Reverend Vernon Kenneth Turner OAM
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES: Reverend Vernon Kenneth Turner, OAM, was born in Adelaide in 1917 where he attended Adelaide High School until his family moved to Sydney in 1931. He died yesterday. Before leaving Adelaide, Vernon Turner frequented all of Adelaide’s radio stations after school. At the age of seven he built his first microphone from a wooden Beecham’s pillbox and some mica and carbon granules. He later built more sophisticated microphones and pick-ups from old telephones that he purchased from the Postmaster General. He spent endless hours reading to himself and into the microphone the pages of the Adelaide Advertiser. In Sydney Vernon attended Randwick Boys High School and Sydney Boys High School and he did extremely well in his subjects. He also attended St Matthews Anglican Church at Bondi where he became a committed Christian.
During vacations he worked to support himself at school and, for several years, in a radio repair shop on Bondi Road, Bondi. In 1937 he was accepted by Anglican Archbishop Howard Mowll for training for the ministry at Moore Theological College. After two Sydney parishes he and his wife, May, spent several years in the outback of New South Wales as bush missionaries. In 1939 the outbreak of World War II interrupted his studies, which were resumed in 1946 at Emmanuel College at the University of Queensland. When the Uniting Church came into being in 1977, Reverend Vernon Turner joined, along with many other Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian ministers. In 1938 Reverend Vernon Turner began a weekly broadcast on station 2CH Church News, which continued for more than 50 years. Station 4BC in Brisbane asked him to broadcast Morning Devotions at 9.00 every morning, which he did for more than 20 years. The program was then heard on 2CB-FM until his retirement in 1996.
While at 4BC he commenced a community hymn-singing program called The Sunshine Hour and that was syndicated to a large number of commercial radio stations in all States. These two broadcasts were the beginning of the Christian Broadcasting Association. In 1953 Mr Turner was appointed editor of the 70-year-old ecumenical newspaper the Australian Christian World. From his tiny office in Castlereagh Street he continued to prepare his broadcasts each day of Morning Devotions and The Sunshine Hour, adding The Morning Interlude, which ran on 2UW for many years. At the end of 1953 the Presbyterian Church ordained him and inducted him into the Abbotsford-Five Dock churches and he immediately set about raising money to erect studios in the Five Dock church. By the end of the 1950s Mr Turner and his staff were producing an amazing 800 weekly programs for 100 commercial stations in all Australian States.
In 1955 he called the first meeting of the Christian Television Association and was its first secretary. By 1960 the staff at CBA had grown to 15 full-time paid staff. A new building became an urgent necessity and in February 1961 new studios were opened at 420 Lyons Road, Five Dock, by the Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board. The building contained three studios, two production booths, a record and tape library, a despatch room, a large office, a print shop and a library. The radio ministry grew apace and in 1975 the Commonwealth Government asked the Christian Broadcasting Association to operate Australia’s first ethnic radio station, 2EA, which it did for three years. Having applied for an FM radio licence for Sydney 23 years before, it was finally granted in 1978 and station 2CBA-FM began broadcasting in March 1979. I started to broadcast at that time and I broadcast from that station every day, seven days a week for many years.
From that date the station has operated 24 hours a day on high power, broadcasting to the whole of the Sydney metropolitan area. Mr Turner wrote a number of books, such as How to Keep Your Marriage off the Rocks, The Art of Christian Broadcasting and God Gave me a Microphone, which went into four editions. In 1991 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia [OAM] for services to Christian broadcasting. From the time he made his first microphone at seven years of age and during more than 50 years of Christian broadcasting, Reverend Vernon Turner dedicated his communication skills to Jesus Christ. Vernon Turner’s close friend Ramon Williams has helped me with these details of his life. He will be buried on Friday of this week. We praise God for the real pioneer of Christian broadcasting and Christian journalism, the Reverend Vernon Kenneth Turner, OAM. 21 November 2006.
