratings were very positive and it was decided that the EA stations would continue to operate under the management of the Government’s Media Department.


See: Beyond the Pasta and Dance Routine