About

WELCOME to the Grace Gibson Radio Retail Store, where we make available to the general public a selection of the very best radio serials, dramas and comedies from the massive library of Grace Gibson Productions.

Our Retail Store was opened in 2012 to allow the general public to purchase their own personal copies of their favourite shows to enjoy at leisure, and we are constantly expanding theline-up of shows available for purchase. If you’d like to be kept up to date on new releases as they happen, click on the ‘Newsletter’ tab on our Homepage and sign up for updates.

And, if you’d like to know a bit more behind who we are, please read on…

Grace Gibson Productions produces and syndicates radio programs to radio stations in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific rim, the Caribbean and other overseas locations.

Grace Gibson (a Texan by birth) opened her own production company in 1944, having been brought to Australia in 1934 by the General Manager of the then fledgling 2GB/Macquarie Radio Network. Her task was to set up ARTRANSA (the American Radio Transcription Service of Australia) and then sell and “Australian-ise” American radio soap stories for them. Initially she was only coming here ‘on loan’ for 6 months but ended up staying a lifetime.

Grace Gibson’s great strength was in creating ‘daytime’ soapies, such as “Doctor Paul”, “Portia Faces Life” and “Life Can Be Beautiful” but she also created other drama classics like “Dossier On Dumetrius”, “Cattleman” and “I Christopher Macauley”. Grace sold the business in 1978, yet Gibson’s were still to produce their most popular radio serial of all-time “The Castlereagh Line” which ran for some 910 episodes and is still heard on many commercial and community radio stations to this day.

Comedy has always been a Gibson speciality too, with classics like “Chickenman”, “Chuck Chunder” and “Captain Kremmen”, and today we are proud to be the distributor of Australian radio’s longest running comedy/satire “How Green Was My Cactus”.

We also represent the best long-form music shows from overseas syndicators, including “Casey Kasem’s AMERICAN TOP 40 – The 70s and The 80s”, “Dick Clark’s Rock Roll & Remember”,”The Classics”, “American Country Country Countdown with Kix Brooks”, “Legends of Jazz”, “Backtrax 80s” (& Backtrax 90s), “House of Blues” and “Country Giants” and – in New Zealand and South Pacific Island markets only – “Rick Dees Weekly Top 40” and “Ryan Seacrest’s American Top 40”.

To many people, the name Reg James was synonymous with that of Grace Gibson. Reg started with Gibson’s in 1946 as an office-boy and ended up being the best known person in the company, remaining with us for his entire career and progressing through to Sales Manager and eventually General Manager of the company. Even in retirement, he remained our Archives expert, much admired and greatly respected by all who knew him. Reg passed away, aged 86, in July 2015…and will be sadly missed by us for a long time to come.

Grace Gibson Productions today is owned by Bruce Ferrier, who has been in radio since 1972, and in the program syndication business since 1979 (when he headed up Macquarie Special Events, which he re-focussed from being a sports report service into a program producer and syndicator). In 1982 he established Independent Radio Services and produced (mainly in association with Doug Edwards and Triffique Productions) a string of comedy hits including “The Boys From Benalla”, “For The Term Of Her Natural Life”, the ground-breaking “Samuel Pepys Show” and was part of the birth of “How Green Was My Cactus” which Grace Gibson Productions once again distributes for Triffique. Bruce acquired Grace Gibson Productions in 1991.

In 2012, Grace Gibson Productions was honoured to be inducted into the National Film & Sound Archives’ prestigious SOUNDS OF AUSTRALIA registry in recognition of the volume of work produced by the company over the years: the first corporation to be so honoured by the NFSA.