L.B. ‘Bernie’ Harte September 10, 1918 - June 14, 2015
L.B ‘BERNIE’ Harte, former radio 2KM broadcaster and manager, RAAF WWII veteran, journalist, author, humorist and raconteur has died at his home in Herberton, Queensland at the age of 96.
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Mr Harte will be well known to many Kempsey people as ‘the voice of the floods’ for the work he and his 2KM team of Macleay Valley correspondents did in keeping people informed via the radio during the Macleay’s many inundations.
He first arrived in Kempsey just after the 1949- 1950 floods and quickly set about re-establishing a small radio station and transmitters around the town.
Within a few years 2KM had grown to be one of the biggest country radio stations in NSW, broadcasting to Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie.
After moving to Sydney in the late 60s Mr Harte returned to Kempsey in 1972, and together with a group of local business people set about establishing the Chamber of Commerce.
Mr Harte retired to Port Macquarie and then later to Far North Queensland. His love of radio came from his war service as a radio operator in the RAAF aboard Catalina flying boats, harassing Japanese forces in the South Pacific and supporting Australian Commando operations from bases in Papua New Guinea.
He was the only member of his Catalina crew to survive the war, and left the Air Force as a Flight Lieutenant. Mr Harte published a history of the early days of Australian broadcasting called ‘When Radio was the Cat’s Whiskers’ in 2002.
His entertaining recollections of flying against the Japanese in WWII are also recorded in the Australian War Material (AWM) archive.
In his contribution to the AWM Mr Harte tells the story of one particular mission where they used home- made bombs because of a shortage of ammunition.
“One day we ran out of our usual 250 pounders. To fill the gap, so to speak, we took along a couple of crates full of 20 pound fragmentation bombs,” he wrote. “Each one had to be fused by hand using a pair of pliers and then thrown over the side a là WWI.
“This meant circling the target for about half an hour to get rid of them.”
When the supply of 20 pounders was exhausted and the 250 pound bombs had not arrived one Catalina crew decided to improvise.
“On their next trip they carried a couple of crates of empty beer bottles, kindly supplied by the Cairns Brewery,” Mr Harte wrote. “The noise generated in the throat of an empty bottle falling from a few thousand feet could be quite frightening to those below - so we were told.”
Mr Harte is survived by Adrian, Jane, Bernie and their extended families. A function in the Macleay to honour Bernie Harte is being planned for later in the year.