Out of the Box - Dylan Storer, Wangki Yupurnanupurru Radio

My name is Dylan Storer. I am a volunteer broadcaster on Wangki Yupurnanupurru Radio in the Kimberley, WA & SYN Nation in Melbourne.

Among other things, I produce and host the weekly environmental & tech show Envirence, broadcast live on Wangki on a Monday and replayed on a Thursday on SYN Nation.

My radio journey started when I was seven years old. I was watching TV and up came Bob the Builder – in the episode Bob and the “gang” built and operated a radio station. This sparked my interest in radio and pretty soon I was dragging my dad’s microphone and speaker out on to the back lawn, reading the news and weather like I was on the radio! I think my family got sick of hearing my voice (I don’t blame them) so my grandmother got me in the car and drove me up to the radio station.

After my initial tour of the station, the manager took me through some basic training on which buttons to press etc. And soon I was hosting my own show under the supervision of the patient staff of Wangki. In the beginning I was hosting an hour show called KIDZ HITZ. It was a music show and I would play music from artists like The Wiggles, Jackson 5 & other songs that were aimed at my age group. As I got older, I hosted a show I called TUNES. It was an afternoon show interviewing local bands & artists along with people about important issues in Fitzroy Crossing.

One day, I interviewed the founder of the Kimberley Toad Busters about the progress of the cane toads across the Kimberley, that’s when I found my other interest - the environment. Still under the name of TUNES, I started venturing into more environmentalthemed interviews and soon I was focusing on so many environmental issues that I decided to change the name.

Now under the brand new and fancy name of Envirence, I was covering environmental, tech & science news from around Australia and the world. It was around this time SYN came up to Fitzroy and recruited me to be a part of their National Hub Program. It was an exciting offer and one I couldn’t turn down so, with a few tweaks to the show, I was ready to be broadcast in Melbourne! Being able to reach more listeners was always a goal of mine, so to finally get this chance meant a lot to me.

Some of my highlights of being a radio broadcaster include; interviewing Andrew (twiggy) Forrest & Commonwealth Games gold medalist Sophie Edington, getting the chance to travel down to Melbourne to visit and train with SYN & above all, being able to get my voice heard on one of the most important issues of our time: protecting the environment.

You can listen to Dylan’s show on SYN Nation, Thursdays 3 – 4 pm or if you happen to be traveling through Fitzroy Crossing on Wangki Radio, Mondays 3 – 4 pm. 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 edition of CBX Magazine.