To outline the origin of this national character, however, one must examine the antecedent media. As in any other national context, television programming in Australia can be understood only by examining its origins in radio and film. As in the U.S. context, and unlike the British, the major impetus to radio programming in Australia came from the commercial sector with the explosive growth of commercial radio in the 1930s. From the soap opera to the singing commercial, the Australian experience mimicked the American. While, as the American critic Norman Corwin has observed, Australia is one of the few places on the globe where radio drama was considered as an art form, the vast bulk of commercial radio dramatic product was of the soap opera variety. In its heyday, Australian radio succeeded brilliantly by its own commercial standards, meeting not only a domestic niche but also providing a steady stream of programs for export. It employed a small army of professional writers and production people who formed the nucleus of writers, actors, and producers for the infant Australian television industry when the new medium began in the mid-1950s.

Unlike the American, and like the British experience, however, since the beginning of the 1930s, Australia has also had a powerful national, publicly owned noncommercial broadcasting entity, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). (After 1983, “Commission” became “Corporation.”) This corporation is recognized as the primary culture-making force in Australian national life. The ABC has, in fact, sponsored many nonbroadcasting aspects of public culture, from the establishment of symphony orchestras in all states, involvement in children’s clubs, sporting activities, and advice to farmers, through specialized agricultural service and comment on markets and weather, to the explorations of the culture of the rural environment.

Still, it must be pointed out that despite the widespread misconception by commentators, the Australian Broadcasting Commission did not owe its origins to a simple amalgamation of the “good points” of American and British thinking. Rather, it arose from the exigencies of the indigenous experience—an Australian response to an Australian requirement. Given its origins and its mandate, the programming from the ABC provided a contrast to the commercial television stations.

The early British broadcasting experience, was, however, very important in the formative years of the ABC. The impact on the ABC of the BBC’s “Reithian ethic” of high moral purpose, nation building, and elevating popular tastes, can, in hindsight, hardly be overestimated. The ABC encouraged high culture through classical music programs and community building through popular music programs, which often featured Australian musicians performing the latest popular songs from overseas. Sporting programs, such as the dominant national pastime of horse racing and test cricket (in the early days especially with England), have been a broadcasting staple from the 1930s to the present time. These broadcasts set the pattern of national participation by the time television arrived in Australia in 1956, and the various programming categories and genres can be seen to derive from them.

Local programming by independent stations reached its heyday in the decade of the 1980s and exhibited patterns similar to that in other countries. It was relatively common for local stations to do a program on a local event or a car-club rally, but local stations became “aggregated” by government policy into networks not unlike the U.S. commercial system. Local programming then found it necessary to appeal to a geographically wider-spread audience, and by the 1990s began to fade away.

The generalization that the British programming on Australian television tends to be mostly on the ABC is valid. On the other hand, commercial stations sometimes take British programs, which have proven to be popular from ABC exposure, and rebroadcast them to achieve higher ratings. A range of programs, from the ubiquitous Yes, Minister series to the more vulgar Are You Being Served? type, vie with David Attenborough nature documentaries and similar British fare as might appear on PBS in the United States.

In sum, Australian television programming bears the marks of several systems that preceded it. Like many other systems, however, Australian TV continues to mold those influences in its own ways. Whether the specifically “Australian” character of television can withstand an onslaught from new economic configurations and new technologies that transcend national boundaries remains to be seen.

Nonfiction Programming

Talk shows, music, morning programs, sports, news, and current affairs programs are all represented in the Australian television lineup, and again, all derived from radio antecedents. As far as television is concerned, little about them is specifically Australian.

In the light entertainment talk shows, for example, the programming is decidedly derivative. Tonight Live with Steve Vizard in the early 1990s betrayed its lineage to David Letterman and Johnny Carson. Admittedly, there was an Australian strain of boyish irreverence inherited from the Australian stars such as Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton, but the sets, presentation, and overall style would be easily recognized by an American viewer. Most importantly, in the commercial medium, Vizard’s success was due to the economic fact that his popularity allowed the Seven Network to extend prime time and charge premium rates for what was, comparatively, an inexpensively produced program.

