Recently Lara Bell persuaded The Lismore App’s founder Simon Mumford to sit down and share his story that ends with the creation of the Lismore App. 

I was born in England, in Croydon, south of London. I don’t remember anything about it. I was two when we emigrated. My father apparently said to my mother “I'm going to go to Australia, do you want to come?” So, we ended up in Perth in 1967.

I grew up in Sorrento, which on the coast north of Perth. We were lucky enough to live 400 meters from the beach. When we moved in it was a gravel road and about 500 meters down the West Coast Highway (as it was known) was as far north as you could go. Now days, 40 km north is Yanchep which is considered an outer suburb of Perth. It has just changed so much.

(16 Robin Avenue, Sorrento, our first home in Australia in 1967)

When we grew up there was nothing there, which was was fantastic. We had one of those upbringings that most parents wouldn't let their kids have now. My older brother, Nic, and I had pushbikes and my parent would just say “come back by dinner”, and you'd just be gone - exploring and doing whatever at the age of 6 and 8.

My father was a mechanical engineer working for the General Electric Company or GEC back then. He worked in water pumps and irrigation in Perth for all his life and that's why he wanted to change.

He has an unusual background. My mum is very English, born and bred, so it was a big move for her. Dad grew up in Kenya. One of those cliched stories - I had a farm in Africa.

His father was English and travelled to Africa due to TB in the early 1900s. He went to work for his uncle who had a coffee farm in the north. His mother was German, a four-foot-nine German and my grandfather was over six foot so a very odd couple.

Anyway, they met, married and had my father. They had an older son who died in childbirth. They blamed the doctors, so my father was actually born in Berlin because they didn't want the same thing to happen again. My grandmother went to Germany to have him and then came back and he grew up north of Nairobi in a town called Nyeri where they bought a coffee farm.

(My father Richard as a young boy on the beach at Mombassa south of Nairobi where his family went for holidays)

He ended up being educated at a private boys school in Nairobi, served his two years in the military and then went to University in England, which is when he met my mother. 

When I was eight we went back to England for six months to live. Just because they (Mum and Dad) wanted a change I think. By that stage, my younger brother, Jeremy, was born so it was good to meet our cousins, aunt, uncle and grandparents for the first time and get to know them. We were spoilt by them which was nice.

We've grown up without grandparents and cousins. It's just been the five of us our entire life, that has been our family. When we moved to Perth there were only five Mumfords in the whole city. I often get asked, 'are you related to such and such Mumford?' and then go through our family history.

(Simon at kindergarten in 1969)

When we came back from England we moved up into the hills of Perth because Mum wanted to breed horses, Welsh Mountain ponies actually. For what reason? I don't know. We bought a five-acre fruit farm in a place called Sawyers Valley Mum purchased her first mare, Susie, and we ran a small orchard too, oranges, apples and pears.

It was a hobby thing. We'd pick the fruit, put it in a crate, take it down to the local Italian greengrocer, get five bucks, get an ice cream and then head home. We did that for a number of years before we moved further east to a 15-acre property in a place called Chidlow. Now Mum could have more room for the horses.

The bigger the farm the more you have to do with clearing saplings from the paddocks and fencing etc. My brother and I remember building the horses a round-yard. We went and got the wood from the National Park, which we bordered and built this round-yard so Mum could break the ponies in. We also built two stables and a hay shed.

On the weekend we’d play sport (Aussie Rules football) and otherwise, we’d be working around the farm and doing odd jobs. We had a cow, only one, just so we could have our own milk supply. Dad would milk in the morning, Monday to Friday, and then my brother and I would alternate the afternoon milk. Then we would do the weekend morning milks to give Dad a sleep-in. We had three sheep to get our own meat when it came time. 

I went to Easter Hills Senior High School 5km down the road from Chidlow. Halfway through Year 11, I was a typical teenage boy getting involved with my first serious girlfriend when the timing wasn't right. The study and dedication slipped and I missed getting into the course I wanted to do at uni by about three marks. I wanted to do Phys Ed because I loved sports. I could have gone on to do a Bachelor of Social Sciences or something like that but decided against it.

