Join us on Saturday 24 January to celebrate 50 years of your favourite music, performers, and voices from five decades of classical music broadcasting on the ABC.<\/p>\n
For many, the network has been more than just a radio station. It had also been a source of beauty, joy and companionship in good times and tough moments.<\/p>\n
We asked former and current presenters to share what ABC Classic means to them, as well as some of their most memorable stories.<\/p>\n
Time and time again, these stories recall moments of connection, a shared love of music and the power of radio to build a community of music lovers.<\/p>\n
Music that can reach everyone<\/p>\n
Many presenters say ABC Classic is special because it’s available to everyone.<\/p>\n
“You could be a kid, or you could be a king, a prince regent or a punk rocker, this is all available to you,” says former presenter Damien Beaumont.<\/p>\n
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Damien Beaumont says listening to ABC Classic opened up a world of music when he was growing up on a rural farm. (ABC Classic)<\/p>\n
Beaumont, who switched off his microphone in 2024, speaks from personal experience, having grown up in regional Australia.<\/p>\n
“The world was open to me in my little isolated farm, and I could experience and know that there were things happening out there.”<\/p>\n
That’s also the case for current ABC Classic Breakfast presenter Megan Burslem, who came from a small rural town in Victoria.<\/p>\n
“ABC Classic was the pathway to this beautiful, wonderful, mysterious world.”<\/p>\n
“Every single moment that I broadcast, I always think about that little kid in a rural country town who is discovering and hearing classical music for the very first time,” Burslem says.<\/p>\n
Connecting people through the power of music<\/p>\n
Over the years, ABC Classic has been the platform for memorable moments and extraordinary stories.<\/p>\n
In kitchens and cars, homes and hospital wards, Presenters and audiences connect through a love of music.<\/p>\n
Christopher Lawrence remembers the overwhelming support from audiences in real life while launching the highly popular Swoon compilation series in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n
“[The Swoon compilation] was a playlist before you had a playlist, a real novelty in those days,” he says.<\/p>\n
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Christopher Lawrence was one of the instigators of the longstanding Swoon segment, a popular feature of Classic Breakfast. (ABC Classic: Toby Frost)<\/p>\n
The initial Swoon albums became the highest-selling classical compilations in the history of Australian music, selling over 500,000 CDs.<\/p>\n
When ABC Classic released the third album in 1998, the team decided to do a broadcast of the launch from its shop in Sydney near the landmark Queen Victoria building.<\/p>\n
“[When] I opened the doors, literally hundreds and hundreds of people came in,” Lawrence recalls.<\/p>\n
The Swoon segment was a long-standing feature of ABC Classic Breakfast, meant to bring a moment of calm amid people’s busy mornings.<\/p>\n
Ed Le Brocq remembers a woman who shared how she was reunited with her daughter through listening to the segment.<\/p>\n
“They’d had a bit of a tricky relationship, but they found out that both of them listened to the Swoon segment [from] different cities,” Le Brocq says.<\/p>\n
“They texted each other after the segment each day and discussed what they felt about the music, [rebuilding] their relationship.”<\/p>\n
![\"Ed](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/bcaf932fe2119f116be18ec00c4e9eb5.jpeg\")
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Ed Le Brocq has many stories of connection from his years presenting on ABC Classic. (ABC Classic: Janine Marshman)<\/p>\n
Building a community of music lovers<\/p>\n
Presenters have cherished the connections with audiences through generations of classical music lovers.<\/p>\n
Before smart phones and social media, audience members wrote letters and made phone calls to share their reactions to what presenters said or played on air.<\/p>\n
Veteran broadcaster Marian Arnold remembers the many letters she received from listeners during her 34-year career.<\/p>\n
“It was very important to me to engage with listeners who were entrusting me with their stories,” Arnold reflects.<\/p>\n
She particularly cherishes a program called Love in the Afternoon, where she invited requests from listeners for music that they associated with love stories later in their lives.<\/p>\n
“I was deluged with requests and letters of all sorts, from coming out stories to the most incredibly beautiful stories and the most heartbreakingly sad.”<\/p>\n
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Marian Arnold (second from the left) was a presenter at ABC Classic for 34 years, and worked alongside popular presenters like Bob Maynard, Geoff Bennett and Malcolm Patterson. (ABC Archives)<\/p>\n
Although technology has changed the way we communicate, our yearning for connection with other music lovers remains the same.<\/p>\n
At the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, when singing together in person was banned due to health concerns, ABC Classic launched the national virtual Classic Choir.<\/p>\n
First Nations composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon wrote Christmas With You, and 1,500 people from around Australia sent videos of themselves singing.<\/p>\n
Russell Torrance vividly remembers the moment he pressed “play” on air for the first time.<\/p>\n
“I was in floods of tears, because I was on my own in the studio,” he says.<\/p>\n
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“So many people had so many high hopes for that Christmas that everything would be sorted out,” he says.<\/p>\n
Instead, so many people were separated from loved ones during that Christmas, and the choir was a way for them to come together, or remember those they were missing.<\/p>\n
Opening a world of musical discoveries<\/p>\n
Even in an era of curated playlists, many people still value ABC Classic’s broad musical offerings.<\/p>\n
From its first on-air launch in 1976 as ABC FM, Arnold says that the station played “everything from Gregorian chant to contemporary.”<\/p>\n
“There was rock music, folk music, light music, drama, poetry, soundscapes, experimental and new music.”<\/p>\n
Pop and other music has found its own home on other ABC networks, and classical music is enshrined in ABC Classic’s name.<\/p>\n
But the network still plays a huge range of music in the classical genre.<\/p>\n
Torrance, who is originally from Scotland, says: “It has been such a discovery learning about Australian music, [particularly] how classical music in Australia is a vibrant and living tradition.”<\/p>\n
“There’s so many different cultures in the sounds of ABC Classic,” Torrance adds.<\/p>\n
This is a sentiment echoed by Vanessa Hughes.<\/p>\n
“In the last year alone, ABC Classics played 1,138 female composers, and bar a handful of them, they are all new discoveries to me,” Hughes says.<\/p>\n
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Vanessa Hughes says ABC Classic played music by 1,138 female composers last year. (ABC Classic: Carmen Pratap)<\/p>\n
Hughes highlights the impact diverse programming has had on the classical music tradition in Australia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“ABC Classic reminds us all that this music belongs to everyone.”<\/p>\n
“Our audience, the people making music, composing it and performing it, that’s everyone,” she says.<\/p>\n
It’s a remedy against the perception that classical music is “somewhat exclusive”, Hughes says.<\/p>\n
“[Instead], it is the most diverse, the most beautiful, interesting world to discover.”<\/p>\n
These stories are just a handful of memories shared by former and current presenters of ABC Classic. As our celebrations continue throughout 2026, we’ll keep sharing these stories on air, and on our website and social media.<\/p>\n