Seen, funded and heard: more marginalised voices to air on Bay FM

Youth, older women and voices from the queer community are all to be heard more prominently on Byron’s only community radio station, Bay FM, thanks to competitive funding approval.

The station has long offered support as a platform for marginalised local community voices but programming reflects a wider social inequity in opportunities for traditionally underrepresented demographics to participate in the media industry.

Take, for instance, emerging Northern Rivers music industry practitioner, Yasmin Morris, an established local performer despite her younger years.

Ms Morris has experience helping coordinate some of Bay FM’s recent local events aimed at fostering the music industry, including a live multi-act gig at the Bangalow Bowlo called AirWaves earlier this year.

She also spent time co-producing and presenting the station’s former dedicated youth program, YAC Radio, co-founded with the Byron Youth Service.

The Thursday afternoon program, scheduled to air in time for school pick-ups across the shire including key local school bus services, featured youth chatting about local and international issues, youth musicians both solo and in bands and through recordings as well as live studio performances, and special segments and productions such as vox pops, film and book reviews.

Founding co-producer Leilah Shostak also partnered with longtime Bay FM presenter Rasela Torise to produce the award-winning documentary podcast trilogy, Young Legends: flood stories of Main Arm.

But after working on the project for some time well past its seed funding expiration, neither Ms Morris nor the YAC Radio co-producer at the time, Max Squires, could afford to keep it up.

When volunteering becomes a luxury, voices diminish

Realities of a declared local housing crisis and other cost-of-living pressures are often heard about on Bay FM but the folk presenting the stories are usually living in the same community as their guests and often share their experiences.

The station shares the modern challenges of other volunteer organisations when it comes to the capacity of people to take on unpaid work, regardless of their passion and skills.

Even now, after news of her successful funding application to launch a new youth program with Mr Squires, Ms Morris is low-key when it comes to the project’s future viability.

‘A lot of work does go in and we volunteered for two years so it would be nice to keep it going one day,’ Ms Morris told Bay FM’s Community Newsroom recently, ‘but yeah, we’ll see how it goes’.

The emerging radio producer’s new program, Off the Charts, is one of three new Bay FM community radio content project pitches to have earned approval for funding through a competitive Community Broadcasting Foundation annual grants application scheme.

The talk-based audio focused projects are all to be produced by independent community broadcasters ranging in experience from a few years to a few decades and counting, with Ms Morris and Mr Squires obviously falling into the former category.

‘We’ve got one month of planning and then five months on air,’ Ms Morris said, ‘hopefully we can apply for some other funding, just so we can keep it going’.

Off the Charts is to air every Friday from October on Bay FM 99.9, streaming at bayfrm.org, from 2-3pm.

Call-out for Byron grommets

‘It’s another fun youth show with a few different segments in it, followed by a “women in music” segment that I’ll be leading, interviewing all different women from the industry’, Ms Morris told Community Newsroom.

Local youth are also invited to participate in the project, especially via its youth surf report, as it’s to be presented by ‘grommets’.

‘You just need to have the froth, you don’t even need to be good at surfing,’ Mr Squires said, ‘you just need to say “yeow” heaps of times and throw in a couple of shockers’.

‘But as funny as it is, that’s also about bringing young people into the fold of the radio,’ Mr Squires continued, ‘it’s a surf town, when the swells are on, this place is all about surfing and the young kids are at the forefront of that’.

‘I’ve been getting dropped in by nine-year-olds for the last couple of years that are better surfers than I’ll ever be,’ Mr Squires said.

Anyone who knew a potential grommet suitable for contributing a local surf report was invited to contact the Off the Charts producers via Bay FM’s [email protected].

Sista Rasela surfing air waves of success

Longtime Bay FM radio producer Sista Rasela, more formally known as Rasela Torise, frequently curves the crests of Byron Bay on her board and certainly won’t be applying for the Grom report.

The award-winning producer is riding a high this year, continuing a wave of industry recognition that began to peak when Young Legends won the 2024 Community Broadcasting Association of Australia Award for Excellence in Community Engagement.

The sector acclaim came after years of painstaking dedication to the art of recording community voices, particularly in remote, regional locations, often with young people living on the margins of society and most remarkably in otherwise isolated or largely overlooked First Nations communities, including one in the Fingal area of the Tweed Shire.

She is loved for her wonderfully crafted features on local markets and sustainable living movements as well as her travel journal podcasts, particularly those created during initial pandemic times in Australia where some jurisdictions were still free to roam, such as the one she chose to explore, Queensland.

Special mention must also be made of her series travelling through Tasmania, where she was able to evoke a true sense of the island state’s beauty and tragic history.

Ms Torise’s weekly program, Belly, can be heard each week from 9-11am on Tuesdays via Bay FM and past work can be found by searching online for Plantation Studios.

National network WOWed by Bay FM podcast

Her upcoming project, Wise Older Women, is a second installment of a previously funded six-part feature interview series living up to its name.

Each episode featured an hour-long interview with a woman aged between her sixties and eighties-plus, including Bay FM station co-founder Nancy Jo Falcone.

The initial series has this year been selected for national broadcast through the Community Radio Network.

Ms Torise said she cried when a CRN representative told her WOW was the year’s highest-rated application, saying the work was exactly the sort the network was seeking.

The series was recently shortlisted for this year’s CBAA awards in the Best New Program category, with winners to be announced at the end of this year’s CBAA conference in Hobart in late October.

A launch date for the second instalment of WOW is to be announced, with production yet to start when Ms Torise spoke with Community Newsroom in late August.

‘I go and I sit with them, and I am just in awe of these elders,’ Ms Torise said.

‘A lot of cultures, older people are deeply respected,’ Ms Torise said, herself often referring on air to her mixed heritage including Samoan roots.

‘They’re not put away somewhere, they’re not ignored,’ she continued, ‘they’re celebrated and children do sit at their feet, and they don’t have to even be children, but just younger people sit with their elders and they look up to them, they listen to what they have to say’.

‘They have years of experience, education and specific knowledge on certain things, these things that they’ve been doing for thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years.’

Green makes more changes with Queer’d News debut

Longtime Bay FM Wednesday morning Make A Change producer Dione Green has also received funding approval for new content, having previously been commissioned to produce Untangling the Yarn, a ten-part series focused on people living with memory loss.

The series aired as part of Make A Change, where the newly funded Queer’d News premiered in late September.

‘It’s going to have an Australia-wide focus,’ Green said of the project on Community Newsroom in the lead-up to the launch, ‘of course, local stories will play a part of that’.

Byron-based community group, Queer Family, was on Green’s list of potential contributors, probably through workshops like some already facilitated with rainbow youth at Byron Bay High School.

‘Our first story is quite possibly going to come from the Byron High School Pride group,’ Green said, ‘they are having “Wear it Purple Day” at their school, which is a sort of a day of awareness for LGBTQ’.

‘They’re very excited at Byron High for the day and I’ve tasked them with recording some interviews about it.’

Queer’d News is the only regular programming on Bay FM dedicated to voices and stories from the rainbow community aside from a late-night current affairs offering on Wednesdays via the CRN, mostly focused on international news.

Green has committed to production of 40 episodes as part of the funding agreement with the CBF.

The first episode featuring local high school students may be heard via Make A Change at Bay FM’s online program guide, look for the 24 September program.

*Mia Armitage is a Bay FM member and presents CommunityNewsroom each Friday from 11am.