So I ended up with a job as a housemaster in a College about 90km north of Perth on an agricultural farm. I studied French and accounting through correspondence (the equivalent of online) while I was there. I looked after a dormitory full of Year 8 students and made sure at night that everyone was there, and up and ready for school, and then I did sport with them as the AFL football coach and cross country. 

After 12 months, I was 19 and decided to pack up my car and head to Sydney to see my ex-girlfriend and stayed there for two years. I got a job in an accounting firm because I was studying accounting, not that I wanted to continue it but it got me a job to pay the bills. I was living in a great location, Neutral Bay on Sydney's lower north shore just a three-minute walk to the famous Oaks pub.

As luck would have it, the group of people I was living and associating with were doing community radio in Chatswood to 2NSB FM. They said “Do you want to come and have a go?” so I went and joined them. I would do a shift on Tuesday and Thursday nights and some weekends. I really enjoyed the radio side and went and did a course at 2DayFM in Sydney with Grant Goldman and Dave Norman, two announcers who ran an annual course. 

Halfway through that course, I applied for jobs and landed my first radio job in Merredin (about halfway to Kalgoorlie). Merredin had a population of 4000 people in the Wheatbelt of WA so it was wheat and sheep and I was the breakfast announcer for 14 months.

(A 20 year old Simon Mumford applying for radio jobs)

I had met Linda in Sydney (the sister of a radio friend). We fell pregnant just before I got the job so we moved west together. My eldest daughter, Sarah, was born in in a place called Kellerberrin, which is smaller than Merredin but that's where the hospital was.

Here's a funny story. The doctor was old and due to retire, so when Linda went into labour, (it was very early, one of those 3am calls after a 24-hour long labour) he was tired and cranky, and he just did an episiotomy rather than wait for everything to stretch naturally. After Sarah was born Linda had complications and so we always referred to him as the butcher. As my daughter grew older she literally thought that because the town was so small that he actually was the butcher and the doctor as well!

After 14 months, I began applying for other jobs. My wife was Sydney born and bred, so we ended up getting a job in Nowra to be closer. I was the drive announcer there on an AM station, before we started the region's first FM station which I ended up doing the morning show on. Then, I became the music director and program director so I got to be in charge for seven years. During that time, we had two more daughters, Chrissy and Tara. Linda and I broke up around that time.

My radio life continued when one of Austereo’s (now known as Southern Cross Austereo or SCA) consultants was driving from Sydney to Canberra to do some work at the radio station there and he heard me on-air. I received a call asking if I wanted to have a chat about joining Austereo?” This was the big league so I said, "why not?”

I was flown to Melbourne to talk to Fox FM about a midnight to dawn shift as they were still available at that time before automation came into play. They said “Look, there's another job coming up in Canberra as Assistant Program Director. Would you like to do that instead?” I was more interested in programming and I always thought I was a better programmer than I was an announcer or a DJ. So I ended up taking the job in Canberra.

Interestingly, the guy who was the program director had an issue just before I started and he suddenly left the company. So, they said “Do you want to be program director? You don't look a gift horse in the mouth so I jumped at the opportunity. It certainly was a baptism of fire. 

Which takes me to my first day. They put you up in a hotel for a couple of weeks so you can find a place to live, mine was on Northbourne Avenue. The radio station was the second storey of a building not far from the hotel ans on Northbourne Avenue too. I had a motorbike at that stage and I pulled out to go to work on my very first day and cars were banked up forever and I was thinking “Geez traffic around here is really bad.”

I ended up waiting in traffic moving slowly down the road and all of a sudden I looked up and there was a building with smoke pouring out of it. I remember looking at the building and then saying, “That's my building!” On my very first day, a guy had a fight with his partner and drove a ute full of acetylene tanks into the bottom story of our building where his partner worked. It exploded and our building on the second floor was engulfed in flames.

Later that night on the news there was the picture of our breakfast announcers being rescued out of the window by the fire brigade. They had to smash the window to get them out.

We did a radio rebuild for FM104.7 because the fire totally destroyed everything. We had no records in those days, it was compact discs, no much was digital. We had no equipment, no studio, no anything as the building was deemed unsafe to return to.

