Vietnamese Youth and Student Show

Monday 9 - 11 pm and Friday 10.30 pm - 12.30 am (Saturday morning)

In Vietnamese.

Vietnamese news, currents affairs and music.

Presented by Tran Chi and Hieu Le.

CRAM Article November 2005

3CR’s popular Vietnamese Youth and Students Program continues to win listeners.

The Vietnamese community in Australia started to grow in the late 1970s, with the influx of the so-called ‘boat people’, and has today become the third largest non Anglo-Saxon language group in Australia.

As is common with many other cultural groups, the early radio programs in Vietnamese reflected the issues of people trying to settle into a new country, find work, find a house and learn the language. Not surprisingly, given the history of the Vietnam-American war, much airtime was also devoted to discussing the issues around this war.

By the 1990s, the Vietnamese community had settled and grown, and a new layer of young Vietnamese people felt their experience of living in two cultures was not being adequately expressed by existing Vietnamese media outlets.

3CR recognised this need and stepped in to fill the gap by training a group of young people from the Vietnamese community during late 1998 to early 1999. They were mainly students, eager to learn, and highly motivated to do a program for, and to, young people. Their first program went to air in May of 1999.

It soon proved a huge success with the community. 3CR recognised the show’s popularity and quickly expanded it to the present four hours per week.

The format of the program is magazine style, including talkback, current affairs, sport, news and music. The talkback segment is always popular as it lets people connect with other members of the community by sharing their stories and issues. While listeners often ring in to request popular Vietnamese songs, a great many other listeners contribute their own compilations, as well as short stories and poems. The Vietnamese Youth & Students program has now become a social and artistic outlet for many in the Vietnamese community in Melbourne.

While 3CR only broadcasts in and around Melbourne, the reputation and reach of the show has expanded well beyond its original expectations. With the advent of the internet, the program can be listened to from its own website, and the latest count is that listeners from 26 countries follow the program.

The Vietnamese Youth & Students program continues to be an outstanding success thanks to the dedication of its team. Well done.

Written by Chi Tran and Piergiorgio Moro.