It’s not altogether surprising that retired broadcast journalist Steve Cookson has found a niche presenting programmes on 2MBS; both radio and music are embedded in his DNA.
With his mother a pianist and light soprano Steve grew up with music and began to play the piano at the age of five, moving on in secondary school to playing the flugelhorn and the cornet in the school band under inspirational band master Cliff Goodchild, who was, at the time, the principal tuba player in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
An avid radio listener from an early age, a lucky break paved his way into the medium. Just out of university he responded to an ABC advertisement for a specialist trainee in the current affairs department, which had recently been separated from the news department.
After a rapid training period the ‘little redhead’, as he describes himself, was handed a reel-to-reel recorder and sent out into the world to interview newsmakers.
Then it was on to television when Channel 10 offered him a job with their news service. Just 26, he felt he ‘had to say yes to expand my knowledge of the media’. So it was that he spent two years working ‘very hard’ on ‘Eyewitness News’.
A desire to extend his experience took him to London, where he worked for two years for Visnews, an international news agency that supplied material to 400 broadcasters around the world. When satellite news feeds were introduced, Steve became one of two key people voicing them.
Once back in Australia he spent eight years at ABCTV news in Sydney before moving to Radio 2UE during Kerry Packer’s brief ownership of the talkback station. There his role was to edit and summarise the entire day’s news and other presenters’ interviews, as well as his own. One memorable example was his interview with Nobel Prize winning South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. When Packer sold the station back to its original owners the entire staff was fired.
By this time Steve had married, ‘family life [three children] had taken over, and I had a real rethink’. It was time to pursue a job with more regular hours. His first post-news media job was working with the 1988 Bicentenary planners. Once more fate intervened and a tiny advertisement in a newspaper led him to a media relations role with St George Bank, which was then a building society. He saw out the end of his working career in media relations and issues management with the Commonwealth Bank.
Now retired, the broadcast media has claimed him once again, this time as a volunteer, using all his remembered skills – writing for radio, researching and presenting – for the afternoon program. Once or twice a month he can also be heard on the drive program.
He was drawn to 2MBS early on by Ann Ramsay’s ‘Evensong’, often heard in his parents’ car on a Sunday evening drive home. ‘It was the beauty of the music and chorales rather than the religion’, often featuring the glorious choir of Kings College, Cambridge, that attracted him.
‘So now I find myself among like-minded, if quite divergent, music lovers, programmers and presenters on this wonderful radio station. It’s fun, it keeps me mentally active and helps me educate myself about some composers I’ve never heard of.’