Music

High culture is typically provided on television through opera or symphony concerts simulcast on Sunday night by the ABC. At the other end of the scale, the ABC provided, in early morning hours, a simulcast of Triple J, the youth national radio network, which broadcast rock music accompanied by exceptionally raunchy dialogue. Music videos are broadcast at various times on both commercial and national television. For example, on the ABC, Rage can go from 6 to 10:30 on Saturday mornings and reappear on Sunday morning for an hour or so.

Morning Television

In the very early morning hours, the ABC provides high-quality instructional television, which can be correlated with written instruction and tutorial interaction and taken for college credit. Language, biology, business, and other Open Learning subjects provide the casual viewer with exceptional, totally involving informational programming, most often of American origin.

Predictably, since the 1980s Channel 9 has aired the Australian Today show, with one male and one female host and providing a mixture of news, interviews, sports, and weather in a well-tested format. Variations of this theme have come and gone on competing networks. By the mid-1990s, for example, in the 9:00 A .M . slot, morning television featured Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton, another reference to an American programming format. Again, the interview is the feature of choice, with perhaps a lighter vein to vary the flavor. At least one station usually counterprograms these shows with cartoons for children.

Sports

While watching sports on television had long been a favorite Australian pastime, the connection between sports and advertising was traditionally not as strong in Australia as in the United States. However, the televised presentation of sporting events is increasingly influenced by American programming strategies. The Australian broadcasting industry had long been poised for intensive activity surrounding the business of sports on television, and media moguls Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch vied for (and collaborated with on occasion) various contracts with players, licenses, and outlets for the advertising dollars and pay-TV subscriptions.

For example, the tradition of cricket had been inherited from the British Empire, where white-suited cricketers (divided into “gentlemen,” who were amateurs, and “professionals,” who were paid) took days to play a “test” match. By the 1970s, Packer was credited with promoting a game more suited to television coverage: played in one day, with colorful costumes, showbiz accoutrements, and players exhibiting enthusiasm rather than the old British “stiff upper lip.” Similar transformations occurred in tennis, football, hockey, soccer, netball, and other sports. The trend toward Americanization was markedly increased with the introduction of Rupert Murdoch’s Superleague, an entirely new combination of Rugby League teams, and with pay-TV sports programs, which were becoming more prevalent by the mid-1990s.

Through all these changes, the scheduling strategies have remained quite the same. A typical week’s viewing would begin with the traditional Saturday afternoon when all channels present one sport or another. The same pattern holds for Sunday afternoon, with one commercial channel starting sports programming at 9:00 A.M. (The ABC has counterprogrammed a high-culture arts ghetto on Sunday afternoons, and the Special Broadcasting Service [SBS] also tends to eschew sports on Sunday afternoon.) The regular television news on Sunday nights tends to increase its sports coverage beyond the acceptable 30 percent for Australian television newscasts, and there are also irregular sports specials programmed in various primetime slots.

While special football games of various codes are broadcast during one or two weeknights in Australia, American football tends to be consigned to late-night taped presentations on the ABC, except for the Super Bowl, which is broadcast live. Basketball is the fastest-growing sport in Australia, and, thanks to television, in one celebrated 1994 survey 11-year-old Australians considered Michael Jordan to be the best sportsman.

The television sporting scene is also affected by the specialized narrowcasting of events to pubs and clubs across Australia by satellite transmission. Horse racing is perhaps the sport most associated with gambling, but with the advent of new technologies, and especially with the advent of sports on pay TV, the ubiquitous TABs (gambling shops) will undoubtedly evolve to exploit the new media.

With the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000, the influence of commercial sponsorship of sport increased and the influence of television on the world of sports in Australia gathered more impetus.

