‘From the Archives’ streams live on Hobart FM

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Lindsay McCarthy took his career as a commercial radio disc jockey into retirement by setting up and running one of Australia’s finest sound equipment collections (apparently rivalling part of the National Film and Sound Archive). He has proved age is no barrier – uploading part of the radio and record player collection online. The president of the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania (SPAT) is also running a oral history program to record the stories of his peers. The sound preservation library has recorded noises particular to Hobart from street chatter, gatherings at market places and people singing in the street, to children at play and traffic noises.

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SPAT’s archives are not sitting in the Bellerive’s Old Post Office to gather dust either – they are being used as content for Mr McCarthy’s radio programme ‘From the Archives’. The Hobart FM show is streamed live on the Internet on Tuesdays from 2- 3pm. He plays old pieces from the SPAT collection of 30,000 records – most of which is out of copyright.

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When McCarthy was visiting Launceston recently, an old friend gave him the 1954 ‘Australian Amateur Hour’ recordings – a 1950s version of talent show Australian idol. He took the recordings home and re-recorded them onto mini-disc for “From the Archives’. Someone else brought in a box of tapes of recordings from when the Inkspots played in City Hall in 1955. After a bit of editing on his sound system at home, they were ready for the public to enjoy a little journey down memory lane.

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Sarah Rhodes

2 Responses to “‘From the Archives’ streams live on Hobart FM”

  1. John Rogers Says: March 9th, 2011 at 1:34 pm

    I spent a very pleasurable 2 hours looking at the marvellous SPAT collections while on holiday in Hobart in January 2011. As a former announcer at 7HT for two years (1970-71) I was fascinated to see the reel-to-reels (Rola) and some of the first ‘cart’ machines (Plessey and Spotmasters) from the 60s/70s in the shelves. I would be interested to know if the Rola and the cart machines came from the old 7HT studios in Elizabeth St? On the same holiday I revisited the floors of the Elizabeth St (above McCann’s) where 7HT once operated. I wonder if someone somewhere has photographs of the 7HT studios and offices as they were in the 1960s and 1970s before the configuration altered slightly in the 1990s when THE-FM began operating from there?
    Cheers and congratulations on the fine work of SPAT in preserving the broadcasting equipment of years gone by. Regards, John (Johnny) Rogers

  2. len eaton Says: April 27th, 2011 at 5:33 am

    i was a trainee control room operator in 1958. i do recall the reeltoreel tape machines were the Byers66. this the days of Rex Waldron, Bruce Klein i think was the chief engineer, Graham (?) Vertigan the GM. the crosses to the TCA dogs were a patching nightmare, sometimes not successful. We closed station at midnight on weekends, the transmitter at Rosny was dialled in telephone style, the huge transmit valve 500watt standby transmitter was on the roof of the McCanns building. Len Eaton mob 0400242077

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