About 5NPY Radio 5NPY (PY Media)

5NPY Radio 5NPY (PY Media)

Overview

Radio 5NPY is the radio service of PY Media — Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Media — the Anangu-owned and controlled media organisation serving the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the far north-west of South Australia. Based at Umuwa, the administrative centre of the APY Lands, the station broadcasts daily to seven communities spread across roughly 120,650 square kilometres of remote desert country, a population the station itself puts at about 2,250 people. Its programming mixes music, interviews, community service announcements and news bulletins covering the APY Lands and beyond, with a significant share of broadcasting in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara languages.

5NPY is the radio arm of one of Australia's most historically significant Indigenous media organisations. PY Media belongs to the generation of remote Indigenous media organisations — known as RIMOs, Remote Indigenous Media Organisations — that Anangu and other First Nations communities built for themselves in the 1980s, when the arrival of satellite television threatened to swamp local languages and cultures with outside content. Radio is only part of what the organisation does: PY Media also produces television and video, runs live outside broadcasts and sporting telecasts, maintains a major audiovisual archive of Anangu cultural material, and supplies translation and recording services to governments, non-government agencies and the South Australia Police. For the scattered communities of the APY Lands, where Umuwa sits about 460 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs and a permit is required for visitors, 5NPY is a genuinely local voice in a media landscape otherwise dominated by distant metropolitan services. The station also streams live through the PY Media website, so Anangu who have travelled or moved away — and anyone else — can listen from anywhere in the world.

History

The roots of 5NPY lie in one of the founding stories of Indigenous media in Australia. At Pukatja, then known as Ernabella, community members began experimenting with video in the early 1980s. Video training was introduced there around 1983, local production began in 1984, and by late 1984 Ernabella Video and Television (EVTV) was making its own low-powered, unlicensed local television broadcasts — among the very first remote Indigenous media initiatives in the country, alongside the Warlpiri Media Association at Yuendumu. The timing was deliberate. The AUSSAT satellite, launched in 1985, was about to beam commercial television into remote Australia for the first time, and Anangu elders feared the impact on language and culture. Making their own media — recording Tjukurpa (Dreaming) stories, inma (ceremony and dance), hunting, bush medicine and community life — was the community's answer.

EVTV's first year produced 17 programs, including a re-enactment of the Seven Sisters creation story and a documentary on bush medicine. Schoolteacher Neil Turner took over the running of EVTV in September 1985 and led its production work for about a decade, alongside Anangu pioneers of the service whose contributions are still remembered in community media histories. From 1987 the federal Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) began equipping remote communities with satellite receivers and local retransmission facilities, giving services like the one at Ernabella the technical foundation of the modern Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Service (RIBS) network. EVTV grew over time into PY Media, the regional Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara media organisation, with its hub at Umuwa, the APY Lands' administrative centre established in 1991.

The organisation's accumulated recordings grew into a substantial archive of Anangu audiovisual heritage: re-enactments of Tjukurpa, inma performances, concerts and decades of community life. In September 2016 PY Media was named the recipient of the Indigenous Remote Archival Fellowship, a partnership between the Indigenous Remote Communications Association, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, to begin digitising thousands of items held on deteriorating analogue formats. Announcing the fellowship, the NFSA observed that Anangu had been producing audiovisual material for some forty years — a lineage that runs directly from EVTV's first tapes to today's 5NPY broadcasts and PY Media's multi-camera live telecasts. Radio 5NPY itself became available to listeners far beyond the Lands in 2017, when the IndigiTUBE radio apps for Android and Apple devices launched with PY Media among the featured remote stations.

Programming and Content

On a normal day at the Umuwa studio, 5NPY's broadcasters and producers present music programs, interviews, community service announcements and news bulletins for the APY Lands and surrounding region. News gathering is deliberately decentralised to match the geography: the station's Community Mobile Reporters file stories and breaking news from their home communities using iOS devices linked directly back to the Umuwa studio. The reporters named on the station's radio page are Sandra Ikungka Lewis of Ernabella (Pukatja) and Willy Muntjantji Martin of Mimili.

Several long-running program strands give the schedule its shape. Uwankara Palyanyku Kanyintjaku, known as UPK, is the station's health and wellbeing program, examining issues of a spiritual, cultural and mental health nature for Anangu on the APY Lands; the UPK name is also carried by PY Media's performing arts work, and the UPK Allstars — an inma performance company established by Pitjantjatjara elders from a record of Tjukurpa passed down through their families — closed the WOMADelaide festival in 2025. Uninpa Iwara is a periodical bilingual current affairs program that takes up the big issues for Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara with Australian politicians, policymakers and community leaders. Kupi-kupi is a good-news segment celebrating school attendance and student achievement, and the station has also produced environmental programming such as The Rubbish Show, a waste-management segment, and storytelling recordings with senior community members including Elder Ginger Wikilyiri.