News

Australian radio news was available in the early days in a prototypal form with the stories taken from the newspapers. The newspaper proprietors, having already demonstrated their political clout by keeping the ABC from commercial taint (and revenues), were able to stifle radio news until the war years (1939–45). During World War II, a coalition government, pressured by the imminence of a Japanese invasion, decided that ABC Radio was crucial to the war effort. Once established, ABC News became one of the world’s most professional news broadcasting services with bureaus worldwide.

Typically, ABC Television’s nightly news is of half-hour duration, presented from each individual state with common stories from overseas feeds, and followed by a current affairs program. The presenter is of the BBC “Newsreader” variety and is not typically a practicing journalist. Richard Morecroft, who fronts the ABC TV 7:00 P.M. news in New South Wales (the state with the largest population), is perhaps the best exemplar of the ABC style.

The ABC format is boilerplate: local, state, national, and international news, plus sports and weather. The commercial stations tend to have similar formats, with quicker pacing and a more lurid selection of topics. Australian newscasts typically devote six or seven minutes of a 30-minute slot to sport, a proportion far greater than typical in the United States. Brian Henderson, the anchor of the Channel 9 (commercial) news, is the longtime champion in the news ratings and provides his network with the coveted high-rated lead-in position for the rest of the night.

The SBS, often admired for the quality of its television news, has an unmatched foreign coverage and tends to longer and more comprehensive stories. Besides the nightly news, there are shorter programs throughout SBS’s broadcast day, some being short updates.

Documentary and Current Affairs

The prototypal Australian television documentary (or current affairs) program is the long-running Four Corners program (ABC), which is an institution in its Monday night slot at 8:30. Perhaps the finest hour in Australian television was the Four Corners’ broadcast of “The Moonlight State” on May 11, 1987, when Australia’s premier investigative journalist, Chris Masters, demonstrated on film existence of the illegal speakeasies, the prostitution, and the gambling dens that had all been long denied by the self-righteous government of the state of Queensland. Senior police officers went to jail and a government was overthrown following the subsequent inquiry triggered by the program.

Channel 9 presents a prestigious current affairs program, Sunday, on Sunday morning, and from time to time other commercial concerns have attempted to match 9 and the ABC with serious public affairs programming, but their efforts seem to vanish as management turns to more profitable programming.

SBS and the ABC both program several high-quality documentaries in any broadcasting week. Typical titles, chosen at random for illustration only, are The Big Picture, That Was Our War, Documentary, Australian Biography, Great Books, and A Most Remarkable Planet.

While a number of these presentations move toward television that is distinctively Australian, it is in fictional programming that the clearest and most powerful explorations of a national character and mode of representation have been established.

Fictional Programming

Although the Gorton Liberal (conservative) government in the early 1970s initiated the process, Australia’s great renaissance in motion picture and television programming really began with the free-spending Whitlam Labour government of 1973–75. Because the same people worked in film as worked in television, it is hard to separate out the histories of the different media. The technical in frastructure for movies was aided by the fact that, since 1960, imported commercials were banned from Australian TV. This meant that in the capital cities, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, motion picture laboratories developed a steady business and the technical expertise required to provide high-quality professional product in the advertising arena. Until the advent of electronic newsgathering (ENG) in the 1970s (when tape began to be used instead of film), television news shot on 16- millimeter film also provided a steady source of supplementary business for the film labs.

The topics of television programming echoed those covered in the motion pictures. Australia, before the 1930s, had an economically viable silent film industry, which did not survive the advent of sound and the economic depression of the 1930s. Hollywood (and, to a lesser extent, British) product then dominated Australian cinema screens. Because film is a cultural artifact as well as being a salable commodity, the Australian audiences became saturated with American culture. Almost ten years after the advent of television in Australia, the American authority Wilson Dizard could make his famous statement: “The daily schedule of a typical Australian television station, particularly in prime listening hours, is virtually indistinguishable from that of a station in Iowa or New Jersey.” And as late as 1967, the Australian Broadcasting Control Board required that only two hours of Australian drama be broadcast per month in prime time.

