Goonellabah’s John Maloney received an Australia Day award for services to the community from Lismore City Council. The award was richly deserved and came none too soon for a man who, while best known for founding the hugely popular Lismore Good Old Days Facebook page, has been serving the community for decades as a community radio broadcaster, church bell ringer and elderly care support worker.

My family's been living in the Richmond Valley since about 1849. Some of our ancestors were Irish convicts who were sentenced to the Moreton Bay settlement and later on got the contract to take the mail from Ipswich down to Lawrence on the Clarence by horseback. When they were coming through the Richmond Valley they thought it was a really nice area and they put in for a grant and were able to get some land released around Casino. Since then we've been living down in this area.

Running the Good Old Days Facebook page, I’ve discovered a few interesting bits and pieces about my family. People who knew some of my relatives were able to fill me in on things about my grandparents and others.

Doing my research for the page, I found some stuff about our great-grandfather Knoetzschs, who had a tiny pub built at Irvington, which was just this side of Casino about as far as the boats could come up the river towards Casino and unload everything. He used to give a free bottle of wine or spirits to anyone who could spell Knoetzchs. I don't know that he gave away many bottles of wine, but he was a very interesting character.

He had been at the Royal Military College in Leipzig, in Germany for the Kaizer, in the 1840s and then came out on a training ship with the German Navy. They got to Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne just as everyone was racing out to the Ballarat to the goldfields, the gold rush, so he and most of the ship deserted and went looking for gold. He did pretty well out of that.

Then the next gold rush was up at Drake so they all headed up to Drake and that's how he came to be on the Northern Rivers. He found there was more money serving the miners alcohol than actually digging the gold, so he opened a pub at Drake and then came down to Casino and lived there until he was about 90 years old.

In high school I really liked local history and did fairly well in history at school. I had a really good history teacher, Nell Williams from Coraki, who had written some local history books too, so she was a good influence on me. I also had a friend called Sid Drew who used to do a lot of research when microfilms first came out. You could read all the newspapers by going up to the university and read through microfilms and we used to look at old articles and pictures and that together.

After Facebook came out, I had a whole lot of local history pictures on one of my profiles and they were popular, just with my contacts and friends. I thought: "Gee, that’s all really popular. Maybe I could do something about it?” but I didn't do anything about it for about two years.

One day I was really bored, and it had become much easier to set up Facebook groups, so I decided to have a go and make one. Over about 48 hours or so, I just sat up uploading and uploading and uploading historical material, to give it a lot of momentum and it just took off really fast. We had about 1000 people in about two days and then it just spread and spread. I thought: "Holy mackerel!”

Within three days we were on the front page of the Echo and 2NR ABC interviewed me. It just went really viral. We had about 8,000 people I think in the first month. It was just amazing. Now we're up to about 15,000, something like that. We were covering all the whole Northern Rivers and so last year we decided to start one up for Casino, and it's up to about 6,000 or 7,000. So it's going really well too.

It's really interesting that the most popular threads are the sort of more banal things. You'd think it would be something really exciting, like some some rescue in a flood or the opening of Lismore Square but a really, really popular thread was about people driving around the block on Saturday night. There were so many people that said: "Oh yeah, that's a good memory. Yeah. We used to drive around the block in our FJ Holden and look at people out the window.” That thread had about a thousand comments and then the old swings that were in Spinks Park, people were just talking about the swings in the playground - that was really popular. It went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.

They're usually things people have had a good memory of, which is really, really great. People wanting to get the swimming pool reopened at the lake, that's been a really massive thing, and getting the railway back, a lot of people are for that and getting the fountain restored at the City Hall. There was a lot of talk about that and that happened. Heaps and heaps of people have been fascinated with fixing that clock that was hanging off the wall in Molesworth St.

There's a lot of people that are really interested in local history and issues and the page has focused the attention onto some of these issues that might have slipped by, which is good. It's showing the council and the wider community there are a lot of people interested in seeing these things get done, preserving the history and that. A lot of our really good history in Lismore has been lost. A lot of great buildings have been demolished, taken away, you know, just for the sake of development. Which is a shame.

One of the things that has come out of this is that we had the big reunion, Back to Lismore Day, which was really great. We had a couple of thousand people come down to the Workers Club. It was packed. We had a reunion of all the old bands and we raised a lot of money, which we gave to the Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter. I think we gave them a cheque for $15,000 or something like that.

So after that, we had another one after the big flood, Lismore's Back From the Flood, and we raised a lot of money from that and gave a big cheque to the council for the flood appeal, which was really great. We had a third one which ended up raising money for the Black Dog Institute I think and we had another one which raised a lot of money for the drought appeal last year. So that's been another really good thing that's come out of it, allowing us to give back to the community and do a lot of really good work. There's so much goodwill in the group, it's great we can harness it to do even more good.

I'd like to do another really big reunion with a lot of the old musicians that aren't getting any younger, from the '80s. A lot of the bands that haven't played together for years, get them all back together. There's a lot of bands that we couldn't fit on the other reunions and singers who said they would have loved to have been there. So harness that and raise some more money for something really good in Lismore, like the soup kitchen or something, which would be great. We'd like to do that.

Next year will be 40 years since I did my first program on River FM. I started when I was in Year Seven in high school when we used to do drive time in the afternoon and each day of the week was a different high school. After that program finished I got my own program and I’ve been doing different shows on and off for River FM for 40 years now. I'm on the board of River FM and I've been helping on the committee for 20 years.

