New Dawn FM takes to the airwaves

A couple of years ago, Phil Charley and I sat down to lunch in Sydney’s Chinatown with onetime colleague Carolus (Charlie) Ketsimur [left], top flight journalist and accomplished jazz musician. Charlie explained how Bougainville was going through a long process of recovering from a destructive civil war that cost the island 20 percent of its population through murder and disease and most of its infrastructure. And he talked of his ambition to establish a radio station in the north of the island that would assist Bougainville’s rehabilitation from this state of devastation. Charlie even had a name for the station – New Dawn.

Phil, and I said we’d do what we could to help and got in touch with our former PNG media colleague, Martin Hadlow, who had just returned from a gig with UNESCO. Martin, now a professor at Queensland University, had always put up his hand for the tough jobs – Jordan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan – and knew that plugging in a locally-owned radio station could do a lot for the education and development, not to mention the morale, of Bougainvilleans.

After a welter of paperwork – business plans, project proposals, budgets, contracts, assessments, reassessments – we got money from UNESCO. The German Government also provided a timely infusion of funds.

And yesterday afternoon at 2 pm New Dawn FM began its first test broadcast from a studio and transmitter on Buka Island.

“We completed the setting up yesterday and double checked that everything was working,” says station manager, Aloysius Laukai [seen here with German officials], who's been driving the project. “The test started at 1400 and went through to 2200. The signal was OK. We got calls from Buka and surrounding villages. It worked very well, and in stereo!”

Testing will continue for the next two weeks and a date for the official launch will be set for around the middle of May.

It will be a golden moment.