Thus deprived of Australian stories on the screen, when the 1970s renaissance occurred, the subject of the programming tended to be the indigenous classics as well as contemporary themes that imparted a distinctly Australian flavor. In 1976 the government decreed (with a “points system”) that there be 50-percent Australian content between the hours of 4:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M., and demanded compliance of commercial licensees. Despite their early protests, the commercial stations found that the Australian programs were very popular with Australian audiences.

Available for television a year or so after cinema release, Australian films became an important part of the indigenous programming, but the epitome of television programming art was seen to be in the miniseries.

Miniseries

The miniseries brought important national myths and icons to the television screen. The quintessential Australian nation-building myth is that of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). The ANZAC story is one of volunteer soldiers, who, in 1915, on behalf of the British war effort against Germany, invaded Turkish territory on the Gallipoli peninsula. The campaign was a defeat, but the valor of the soldiers, celebrated in a national day of commemoration (ANZAC Day, April 25), became a central theme of the Australian nation, representing a cause worth any sacrifice. The television miniseries Anzacs thus complemented the major motion picture Gallipoli to tell the ANZAC story. The popularity of this story has proved robust. In the latter half of 2001, the ABC reran the 1982 miniseries 1915, starring Sigrid Thornton. The nostalgic beginning lured the viewers into expecting a conventional love story. The ending, however, left the viewers confronting death, betrayal, and the facial and mental scarring of the protagonists. The concluding sets portrayed a prosperous and genteel Sydney harbor-side lifestyle and made no concessions to any romantic vision of warfare.

Similarly, following the nationalistic, nostalgic (and essentially mythic) impetus, another miniseries, The Last Outlaw, told the story of arguably the most famous Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly. He is (literally) an Australian icon; in his self-made steel body armor, he looked like a medieval knight, with six guns. Like his American contemporary, Jesse James, Kelly was a highway robber, but, unlike James, his behavior elicited considerable public sympathy, with large crowds protesting his hanging in 1880. Today his story is all-pervasive in Australian culture, with the Ned Kelly icon appearing in the high culture of Sidney Nolan paintings in the National Gallery in Canberra, and the armor and six guns featured as a logo for a brand of sliced bread. Yet beyond the Australian version of the Robin Hood image lies a historical reality. Because Kelly epitomizes for Australia the rebellious Irishman persecuted by British rule, his story ties in neatly with a long tradition of republicanism, which despite its recent repudiation by referendum still lurks in the wings.

The television miniseries Against the Wind (1978) depicts another important facet of Australian history that had been ignored while American stories had dominated the Australian television screens. This program, too, harks back to mythic origins, as Australia’s convict past is evoked by the story of a spirited Irish girl who was transported to Australia as a political prisoner. She falls in love with a fine upstanding convict unjustly treated by a vicious system. The settings of the program resemble more the production values of Disney studios than the squalor portrayed by recent historical accounts of the 18th-century settlement, but the program fulfilled the requirements of standard founding myths requisite in all cultures.

A depiction of a 19th-century family saga, Seven Little Australians (ABC, 1973) provided a local version of the American Little House on the Prairie or Canadian Anne of Green Gables genre. Other miniseries covered well-known Australian legends, such as those relating to the sporting stories between the wars. Bodyline (1984) portrayed unsportsmanlike Englishmen attacking stalwart and long-suffering Australians when playing the extremely popular sport of cricket. The title, Bodyline, made reference to a tactic of aiming at the batsman’s body, rather than at the wicket (a tactic that worked). The English won the test series in 1936 and a number of Australians were, in fact, injured. The other casualty was Australian good feeling for the British, although the Australians took the high moral ground and did not reciprocate with the “body-line” tactic. This material, clearly restricted in commercial terms to the “old empire” of cricket players, is the stuff of myth and legend, and as such proved popular with its intended market.