One of the main things I'm trying to do with the community radio shows that I do, is on Sunday morning the show is specifically for seniors music for people over 80 or 90 because they're not sort of targeted anywhere else on radio now. So we're playing them all the music that they really love. Like Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, you know, all those classics. Dean Martin. It's about the only program that they have now just for that age group. And the other one is the country music show that I do on Thursday night is specifically targeted at helping lots of upcoming independent artists. We've got lots of local singer songwriters who are playing really good traditional music, taking the music back to its roots and they're doing it really successfully. So I'm trying to help them get a foothold and get them going.

River FM is pretty good. It’s keeping the local voice of radio going which is really important, especially during the floods that we have here. We need people broadcasting what's happening overnight because a lot of the other radio stations, commercial or whatever, go to their networks. At 6pm they go off to Melbourne or Sydney or wherever. We might just get a brief mention at the end of the hour or during the weather or something.

If we're there live like during the big flood in April 2017, we can just go on all night all day. Which is what we did, for three days, nonstop.

River FM is above Hernes Transport in South Lismore, just near the river bank, so we were trapped in there. We had water all around so that we couldn't get out. We could just go to the window to check the water level. Which was really handy. I had just knocked off work and went to the station quickly before the water came up because otherwise I knew I’d get trapped. So I flew down there but I didn't think to take too much. I just took half a loaf of bread and a couple of eggs and some cheese. So for about four days, I lived on half a loaf of bread and not much else.

I just had the manager of the station, who lives in Kyogle, with me. She was trapped as well and was there helping me. She'd run in with faxes and she'd bring me a glass of water and whatever and we kept going. I was just reading out river heights, giving people evacuation information. I had all the old farmers and people ringing and I’d pass all that information on.

This one lady sent me the nicest letter. She couldn't find out who I was for a long time, but she just found out this year and sent a letter saying she was trapped in her car and then when they’d managed to get out, she drove up to the top of Goonellabah and sat there for two days and we just kept them sane listening to us, knowing what was happening.

You're just sort of running on adrenaline. Every now and then maybe at 3am or 4am in the morning you might have 20 minute nap but then wake up because you've got to read the next river heights bulletin, which would come through at a quarter past the hour, every hour.

It was something different but I don't think I'd like to do it again in a hurry.

John Maloney broadcast live and non-stop for three-and-a-half days during the flood in 2017 when his radio station became an island. 

I got into belling ringing when I was in high school at Marist Brothers, which is now Trinity Catholic College. I started to learn to play the cathedral bells, which is a very historic 12 bell chime which was made in Dublin 100 years ago. They weren't being played at the time. Kevin Burns taught me to do that and I've been doing that since. That's at St Carthages. I still do that for all the services and weddings and Christmas and anytime that we need bells, which is really good. It's what we call heavenly metal music.

The ABC heard about us and did a segment on the Countrywide program. It's been one of the most popular segments that they have shown. They've repeated it a couple times showing us playing the bells. We also made some YouTube videos of the bells about 15 years ago and they've been watched in something like 150 countries around the world and had thousands of views. Places like Uzbekistan and Paraguay and Nigeria. People watch it and comment on it. That was pretty amazing and blew me away.

About 15 or 16 years ago, the bells started at St Andrew's Anglican Church, though that's a different type of bell ringing. We need a team of six or eight people to ring the bells there. So as soon as that started, I went over and saw them while they were just installing them and said I'd like to be part of it when it started. Which I did and I'm still doing that with our team of bell ringers there.

We go every year to a campanology convention, which is either in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide or Sydney or somewhere, which is really good. We've rung bells in nearly every city in Australia that's got bells, which is a good fun.

It's a good team activity. It's really good exercise. Some people say, you can't do more than two things at once, but in bellringing you're doing four things at once: you're counting, listening to the tune, you're coordinating your hands to catch the rope at certain places and you're counting the numbers in the pattern that you've got to learn. It really tightens up your brain activity. It's good for the spirit. It's giving back to the community. It's a unique activity that hasn't changed much in a couple of hundred years, a good tradition. I really like it. It ticks all the boxes for me.

John Maloney laying a wreath for his Great Uncle Tom Boyle at the Centenary of the Battle of Polygon Wood, Ypres, Belgium in October 2017. Photo: John James Maloney / Facebook

The main thing I look for in the things I do is a chance to be a servant for the community, to give back to the community, to give back to people, make a difference. That's the sort of guiding thing behind what I'm doing, that it's going to benefit someone or help someone. Like with the work that I do with St Carthages Community Care, for the past 25 years, working with community aged care and running groups for the senior citizens. We're working with lonely people were, brightening up their lives, with quizzes, music and entertainment. Taking them on outings. It's really good to boost them up and make a difference every day when you go to work, which is great.

I think you live a much better, happier existence if you're giving back, if you're helping people. I know my parents have both been a very good example. They've won awards before from the premier for volunteering and helping out. Dad's been doing his amateur boxing training here in Lismore for 60 years or something like that, since the ‘50s. So he's helped a lot of people. Mum does a lot of work in aged care and volunteering with meals on wheels and lots of different groups. So they've been a good influence to me. I've always just thought it was the thing to do..

Receiving the Australia Day award was a total shock. I thought I had no chance of winning. The council rang up to to make sure I was coming and I said I suppose so, because we usually go any way to watch. I was just sitting there and then as they were reading out the people and my family said: "Quick, go up. You won.” I didn't realise. I thought there's no chance in hell of me winning. It was really, really nice. I thought there must have been other people nominated who were more worthy, but there you go. It's nice. I really thank the council for doing it. I still haven't found out who nominated me. Whoever it was. It was nice of you to think of me. It's pretty humbling.