C31 Melbourne
community television channel in Melbourne
C31 Melbourne is a free-to-air community television channel in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Its name is derived from UHF 31, the frequency and channel number reserved for analogue broadcasts by metropolitan community television stations in Australia.
History
The station began broadcasting officially on 6 October 1994, with racing programming on Saturday nights and regular programming from Monday to Thursday. Test transmissions began on 23 August 1994, after its transmitter was installed on Mount Dandenong the previous day. The Australian Broadcasting Authority had granted Melbourne Community Television Consortium (MCTC) with a temporary open-narrowcast licence on 5 March 1993. The framework of community television in Australia can be traced back to 1992, when the government asked the ABA to conduct a trial of community television using the vacant sixth television channel 31. On 30 July 2004, the Australian Broadcasting Authority granted the station a full-time community broadcasting licence.
C31 began broadcasting in digital during June 2010.
C31 is primarily funded through sponsorship, grants, sale of airtime and member donations. The station does not receive any regular government funding.
“C31 Melbourne” enters the record as community television channel in Melbourne. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Melbourne, community and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“C31 Melbourne” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Melbourne, community and television provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5008130. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1993, 1992 and 2004.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “C31 Melbourne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.