We ended up working from the ABC building and literally asked listeners to come and supply us with music, which they did - it was amazing. We just ran everything by the seat of our pants for about three months, I think and we were in the ABC studio for six months before we could move back into our own building in the Jollimont Centre. 

I met Donna, my wife of 30 years next year, in Canberra. She's a Lismore-born and bred girl. She was working at 2LM/ZZZ when a friend of hers, who had moved to Canberra six months earlier, rang and said, “Look, there's a sales job here. Do you want to come to Canberra?” On a whim she accepted. I started there in November 1993, and Donna joined in February the next year.

(Donna and Simon with Tara, Sarah and Chrissy March 7 2004 at the wedding reception just north of Goolmangar Shop after the ceremony at Bexhill Open Air Cathedral. There was a flood the day before forcing the wedding to be postponed as the Nimbin Road was cut off)

I did two years there and then got a job offer to go back to Perth to 96FM. I did a couple of months to set it up and then Donna came over. We had a great time there, it was a small but great team. We turned the station round in eight months. It was in awful shape. 96FM was a heritage radio station, it was rating a 4.6, probably last of all the commercial stations, and we went from a 4.6 to 14.6 in eight months and ended up being number three in the market. It was hard work but a lot of fun rebuilding the brand. 

After that short stint, we moved to Adelaide and worked at SAFM for 12 months before another move to Triple M in Sydney for seven years as Assistant Program Director for a while and then Program Director at the end of the stint.

Triple M was a fantastic radio station, again rebuilding its brand but with some incredible people. Andrew Denton and Amanda Keller were doing breakfast, Club Veg were doing the drive show. The station had an attitude and punched well above its weight for what it was.

You could see how hard people worked. People like Andrew Denton, Amanda Keller and their team would get in at 4am and do two hours preparation and planning before they went on air at 6am to 9am. And then sometimes, if they were writing skits, they could be there until 1pm or 2pm. Yes, they were paid very well but they definitely worked hard for all the success they had. Breakfast radio is a different lifestyle.

Triple M was a load of fun with some really interesting characters and some good people.

(Skydiving in Sydney for a radio promotion Offsrping's 'Pretty Fly For A White Guy')

From there I ended up in a radio consulting job. I always wanted to consult, I loved it. So I ended up working for ESP in Brisbane as a consultant for about four years. That company was taken over when a couple of the guys who hired me retired, and I ended up taking their international arm which was where I was spending my time, so we started our own consulting company.

When I joined ESP initially I did some overseas travel. We had clients in Manchester and Bristol in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. BigFM in Stuttgart became our client for about eight years when we started CSC (Creative Strategy Consultancy). We would go to Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and New Zealand.

I didn't love the travel but I loved the destinations. All of a sudden I was learning about different cultures that I hadn't experienced before, trying different foods playing tourist where I could. You're sitting in Jakarta and you pick your own eyeballs or brain for a soup, it was fascinating. If I could take a few days to go and see certain destinations or tourist points I would.

We were in Brisbane for 16 years. Donna and I were told we could never have kids but 11 years later, Callie was born. It was a complete surprise! When you're told you can't have kids, and we were 40 at that stage, and thinking “We're probably too old now anyway”, it is a shock, in a good way. I was overseas at the time and when I came back Donna had a gift box for me and in the box was the pregnancy stick. I couldn't believe it.

(Callie in the arms of her grandfather Ben Mulcahy in the family Peter Street home in East Lismore)

If I had a trip (for work) and Donna and Callie could tag along for a holiday, we did that. We went to New Zealand a couple of times and Kuala Lumpur. At one stage, when Callie had just started preschool, we did a five-week trip through Europe.

We landed in Paris, hired a car, did Disneyland, went to Germany for work then drove to the UK to see family for a week. Then we caught the ferry to Calais and drove through the south of France up through Monaco, Italy, Switzerland and back to Germany for work, drove the hire car back to Paris, full of gifts and an extra suitcase, and flew home. So where we could, we travelled because we believe life experience is so valuable. It's something that you're not going to learn in the classroom.

