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When I was a child in the 1950s, my mother told me that she and other children at her school at Randwick rushed outdoors to see the fly-over of Charles Kingsford Smith on one of his epic voyages to Mascot aerodrome. My father was born in the same decade that the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. This bygone era of technology so dated my view of my parents that they might as well have lived in the time of fossils rather than in the world that I knew.
Now, I find myself caught in my own time warp. The change that communications technology has wrought has made my childhood experiences a remnant of a long-eclipsed era. I have spent my working life immersed in the technology of what used to be called ‘mass media’ but which somehow lost the ‘mass’ bit along the way. I realise now that I too am a fossil. Of the crystal set era!
I first marvelled at the gadgetry of my techno-age when I watched boys attach their crystal set radios to the wire fences of the school tennis courts. These ingenious little devices could tune into AM radio using only the power of the station’s own transmitter.
The first inkling of my future as a journalist came when I accompanied my dashing Uncle Ray to his work as editor of the yellowish Sunday Mirror at the News Limited offices on the corner of Holt and Kippax Streets in Sydney. Could work be this exciting? Long screeds of copy were run back and forth by copy boys, each time bearing new coloured pencil notations and markings. They were handed to the typesetter, after which the apron-wearing compositor would lay out metal blocks of the text and images ready for the presses. I took home a block bearing my name and my destiny was half decided. At home, I laid out the first and last edition of The International, circulation: one copy. Later on, I was to find it easier to talk for a living rather than write.
In the school library, as a twelve year old, I read John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage to learn more about the hero president who had been killed the year before. These dramas of former statesmen stirred my own fantasies about pursuing a noble career as a politician. And it must be said I took down copies of parliamentary Hansard. How impossibly important to have your every spoken word recorded for posterity! Now, the two consistent pathways in my life began to merge: a passion for journalism (and communication) and an abiding interest in politics.
In the Sydney of my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, Cinesound Review and its competitor, Movietone News, were entering their twilight years as the showcases of documentary newsreels that would accompany the ‘shorts’ before the feature film at the ‘pictures’.
An all-newsreel cinema operated in the basement of the grandly ornate State Theatre, in Market Street, Sydney. I went there hand in hand with my parents. It was easy for me to imagine wartime crowds queuing up to get their fill of the latest sanitised documentary footage of conflicts raging in Europe and the near Pacific. Drama and atmosphere were added to the images by the exaggeratedly declaratory voice-overs and martial music. Much of the film work was masterfully shot by brave young cameramen such as Damien Parer, who trudged the Kokoda Track alongside the diggers. The introduction of television into Australia in 1956 slowly killed off the newsreel and ushered in a new communications age.
The television, the communications satellite (first launched in 1963) and the jumbo jet became symbols of a new era of ‘speed’ and ‘access’ that tore down the barriers that separated people by psychological and physical distance, mind and body. You could go anywhere in the world in a day; talk to anyone, any place, at any time; or sit numbed by a continuous stream of news, pseudo-news and entertainment on the box (and later on computers and mobile phones and a combination of the two). This transformation in ‘connectivity’ would help transform cultural norms and was a taproot of globalisation. Over just a few decades, one world had morphed into another. The world at war already seemed far back.
Imagine 1939–45 wartime Canberra and its physical isolation. The Prime Minister, John Curtin, sat in the bush capital, with telegrams still acting as a primary form of communication. A journey to his home town of Perth meant an arduous journey by transcontinental train or by coastal shipping for most travellers. A small coterie of print journalists tapped out the news from the press gallery to their head offices around the country.
Imagine wartime Washington. President Roosevelt had expanded his personal office in the White House to cope with the growing demands of the job. When he became president at the height of the Great Depression, one correspondence secretary was sufficient to handle the flow of mail into and out of his office. Roosevelt had mastered the new medium, radio, and in stentorian tones had delivered his renowned ‘fireside chats’, which sounded much more like lectures than chats. He made 30 of these broadcasts between 1933 and 1944.
Imagine wartime London. Winston Churchill made his great speeches in the House of Commons but an actor, Norman Shelley, then mimicked Churchill to repeat the same speeches for broadcast on the BBC. As the great American journalist Edward R. Murrow observed, Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. Television, with its demands for intimate speech rather than platform oratory, would soon bring down the curtain on the age of rhetoric of which Churchill and Martin Luther King Junior were the last exemplars.
Back in 1939, the ABC broadcast Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war live via BBC short wave and, soon after, Robert Menzies made a live announcement that ‘Australia is also at war’. A ‘Department of Information’, of which Sir Keith Murdoch was briefly Director-General, censored all news reports.[2]
Voice was the breakthrough medium of the Second World War, presented with formality by posh-accented radio announcers (as broadcasters were then called). The head of the ABC, Charles Moses, for a long time held the view that announcers should remain nameless.[3]
Radio began in Australia in 1923 and the ABC came into existence on 1 July 1932 with a vision of helping to unite the continent’s far-flung population. In those heady days of the ‘wireless’, families gathered around the radio console at night to listen to the mix of soap operas (so named because of their soap company advertisers on commercial stations), talks, music and news. Richard Boyer, appointed chairman of the ABC by the Chifley Government and after whom the Boyer Lectures were named, called radio more revolutionary than the internal combustion engine (an ambitious claim; at least it produced less greenhouse gas).[4]
During the war, the ABC still relied for news content on negotiated agreements with wire services and newspapers, although a number of ABC reporters, such as Chester Wilmot and John Hinde, became voices of the Australian war effort. An independent ABC news service was finally introduced on 1 July 1947, a year after the broadcast of Parliament began—an experiment that the politicians of the day were sure would raise the prestige of their debates.