Orange, New South Wales, does not grow a single orange. The Central-Western city was named in 1846 by surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell in honour of Prince William of Orange, a Dutch royal with no connection to citrus fruit, and the local climate turned out to be far too cool for oranges to survive. What it grows instead is apples, and it has grown them since 1841, when settler George Hawke planted a small orchard on 2.5 hectares of land and harvested his first two apples three years later. Orange went on to become mainland Australia's largest apple producer for roughly 170 years, earning the nickname "Apple City."
A station that used to wear that history in its name
The city's community radio station carried that identity directly for years. Before it became FM107.5, the station operated as Apple FM, broadcasting on a temporary community licence through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, according to its Wikipedia history. It converted to a full community broadcasting licence in January 1998, taking on the callsign 2OCB and rebranding as FM107.5, The Local Station, under the nonprofit Orange Community Broadcasters. The transition was not entirely smooth: the station survived an insolvency scare in 2001 before settling into the operation it runs today.
Volunteer-run, transmitting from a mountain
FM107.5 broadcasts from a transmitter on Mount Canobolas at 1,395 metres of elevation, running at 5 kW to reach the Orange RA1 licence area, a footprint stretching roughly from Cumnock in the north to the outskirts of Bathurst in the east, Cowra in the south, and Eugowra in the west. The station's programming mix leans into what most Australian community stations aim for and few large commercial operators bother with: music, arts coverage, Indigenous programming, and shows in languages other than English, produced almost entirely by volunteer presenters, supplemented with content from the Community Radio Network.
Still growing apples, still serving the same district
The apple industry that gave the original station its name has not disappeared from Orange, even if the region's agricultural mix has diversified into cool-climate wine and cherries over recent decades. FM107.5 no longer needs the fruit in its name to signal what community it serves, but the throughline is still there: a volunteer station broadcasting from a mountain above a district that has spent nearly two centuries growing the wrong fruit for its own name, and finding a way to make that work anyway.