Sunbury Community radio veteran and local resident Bill Kirk tells Zoe Moffatt about his connection with the town and almost two decades spent at the local station.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
I moved to Sunbury in July 1983, with my wife and first son. We moved into a house in Goonawarra, at that stage the place was surrounded by paddocks basically, and cows would wander down the street. I have four adult kids and five grandchildren, they’ve all been schooled in Sunbury and I was heavily involved in school councils. I am also involved in the Sunbury Family History Society as they were when they were first established.
Tell us about your time at 99.3FM and how you got involved?
I started in 2005, when a fellow school councillor was the station manager at the time. I hadn’t really been aware of it to be honest before then and eventually I decided to have a go at it. I had a lot of music and didn’t really have anyone to share it with other than myself. So I took the opportunity and joined up in May 2005, and have recently finished after about 19 years.
How does it feel to look back at almost 20 years there?
Fantastic, I really enjoyed my time there. Somebody said to me right at the start, ‘you sound as though you’re enjoying the music you’re playing,’ and that was my philosophy. I wanted to sound as though I was enjoying doing it and hopefully the listeners were as well.
What do you like about where you live?
We moved here originally because of the ‘citing living, country life’ slogan, but obviously the town has changed considerably since then. However, I still feel it’s a much better environment to live in compared to the inner suburbs.
And what, if anything, would you change about where you live?
Parking is always a problem, depending on the time of day and where you want to go, but at least at the moment, we don’t have to really pay for parking.
Where is your favourite place to spend time?
Places that serve a nice coffee
Tell us something people would be surprised to know about you?
I’ve often felt for the past 19 years that there weren’t very many people listening to my shows because I tended to have a different style of music than some of the more popular, more modern day shows. I did the Sunday classic morning program for 10 years between 2006 and 2016, which was 477 shows between 6am and 9am on a Sunday morning and there’s only a few Sundays I missed. I think the thing I was most proud of was that I did 18 Christmas morning shows in a row, and that was part of about 150 fill-in shows that I did over the years as well.