During one to Jakarta, a Kiwi friend who is a bit of an entrepreneur moved from Auckland to Wanaka, near Queenstown. Wanaka had a local newspaper which he thought wasn't very good. So he started the first digital local news app.

When we would catch up, I discovered more about its development and became interested in what I thought was a great idea for the future. I think someone else started another local app in New Zealand and Lismore was the third. Donna and I discussed it and we thought let's do it.

People would say, “Why Lismore?” But it was because Donna was born and bred here and I'd been coming with my girls since we got together for the last thirty years. I'm not officially local because I wasn’t born bred here but 30 years is still a long time. We had family here and we had friends so we thought let's start the Lismore App. Initially thought we could make it work from Brisbane so we hired Will Jackson, Jilly Jackson’s son, as our first journo and we hired a sales guy.

We quickly learnt that the digital news space was too futuristic for some who were still stuck in traditional media like the Northern Star (they were still printing then), but we knew there was a crossover point as younger people wanted to get all the information on their mobiles, tablets or PCs and older people would still go and buy the newspaper and sit down to read it like they always had. However, newspaper sales were on the decline in regional markets throughout Australia so we knew the time would come when the Lismore App would be a strong brand in the community.

I love change because I love the opportunity that presents itself. If you don't adapt, you end up operating the same way over and over and over again. You'll peak at some point and then you'll start to detract. It's really hard to keep a business running at maximum profit without adapting in some way. You have to embrace it rather than fight it.

Donna and I thought that to truly make the Lismore App a success we needed to move down to Lismore. We originally launched The Lismore App in November 2017 with Apple owners joining in January 2018. We moved back to Lismore in 2020. As an owner, you're better off in the market. You know people, you've got connections, you make relationships and that's been the best move for us. 

I'm a bit nomadic. Coming from England to Perth, moving from Perth to Sydney to Merredin to Nowra to Canberra back to to Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and now Lismore, we've travelled everywhere. My family was just our (immediate) family. So it was more about how Donna felt about coming back to her hometown. Callie was in Year 8 so that was another potential issue, uprooting her from her friends. But we bribed her - she wanted an egg chair!

Six months after we had moved she told us she didn't want to go back. She loves it here. She's made good friends at Trinity and has found her life dream to be an actor. She has recently played Moana at Ballina Players, finished a role in Beautiful and will play older Nala in the upcoming Lion King musical.

I'm a keen golfer. Once a week I try and get out and play golf just to unwind plus you meet a lot of people that way. The goal is to get my handicap to 18 or under in 2024, we'll see.

Our three older daughters are in Sydney, and we are grandparents to nine. Sarah has three boys, Chrissy has two girls and a boy and Tara has three boys as well. The three girls have been coming to Lismore since they were very young, we even have a photo of them swimming in Lismore Lake and driving a car around the old track. Now, they bring their kids (our grandkids) and see the changes and experience what we have to offer.

(The old car track in the mid 1990s)

(The nine grandchildren, although there are 10, the child in the middle is not a grandchild with Callie in the background)

I guess we've had a couple of tipping points as far as the Lismore App goes. One was COVID and the other was the February 28 2022.

A global pandemic and Lismore's biggest-ever flood were incredibly tough on the community. But we are a digital newspaper that knew people wanted a trusted source of local information so we worked really hard during those times to make sure that we gave people what we promised. The Northern Star stopped printing during COVID and ended up on the same platforms that we were on and had been there for two and a half years. They also had a paywall and we didn’t. It's a big sticking point for people.

February 28 2022 was on another level, it was on such a scale that I still have trouble imagining where the water level rose to. Again, we worked really hard over those first three days, getting four hours sleep to make sure people had all the information they wanted because people were desperate for it. We wanted to make sure that we served the community. If we promise it, we want to deliver it, and not just have it as a hollow promise. It just builds trust in the brand and what the Lismore app stands for.

It's been a good move. It's been positive. And I love what the Lismore App represents and what we can do. I love supporting the community, we can do a lot of good and I hope to make people accountable when we need to.