Mike Moore and his wife Cheryl decided seven years ago to move to Kununurra, in the extreme north of Western Australia, not far from the Northern Territory.
For many people, the attraction of Kununurra is that it’s the eastern gateway to the Kimberley, one of the most remote and breathtaking landscapes in the world: home of outback 4WD adventure, rugged terrain, an outback sea and giant barramundi.
But for Mike, the attraction was to lend support to an unusual radio project aimed at broadcasting Christian radio programs to some 60 per cent of the world’s population.
‘I guess I got involved because as a Christian our whole aim in life is to help people’, says Mike, who used to run a mechanical repair and hire business and grew up in the West Kimberley town of Derby.
‘And I could see that radio could help a lot of people in the Third World countries. We decided to chuck in the money side of things and come with HCJB where you don’t actually get paid. You get supported by different churches and Christian people.’
Mike is the local manager for HCJB World Radio, a worldwide Christian broadcasting group based in the US. HCJB pioneered evangelical broadcasting in 1931, beaming short-wave programs from a converted sheep shed in Ecuador. These days, it broadcasts to more than 100 countries in 120 languages. And depending on the target audience, the group uses short-wave, AM and FM radio, satellite, TV and the internet to get its evangelical messages out.
HCJB is the radio call sign originally in Ecuador. From that, a motto has been created: ‘The motto is “Heralding Christ Jesus Blessings” but that’s not our name, our name is HCJB’, says Mike.
In October, HCJB announced that it had finally cleared seven years of red tape and local opposition and had the go ahead from the Western Australian Government to lease Crown land to extend its broadcasting centre several kilometres outside Kununurra.
Although it already broadcasts radio programs in 11 languages to the Asia Pacific region from Kununurra, HCJB plans to expand its short-wave broadcasts by leasing the extra land and building another 31 radio towers some 90 metres high.
The Kununurra towers would take programs produced at HCJB’s Melbourne studios and broadcast them further into the Asia Pacific region. In all, the new towers would cost an estimated $20 million. But for the past three years, emotions have run high over