Similarly, the mythic imperative of coming to grips with former enemies was handled with the miniseries Cowra Breakout (1984). In 1944 Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) “broke out” of a POW camp in the remote Australian town of Cowra. By the early 1980s, when the program was made, Japan and Australia had experienced a quarter-century of mutual economic interest as trading partners, and Japan was the most important Australian market by far. The deaths of the brave but culturally incomprehensible Japanese were treated in this series in a way not unlike that of the pacifist film of the 1930s, All Quiet on the Western Front. By the end of 2001, the Australian wartime experience with the Japanese was crystallized in the six-part miniseries Changi. Much more sophisticated in style, than, for example, 1915, the POW epic Changi is a narrative that travels from the bucolic to the brutal, with the Australian edition of Time magazine describing it in terms of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Changi was about the power of sense memory. Its title comes from the prison in Singapore where 130,000 Allied troops were housed for three and a half years. These soldiers were not defeated in battle but ordered to surrender, a fate not appreciated by their Japanese captors. The Australian POWs who survived maintained their spirits by presenting a carefree character, singing and joking their sufferings away. The story is told through the prism of the 60-year-old memories of six Australian veterans.

Clearly the initial outpouring of depictions of Australian history and culture resulted in part because of government production subsidies, provided as partial support for the requirement that holders of the lucrative television licenses broadcast Australian content. Then, when the ratings for the earliest of these miniseries demonstrated that such Australian stories were very popular with Australian audiences, it seemed tangible proof that a cultural imperative was also inherent in their acceptance by the indigenous audience.

By the 1980s, however, the economic climate changed. Broadcasting seemed dominated by takeovers of the major television networks. Furthermore, deregulation and privatization, rather than activist nationalistic initiatives, seemed to capture the governmental imagination. Thus, by the end of the decade, the traditional mythical Australian themes of the tragic losers (Ned Kelly, the ANZACS, the bodyline cricketers, Les Darcy the boxer, and even Phar Lap the racehorse) were being superseded by a new type of Australian story. The audiences, satisfied by the availability of their indigenous stories, began to demand a change of programming, and the program makers began to look beyond the most obvious indigenous themes.

By the 1990s, the motion picture industry was tackling contemporary themes presented with high production values. For example, The Heartbreak Kid (1993) concerned an affair between a high school student and his young teacher. The milieu of Greek culture in Melbourne provided a conflict intermingling male dominance (the teacher’s fiancé resorts to violence, and her father’s role is stereotypical) and a depiction of conflicting loyalties. The television serial spin-off was called Heartbreak High (1994–99), with the same young male lead and an approximation of the cinematic verisimilitude in the sets. Produced around the same time was Paradise Beach (1993–94), in the tradition of Baywatch, with Surfers Paradise in Queensland standing for the California coast.

Traditional themes, however, remained a staple. For example, The Man from Snowy River, a 1982 motion picture derived from a poem by Banjo Patterson, the author of “Waltzing Matilda” (the Australian national song), had been a success in the 1980s. By 1994 a 13- part television miniseries entitled Banjo Patterson’s The Man from Snowy River continued the genre. It is perhaps a sign of the maturity of the industry in Australia that the subjects and formats that secured the initial popularity for Australian programs with Australian viewers now are merely one type of program among many. By 2000 the national broadcaster captured a large audience with Sea Change, a story of a workaholic professional woman who, with the breakup of her marriage, quits her city job and relocates her family to a seaside village. Starring Sigrid Thornton, this highly rated program went for two seasons on Sunday night. It provided evidence for a sea change in Australian tastes. Former miniseries had a rousing, romantic, or uplifting message, yet Sea Change portrayed a rather rueful recognition of contemporary life.