Outside the studio, live work is a defining part of the service. 5NPY performs live outside broadcasts in APY communities and provides logistical support for memorial services in times of mourning. PY Media has also become known for live telecasts of regional sport: it has broadcast APY women's softball and men's football competitions, twelve matches in a season including each grand final, using up to six professional cameras, on-field microphones and multi-platform streaming to Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, with commentators drawn from the station's own pool of broadcasters across the Lands. The organisation has likewise set up livestreams for major civic occasions in the region, including a visit by the South Australian Premier's country cabinet to Umuwa that was reported by ABC News.

Audience and Reach

5NPY's primary audience is the Anangu population of the APY Lands. The station states that it broadcasts its signal to seven communities over an area of 120,650 square kilometres, to a population of about 2,250 people; the wider APY Lands population is around 2,500. Indigenous Community Television's profile of PY Media describes how the organisation supports six Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Service (RIBS) communities — Fregon (Kaltjiti), Ernabella (Pukatja), Mimili, Indulkana, Amata and Pipalyatjara — in addition to the Umuwa hub itself, which accounts for the seven-community network.

Because each community is small and widely separated, radio's value here is less about raw audience size than about connection: health messages, school news, ceremony and mourning notices, sport and language all travel across the Lands on the same service. Streaming has extended that reach considerably. 5NPY is streamed live on the PY Media website for worldwide access, and since 2017 it has also been available through the IndigiTUBE radio apps, a development the Community Broadcasting Foundation supported precisely so that listeners away from home — a Pitjantjatjara speaker from Pukatja visiting Alice Springs, for example — could keep listening to radio in their first language. PY Media's streamed sports telecasts have drawn appreciative audiences across Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, as well as international viewers, according to the organisation's reporting of its broadcasts.

Digital Presence

PY Media's website, pymedia.org.au, is the station's front door online. A dedicated radio page describes the 5NPY service, its programs and its community reporters, and the station is streamed live from the site. The homepage carries news from across the organisation's work — its role in Covid-19 communications for the Lands, its involvement in events such as the Bush Bands Bash — and links through to its translation and outside-broadcast services. Beyond its own site, PY Media maintains a channel on Indigenous Community Television (ICTV), which hosts its video content including community programming and the UPK Allstars' WOMADelaide 2025 performance, and its material circulates through the IndigiTUBE platform, the online home of media made by and for Indigenous people in remote Australia. The station's sport and event productions are streamed simultaneously to Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, meaning a football grand final at a remote community ground can be watched live by family members in Alice Springs, Adelaide or overseas at the same moment it is played.

Ownership and Organisation

Radio 5NPY is owned and operated by Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Media Aboriginal Corporation, an Anangu-owned and controlled organisation — the corporation's ABN, 56 496 236 911, appears in its submission to the 2006 federal inquiry into community broadcasting, where its general manager was Will Rogers. The corporation is the regional media organisation for the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples and is recognised as a Remote Indigenous Media Organisation within the national First Nations media sector, whose peak body is First Nations Media Australia. Day-to-day management in recent years has rested with manager Thomas Holder, who fronted both the 2016 archival fellowship work and the organisation's sports telecast expansion. PY Media's work is supported through the structures that sustain remote Indigenous media nationally: it is a longstanding participant in the RIBS framework, its archive project was backed by the NFSA and AIATSIS partnership, and its streaming distribution was developed with the Indigenous Remote Communications Association (now First Nations Media Australia) and the Community Broadcasting Foundation. The organisation is based at Umuwa, with its broadcasters, producers and community reporters spread across the communities it serves.

Contact and Availability

Radio 5NPY broadcasts daily from Umuwa in the APY Lands, South Australia, and can be heard across the Lands through the community retransmission network at Fregon (Kaltjiti), Ernabella (Pukatja), Mimili, Indulkana, Amata and Pipalyatjara. Listeners anywhere can stream the station live via the PY Media website at pymedia.org.au, where the radio page (pymedia.org.au/radio/) sets out the service's programs and reporting team, and through the IndigiTUBE radio apps for Apple and Android devices. PY Media also offers in-house translation and recording services, used by federal and state government branches, non-government agencies and the South Australia Police, and provides outside broadcast and memorial-service support to APY communities; enquiries for these services are directed through the PY Media website. Video programming from PY Media, including community stories and performances, can be viewed on its Indigenous Community Television channel.