Twenty years ago, the Whitlam Government licensed the ABC to open a new AM radio station – 3ZZ in Melbourne – to provide media access to people whose concerns were not aired elsewhere. Labor soon rued the freedom of expression it fostered, but it was the Fraser Government, in an unprecedented violation of the ABC’s independence, which closed it down two years later. The Commission conceded for the first time that its ‘independence is a qualified independence, confined to the formulation of program policy’. 3ZZ’s followers marched in protest, but the larger public had never heard the broadcasts and ignored the dangerous precedent involved.

Radio Australia, (RA), the short wave broadcasting service of the ABC, has fought similar battles since its inception but, as few Australians ever hear it, perhaps its closure would cause as little protest. In This is the ABC, Ken Inglis devotes just thirty of four hundred and forty pages of text directly to RA, although its life is almost as long and its potential is very great. RA represents Australia – our social and political values, our culture, and enterprise – to millions of listeners in Asia, where supposedly we are trying to belong.

What is RA’s purpose? What sort of people listen, and where? What does it broadcast, and at what cost to the tax­payer? When its reports on the internal affairs of its neighbours cause a diplomatic kerfuffle, do its benefits outweigh the damage? The answers to some of those questions may be found in Radio Wars, but more or less inter alia, because it is not Errol Hodge’s purpose to give us RA’s complete story. Instead, as he says, in his introduction,

This book is called Radio Wars because warfare of a kind has raged around Australia’s shortwave service for much of its fifty-five years of existence.

And he goes on to describe an almost unremitting conflict over the essential purpose of the service: whether it should be a vehicle of government propaganda, excluding even Opposition opinions, or broadcast spin-free news and information about Australia and our region. Using Freedom of Information provisions, Hodge has trawled the Australian Archives for evidence of who stood where in the battle.

In 1939, when RA was established, the Menzies Government’s purpose was to counter enemy propaganda with its own. Under the directorship of William Macmahon Ball, the service was administered by the Department of Information (DoI). The ABC, which co-operated in its running, lobbied hard to take full control. In 1942, the government conceded, with the proviso that RA’s political policy must ‘conform to the directives of the Minister in control of political warfare’ – Dr H.V. Evatt. But the Curtin Government resumed control in 1944, putting RA under the Minister of Information, Arthur Caldwell, though it was still responsible to Evatt for its political policy. Macmahon Ball resigned in disgust.

His stated intention had been to broadcast ‘factual and objective news – no matter how bad – about the war’, but External Affairs prevented any reporting of such events as the looting of Darwin, after the bombing, by Australian and American troops; the Battle of Brisbane; the self-sacrifice of the Kamikaze pilots; and, most pusillanimously, the massacre of Japanese POWs at Cowra.

After the war, though External Affairs’ grip slackened, Caldwell, now Minister for Immigration, resisted ABC pressure for RA’s return. He was determined to use the service to encourage European immigration and it remained under DoI control until the election of the second Menzies Government in 1949. RA’s integrity was regarded more highly in Asia than the crude propaganda of Voice of America, but still the ABC was obliged to confer with the Department of External Affairs on the content of news bulletins and news commentary.

Now, however, the Cold War froze the intellectual climate. External Affairs Ministers Richard Casey and, later, Paul Hasluck, both envied the US Government’s absolute authority over Voice of America, and sought to exert greater control over RA’s broadcasting. Departmental Secretaries Arthur Tangey and, later, Richard Woolcott, were of similar mind.

While we not wish to see (RA) turned into an obvious instrument of government propaganda ... we are concerned to see that ... (it) does not broadcast material which is harmful to our interests or runs counter to government foreign policy. (Woolcott, 1965)

Radio Wars throws useful light on these protagonists. Their skirmishes with such news commentators as Sir Herman Black and Dr Peter Russo over their scripts are entertaining. ABC Chairmen Richard Boyer and James Darling emerge as determined defenders of ABC independence; General Manager Charles Moses is easily swayed, and ABC Editor-in-Chief, Walter Hamilton, stands out as a warrior hero.

 After 108 pages of these battles, the reader is suddenly plunged into a detailed analysis of RA’s coverage of Indonesian politics between 1945–94. At sixty-eight pages, and because the style here clearly represents Hodge’s first-hand experience, this section is almost a separate book. The documentation of the 1980 expulsion of ABC correspondent, Warwick Beutler, and of RA’s coverage of the Dili massacre, are perhaps Hodge’s most important contribution, a valuable resource for students of the period. Yet it seems, like the rest of Radio Wars, to drown in the mass of detail.

Throughout the book, Hodge raises the peacetime purpose and likely future of RA, but he never systematically argues the case. Fundamental to this discussion is a recognition of the risk of cultural imperialism inherent in the service. Countervailing, there’s the need of developing countries for credible information their governments sometimes deny them. And then there is Australia’s legitimate desire for a cultural presence in Asia. Hodge acknowledges these issues but does not develop them. As a consequence, the often unwieldy material in Radio Wars lacks an organising principle which such a discussion might have lent it.