Soap Operas

As in the United States, soap operas are programmed in Australia during the day, and the typical commercial offering has a mixture of U.S. programming (Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless) interspersed with Australian soap operas such as Home and Away and Neighbours. The basic rules of the daytime serials that were established in the 1930s radio era still apply, regardless of the racier themes and more topical situations. Perceptions of the “Australian-ness” of the indigenous soap operas vary and provide interesting perspectives on cultural productions. The general Australian opinion is that the lives of the protagonists in Australian soaps are mostly ordinary, everyday, and working class. Yet to European observers, the Australian soap opera is characterized by relatively healthy, happy beings who endure their endless travails in a fortunate sun-drenched situation. Regardless of these “Australian” traits, the Australian soap opera remains true to type, exhibiting, most significantly, the “endless narrative” that characterizes the genre worldwide.

Comedy

Much of Australia’s television comedy is derivative. For example, for several years the Channel 9’s Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show used the standard U.S. formula established in America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Perhaps with a more indigenous flavor, the family situation comedy Hey Dad! (1986–94; in daytime reruns by the mid-1990s) followed the U.S.-sitcom formula but focused on the same everyday working-class context presented in the Australian soap operas. Acropolis Now (1989–92), a politically incorrect sitcom, made gentle fun of Australia’s ethnic communities placed within a dominant Anglo culture.

On the ABC from 1983 to 1994, Mother and Son presented a genuinely challenging comic world. Veteran actors Ruth Cracknell and Gary Macdonald explored the tribulations of a man taking care of his mother, who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. The cult comedy Frontline (1994–97) starred Rob Sitch as Mike More, an unhinged, venal, television talking head. A send-up of a television current affairs program, this show was generally considered to be thinly disguised social commentary.

Police Procedurals

The police serial in Australia began with Crawfords, a major production company in Melbourne. Crawfords came to prominence with Homicide (1964–75) and established a format with Cop Shop (1977–84). More recently the Australian police show genre has been exemplified by two programs, Police Rescue (1990–96) and Blue Heelers (1994– ). Police Rescue, with its star Gary Sweet as the lead Mickey, took place in an urban setting. With high production values (as befitted its ABC origins and overseas coproducers), Police Rescue’s storylines dealt with tensions of contemporary life in a city that was not necessarily recognizably Australian.

Blue Heelers, on the other hand, is set in mythical, bucolic, small-town Australia. Produced for Channel 7, Blue Heelers is constrained by a modest budget monitored by the creative guiding hand of leading Australian writer Tony Morphett. The program is clearly indigenous, and it is thus not as accessible to overseas audiences as Police Rescue. The very name, Blue Heelers, plays a word game recognizable to Australian audiences, yet which would escape viewers unaware of Australian nuances. It refers simultaneously to the standard blue uniforms that identify police in most of the English-speaking world and to a breed of cattle dog, the Queensland blue, notorious for sneaking behind unsuspecting people and nipping at their ankles. The star, John Wood, is positively avuncular, although the show has elements of action drama. While Australians are among the most urbanized people on Earth, the call of the small town, as exemplified by the long-running program A Country Practice (1981–94), seems to provide an appeal in national escapism as provided by television.

Both Blue Heelers and Police Rescue have been aimed at a family audience at 8:30 P.M. Both present continuing characters who constitute a “family” in the workplace. Both offer the usual recipe of conflict, violence, sexual attraction, and humor. Nevertheless the program set in the country is much more clearly mythical, Australian, and designed to reassure its audience. While Australian viewers, as the ratings attest, have enjoyed the restless camera and edgy performances of the American offerings NYPD Blue and Law & Order, just as they enjoyed Hill Street Blues, Australian producers have generally stayed with less gritty serials. On the other hand, police-based short series such as Janus (1994–95), produced by the ABC from its Melbourne studios, have explored a much darker vision for the policing profession than that exemplified by the prototypal Blue Heelers and Police Rescue.