Australians emerged from our cultural cringe in the late sixties when our film and television industries thrived. Has that belief and pride in Australia gone for good?

When I grew up in rural Australia in the 40s and 50s, I believed everything of any importance happened elsewhere, we Aussies just didn’t matter. A photo of Princess Elizabeth hung on the bedroom wall of the family home. Radio was very British. and when the news came on about important issues, it was all from overseas. The films I loved to see, when I could, came from an American wonderland.

When television reached Australian shores in 1956 in time for the Olympic Games, we were lumbered with a broadcasting system, a dual system, which exacerbated our predicament. Unlike the UK and its esteemed well-resourced BBC, our public broadcaster, the ABC, was given only one channel and directed to provide comprehensive programming across Australia. If the ABC had been given two channels, it could have counter programmed (put programming for minority tastes on one while appealing to a larger audience with the other), as did the BBC.

To top off that challenge, the government decided to license three commercial television channels which meant the ABC always got clobbered in the ratings. The commercial networks readily pointed to the ABC’s smaller audience numbers, while insisting it should cover all the genres commercial stations did not want to spend money on, such as children’s programming, documentaries and any programs for minority audiences.

Despite grand promises made when licences were granted, it suited the commercial networks to argue the advertising pie was too small for three networks to invest in expensive local programming, so two-thirds of their programming came from the US. When I recommended the abolition of one network to solve that problem, all hell broke loose.

The Australian Broadcasting Control Board, which had the task of program and advertising regulation, were reluctant regulators. It was content to ignore the promises made and argued, when questioned, that there was no power under the Broadcasting Act to call stations to account. That was a matter of dispute, but the ABCB never tested its powers in court.

For the first 20 years of television in Australia, the commercial network audience seemed happy enough to be treated as an outpost of Los Angeles with its cop shows, westerns, sitcoms and game shows. The ABC did make some genuine Australian programs, but the public broadcaster was top heavy with administrative staff, and its prime-time programming had a colonial presence, with BBC programs and news read in a proper pommy accent. We neither saw ourselves nor our own neighbourhoods on Australian television. When I went to Stanford University in the US in 1966, I was asked what language we spoke in Australia.

This was all about to change with intervention by the governments of John Gorton........

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