Stephen Walker had been running a youth crisis centre in the Dandenongs when he first encountered a weird station transmitting out of RMIT University. He later remembered passing an aerial out of his bathroom window, tilting it in exactly the right position until he received a signal.

“It felt like we were kind of eavesdropping on a culture,” he said.

Walker, who died on Wednesday from cancer, would go on to shape the sound of independent Melbourne.

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Music fans, particularly those of a certain generation, will remember him as The Ghost Who Talks, presenting Skull Cave on Friday evenings on Triple R for more than 30 years. As well as broadcasting, he served as program manager for 14 years, helping establish Triple R as the most successful public station in the southern hemisphere.

It’s easy to forget that not so very long ago you could only hear artists like Nick Cave, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith on alternative stations. Before the internet, before Spotify and social media, Australians who wanted to hear music that didn’t fit commercial playlists relied utterly on radio DJs.

Stephen Walker was one of the best.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘One of the best’: Stephen Walker and Patti Smith in the the Triple R studios in 2008. Photograph: Triple R

His sense of outsiderdom (“I felt like a hick from the sticks”) in relation to a predominantly inner-city music scene helped shape his own on-air persona – and later the station as a whole.

Walker began broadcasting in 1981, opening his first show with Cabaret Voltaire and closing with Pere Ubu – a selection that epitomised his distinctive aesthetic.

Yet he sought, from the start, to introduce others to the music he loved.

Post-punk culture could be deeply intimidating, a scene almost designed to repel anyone associated with the hated mainstream. Walker, by contrast, sounded like a knowledgeable elder brother, inviting you to check out his vast record collection and then gently steering you to tracks he thought you should like.

Walker called his first show From the Bunker, borrowing the title from a book about William Burroughs (another of his long-term favourites).

In 1982, he hosted a show for young people called Survival Talkback. On one occasion, he arrived at the studio to be told he wouldn’t be taking calls – Triple R hadn’t managed to pay its phone bill.

Walker became program manager in 1984 and helped establish a degree of stability for what had previously been a precarious, punk-rock venture.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stephen Walker with Sepultura in the foyer of Triple R radio station in Melbourne. Photograph: Triple R

As Mark Phillips explains in Radio City, his history of Triple R, Walker identified an idealised listener for the station: “A modern-day renaissance man or woman who tuned in for both Film Buffs’ Forecast and hardcore punk music, someone who had a rock’n’roll attitude to spoken word and an intellectual attitude to music.”

Whether or not this paragon actually existed was neither here nor there: the point was to make radio that didn’t patronise its audience but assumed a willingness and enthusiasm to engage with unfamiliar – even difficult – sounds and ideas.

Walker’s own show, Skull Cave, exemplified this approach. Broadcasting as The Ghost Who Talks (“Nemesis of mediocre radio everywhere”), Walker presented Melbourne with a smorgasbord of underground culture, combining proto-punks such as the Stooges with jazz artists like John Coltrane, experimentalists such as Laurie Anderson, the hip-hop of Public Enemy and a regular array of spoken word weirdness.

Britain had John Peel; Melbourne had Stephen Walker.

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He gave as good as he got in Triple R’s sometimes fractious internal disputes. But even those who disagreed with his programming choices recognised the importance of his insistence that community radio could and should produce high-quality content.

A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis eventually forced him to step back from the day-to-day running of the station. In 2010, a benefit concert for his medical expenses demonstrated the feeling towards him in the musical community: the remarkable lineup included Nick Cave with the Dirty Three, Gareth and Dan from the Drones, Dave Graney and the Lurid Yellow Mist, Ron S Peno, Sand Pebbles, DJ Max Crawdaddy and the Skull Cave All Stars.

Walker’s health forced him to abandon broadcasting last year. But you can still hear his distinctive sensibility in the show now presented by Woody McDonald in the same time slot.

In 2019, when even the leader of the opposition praises alternative music, the legacy of a particular DJ could easily be overlooked.

But for a lot people in Melbourne and elsewhere there will never be another Ghost.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian columnist, and a former Breakfaster at Triple R.

