Extract: Whose ABC
An extract from my essay ‘Whose ABC’ in the March edition of The Monthly.
My first media memory is of the theme to the ABC radio drama Blue Hills playing from the hulking walnut-veneered radiogram in my grandmother’s Adelaide living room. The tune was Pastorale, by British composer Ronald Hanmer, originally recorded by London’s New Century Orchestra and later performed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Hanmer had no idea his piece had become a ubiquitous Australian earworm until he emigrated here in 1975.
Blue Hills ran for 5795 15-minute episodes over 27 years from 1949, every word of it written by Gwen Meredith. This feat of composition had in fact begun in 1943, when the government wanted more farmers to grow soya beans to aid the war effort and hit upon the idea of a radio serial chronicling Australian country life as the ideal vehicle for an urgent work of pastoral propaganda. Meredith would write 1299 episodes of The Lawsons before its characters made the fateful jump out of soya, into Blue Hills, and a daily drama that would last a generation. The last episode of The Lawsons aired on Friday, February 25, 1949. On Monday, February 28, Blue Hills filled the same 1pm broadcast slot. As it would until September 30, 1976, when actor Queenie Ashton, who had spoken the first words of The Lawsons, uttered the last for Blue Hills: “Goodbye.”
My memory is probably of the 6.45pm repeat broadcast that ran into the 7pm news, a bulletin still introduced – as it has been since 1952 – by Charles Williams’ Majestic Fanfare.
There are motes hovering in the golden, low, light of dusk, the house just opened to catch the first breaths of a summer evening’s sea breeze. “This is the news from the ABC…”
The Australian Broadcasting Commission was just 17 years old when Blue Hills began its run, a statutory body formed to replace the Australian Broadcasting Company that had been established in 1929 to herd the radio companies that multiplied after the medium’s introduction in 1923.
In a new postcolonial federation, a place in which isolation was a defining motif of national character, the advent of real-time, spoken, musical and dramatic communication was arguably as culturally transformative as the internet would be two thirds of a century later, as electric light was when it illuminated its first Australian city, Tamworth, in 1888, as the first long-distance telephone call, between Campbell Town and Launceston, had been in 1877.
By the time the commission was legislated in 1932, radio had been enthusiastically adopted, with a growing set of stations divided into A and B Class broadcasters. B Class could take advertising. The A Class gathered, as historian Ken Inglis noted in his account of the ABC’s formation, under the banner of the Australian Broadcasting Company, “supplying the national broadcast service for the Commonwealth of Australia”.
The ABC was thus a body necessitated by the rapid adoption of technological change and one charged with remedying that long-felt want of the young federation: to refine its cultural life beyond the coarseness of the rude, rough and violent colonial years.
Inglis notes the significance, and breathtaking novelty of the new radio technology: “Wireless was as remarkable as powered flight, and more mysterious. The very word expressed the amazement of a generation whose grandparents and parents had assimilated the earlier miracles of telegraph and telephone. How could sound travel except through wires?” The audience was assured it was not necessary to keep doors and windows open. Radio waves could pierce masonry.
It would also begin to bridge the fathomless expanses of the continent. Listeners in four states heard the Duke of York speak and Melba sing at the opening of the new federal parliament in 1927.
The postmaster-general announced the new ABC commission on May 23, 1932, and it quickly found its feet, in part thanks to the example set by the preceding imperial body, the BBC. It had charge of 12 radio stations and the 250 employees of the old Australian Broadcasting Company. Chairman Charles Lloyd Jones told Sydney’s Wireless Weekly that the ABC aimed to provide a service “for the majority of the listeners-in of the Commonwealth”. Inglis estimates that in 1932 radio licences were held by about 370,000 Australians, just under 6 per cent of the population. The potential audience “approached two million in a population of seven”.
On July 1, 1932, the Australian Broadcasting Commission became a legislated reality, a moment marked by a national broadcast, beginning with the bells of the Sydney GPO as they chimed 8pm, in homage to the BBC’s broadcasting of Big Ben. Prime minister Joseph Lyons spoke, followed by opposition leader James Scullin and Dr Earle Page, leader of the Country Party. It was a remarkable feat: not only a live national broadcast, but one that combined bells, Page and announcer Conrad Charlton in Sydney, the voice of Lyons from Canberra, and Scullin in Melbourne. The new commission’s cultural and technological potential – the “annihilation of distance” as Inglis put it – was there for all to hear.
Read the full essay here.