Joan Ikin, Former Volunteer
I had been an applied maths teacher for many years, and I was exhausted, so I decided to finish up and I thought, what am I going to do now? My son had heard an advertisement on 3MBS that they were looking for volunteers. He said 'you love classical music why don’t you get involved?', and so I did.
I did the training as a presenter when I first started at the station, and I was also doing some work in the office. There weren’t many paid staff in those days, when I started in the early 1990s, it was mainly volunteers.
In the old studio in Kew there was a sign on the door which said, ‘This door must be kept closed at all times.’ I wasn’t sure how anyone was expected to get into the studio given this. The studio walls were also adorned with egg cartons to dampen the sound. It worked to an extent, but we could still hear the trams sometimes down Cotham Road and Glenferrie Road.
My program was Morning Recital which was on at 10am for two hours and it used to follow the Karl Haas program. The only problem was that you never knew when the program was going to finish—there was no automatic finishing time like there is now. It really was excruciating waiting and then you would hear the Beethoven slow movement playing and you knew he was finishing. You then had 20 seconds to select something to continue his theme or introduce your own theme.
I did over a thousand programs based on themes, which I devised. Sometimes I would think of a particular piece of music which suggested the theme; for example, [Sibelius’s] Finlandia and Romanian rhapsodies were just a couple I did.
I was involved in the training of new volunteers for a while, but I never thought of teaching so much as helping people to learn. I really liked the atmosphere at 3MBS though sometimes dealing with management I had to tiptoe around a bit.