General News
18 February, 2026
Wimmera radio mast has stories to tell
TOWERING over the Wimmera for decades now is the landmark of the Dooen radio antenna, and this month marks 90 years since construction began in a time when building methods and equipment were nowhere near as developed as they are today.
About a year later in 1937, radio transmissions for 3WV began from the 201-metre site on AM frequency 594kHz.
Its spoked ‘top hat’ reshaped the electric field energy more evenly and optimised the radiation pattern for ground coverage, providing about a 20 per cent efficiency gain and eliminating the need for a taller tower.
But keeping a radio mast operational requires ongoing maintenance, including painting, checking cables, and replacing parts.
Former radio linesman, Charlie Hutchison, lives in Horsham and retired nearly 30 years ago, but has many memories of working and climbing on the Dooen mast with a long list of maintenance items.
“In the old days, we had to change the lights quite often,” he said.
“I've only lived here for the last 50 years, born up at Ararat, we worked out of Melbourne.
“Went and got a job, went to the school at Ballarat for 12 months and finished up getting onto the radio lines section.”
Employed by the old Postmaster General (the precursor to the split into Australia Post and Telecom – now Telstra – in 1975), Charlie said his team “worked out of Melbourne, as a crew, we went all over Victoria, looking after all the TV stations and the radio and the microwave and the mobile phones – all of that, it was about 20 or 30 of us”.
“I lived in a suitcase for 30 years,” he said.
“I used to go just change the lights on my own. In the early days, before all this satellite navigation … every time there was about four globes out, you’d have to go and do a compulsory (replacement) for the Department of Civil Aviation.
“Now they’ve got all this navigation. I often go past (and) go crook about the lights out – I don’t know who changes them now.
“We used to do all the maintenance on the guy anchors and up the mast, we’d grease all the threads up, make sure they weren't rusty, clean them up.
“And you’ll see all the insulators on the guys, they're all porcelain too – we used to do checks on them (and) make sure they weren't cracked.”
Lightning strikes on the tower also did some damage.
“One time (we) had a good one ... the lightning on the (cable) bend going into the building, burned through the porcelain insulator – just melted it like nothing, and porcelain’s got to be pretty hot to melt.
“That shorted everything out because it went into an inch and a quarter big bolt in the middle hole, and then we mucked around fixing that up for a couple of days.”
Sometimes there was evidence of a different kind of burn.
“One of the areas on the transmission line, they were all above ground – we had two big 600-pound copper cable and 300 pound around it like a coaxial cable, but it was exposed,” Charlie said.
“The birds used to land on it and all you’d get – the next day there'd be just their claws hanging on the inner ones.”
No fear of heights (his wife, Maree, said she had learned not to worry as “he was doing it before I met him”) and countless visits to the site also made him very familiar with scaling to the top of the tower, and he was asked by the Mail-Times how long that took.
“10 or 15 minutes if you were in a hurry,” he laughed.
“20 minutes if you were taking your time.
“The whole idea of going there (was) climbing it.”
When atmospheric conditions caused certain copper elements of the mast to slightly detune the transmitter off frequency, Charlie said the fix required the climb to be done at night.
“Sometimes they moved around with the hot and cold, loading coils they called them,” he said.
“About as big as a five-eighths copper tube, and it was just in a circle, and there were little bars across it. You had to get it in between there and slide them around and get to tune it in properly.
“We used to do that only of the night time, after 12 o'clock, when they turned it off, so you didn't get any interference.”
Despite the big lights shining on the tower to help with that job, Charlie said you could see “town lights all around”, but “we didn’t take much notice because we were there to do a job”.
Mind you, it wasn’t always just about the work.
“We used to get up to the top and dare one another to go out in the armature – we've got a photo here somewhere of a bloke standing in between the guys on his head,” Charlie laughed.
“You weren't allowed – if you put 80 kilograms out on one arm, you had to put someone at 80 kilograms out (on) the other arm. We were doing this for years.”
He said the engineering of the tower was quite impressive, with some key components lasting a very long time, including the distinctive top section.
“I think there’s eight insulators on that, about four foot high,” Charlie said.
“There's a big ring set on them, only half inch bolts … on top of each insulator was a steel cap so you could bolt it down, cemented in …. and that's all that held it, it used to just sway around in the breeze, you could see it move.
“And I don't know how the porcelain insulators have stood up to time – I think they’re the originals, I never changed them.”
Locals living nearby might also occasionally have heard strange sights and sounds coming from the location.
“You’d short out the lightning rod and the flame would be about 10 or 15 foot long,” Charlie said.
“You could hear it all over Dooen, I reckon, if you were listening. So we stopped doing that after a while.”
He also recalled how the crew could ‘tune in’ without a radio on days with certain weather conditions.
“You used to stand on the bottom on a frosty morning with the mast on, and you’d go in the little enclosure – and if you just wiggled your shoes around, you’d get music coming out of your feet, out of your shoes!”
On the subject of power output, this has changed over the years – when first commissioned it used a 5000-watt transmitter, then 10,000 watts, then in the 1980s the original building (with drought-caused cracks in the walls of up to 100 millimetres) needed to be replaced – and so, along with the installation of the one of the first solid-state systems, began 50,000 watt broadcasts in 1988.
Listeners have been reported from places as far and wide as Japan, Canada and South Africa – Charlie and Maree said they recalled listening to 3WV on distant travels, picking up the station from places “on the Nullarbor Plain and down in Mallacoota in the hills” and others have reported picking it up in Tasmania and Birdsville.
Charlie said he was sad when the original “beautiful, big old building there” was in such poor condition it had to be torn down – work he participated in.
“(It was) like a town hall – not as big, only single storey, had about 25-foot ceilings in it, it was just like Parliament House – great big entry, unbelievable,” he said.
Back in the early days, there were always people on site – including a guard by the Volunteer Defence Corps during World War 2, when the station apparently sometimes broadcast coded messages.
There’s even a story of a volunteer air force navigator from Mount Gambier training and getting lost at night until sighting the silhouetted tower as a familiar landmark as the sun rose.
Originally, power was supplied by diesel generators, as electricity had not yet arrived at a level in Dooen that could supply the transmitter, and – along with the frailty of early radio equipment – this in turn meant some maintenance workers had to live on site; but eventually those homes weren’t needed and torn down too.
“They took … about three or four houses out there ... on the side of the road there, between the buildings there and the Dooen Hall,” Charlie said.
“In the early days, they were there 24 hours a day, two or three families (of) maintenance workers.”
With the slow march of electronics transitioning from valves and then even from analogue transistor-based circuitry, Charlie said, “now it's all digital stuff, and the electronics is all different”, the level of on-site attention required has gradually decreased.
But with his days of climbing the mast long behind him, Charlie said as far as he was aware, one major task he was involved in appears to have stood the test of time, with the dry Wimmera air helping preserve it.
“The last big job we (did) there was painting it,” he said.
“That was 53 years ago.”
The tower doesn’t just provide a familiar sight on the horizon for locals.
It marks a time gone by where radio was relatively new, and world events just a few years later meant it became a critical part of the region’s communications infrastructure, perhaps only in the last two decades becoming seriously eclipsed by mobile coverage and the handheld high-tech of smartphones.
By the time 100 years roll around, its importance may have diminished even more from its initial existence, but with AM radio still providing key services in times of emergency over much larger footprints than mobile towers, it will likely be standing for some time yet.