4MK was the first commercial radio station to launch outside South East Queensland, and it started about as small as a station can start. Amateur wireless enthusiast Jack Williams and his father built a transmitter in their backyard, took out a commercial licence in 1931, and set up the studio console in the family living room, according to a history compiled by the station's Wikipedia entry. Programming simply stopped whenever Jack sat down for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and it stopped again every week when he headed out to his Buffalo Club meeting.
A living room operation that grew into a family newspaper's business
The station did not stay a two-person operation for long. In 1938, Mackay's local newspaper, the Daily Mercury, bought into what was still, by most accounts, a living-room-based family business. By the mid-1940s, the operation had grown into a full regional broadcaster with a real staff and a real schedule, running continuously from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., according to a period account from the Radio Heritage Foundation. J.H. Williams managed the station by then, with announcers Mavis Watson, Cath Potts, and Joan Hurley filling out programming that ranged from the serial drama "The Golden Boomerang" to a dedicated radio Sunday school, plus a poetry segment from Watson and a cooking program from Potts. The station also raised support for the Red Cross and the Red Shield, tying it directly into the civic life of a district whose economy at the time ran on seven sugar mills, a butter factory, and two wharf sheds.
Sixty-eight years without a commercial rival
What followed is a run almost no radio station gets to claim. 4MK held a commercial broadcast monopoly in Mackay for 68 years, its only competition coming from the ABC, which began relaying into the district in 1951 and launched a local service in 1953. The station celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2011, by which point long-serving announcer Trevor Lymbery, who had started his radio career in 1959 and joined 4MK in 1964, had spent 46 years on air before retiring the previous year.
A callsign that survived its own rebrand
The 4MK name briefly left the AM dial entirely. In 1999, the branding shifted to a new FM sister station, 4MK-FM on 101.9, while the original AM signal was renamed EasyMix 1026. That FM station was itself rebranded as Zinc in March 2009, which freed the callsign back up, and the AM station reverted to being 4MK. Ownership has changed hands more recently than the name has: Grant Broadcasters sold the station to the Australian Radio Network in a deal announced in November 2021 and finalized in January 2022, putting a station that started on a family dining table under one of the country's largest commercial radio groups.