review | Liz Jacka

AUNTY RESILIENT

• K. S. Inglis: This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932–1983 (Black Inc., $39.95, ISBN 1863951814)
• K. S. Inglis: Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983–2006
  (Black Inc., $39.95, ISBN 186395189X)

Whose ABC? is the eagerly awaited sequel to Ken Inglis’s magisterial history of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, first published by Melbourne University Press in 1983, and here republished together with the sequel in a paperback edition by Black Inc. The earlier book has been republished as an exact facsimile, but includes two and a half pages of corrigenda, only one of which is of any significance. Drawing on Patrick Weller’s biography of Malcolm Fraser, published in 1989, Inglis reveals that Talbot Duckmanton, who was General Manager from 1964 until 1982, while maintaining “his persona of protestant rectitude” publicly, was privately advising Fraser’s coalition government to give the ABC less than it was asking for as a way of “forcing economies” on them. Also revealed is that Duckmanton requested that complaints about ABC coverage be made by phone rather than letter so that the GM could not be later accused of bowing to political pressure.

This episode illustrates the overwhelming concern in Inglis’s second volume, as it was in the first, which is the endlessly troubled relationship between the ABC and the government. The title, Whose ABC?, is of course telling. It turns the ABC’s own slogan – It’s Your ABC – into a pointer towards the struggle for ownership of the broadcaster; the dramatis personae are the government, the Board, the management, the staff, the commentariat, the Friends of the ABC and last the amorphous entity, the audience: the listeners, viewers and users (of ABC Online). It is the ebb and flow of power and influence among these players which structures the narrative of Inglis’s history.

The first volume, This is the ABC, covered fifty years of the ABC’s life and was just over five hundred pages long. The latest one covers twenty-three years and is nearly six hundred pages. The amount of detail is almost overwhelming, but the story is told with such narrative drive that it is not a difficult read, at least not for those who are avid followers of the ABC’s fortunes and are thus already familiar with most of the events here related. In contrast with the first volume, for the second Inglis did not receive the support of the ABC and in particular has not had access to its document archive, so his sources are primarily interviews and media reports, supplemented by a small number of books and an even smaller number of policy documents. The high level of reliance on the media reports (principally newspapers) is quite surprising for a serious work of historical scholarship, but it is clear that Inglis, who did succeed in obtaining extensive interviews with all the main players, has cross-checked his facts thoroughly.

Still, the reliance on media reports has resulted in a relentlessly chronological approach to telling the story, and to some extent has allowed the media to set the agenda for what is significant to say about the ABC. This is not a deeply analytical book, which is not to say that it does not contain assessments and judgements, given in Inglis’s warm and slightly ironic tone of voice, but the reader has to trace for herself the themes and issues, as they bob up and down in the narrative flow; they are not strongly marked by the author.

A sign of this reticence about an analytical framework is the way the book is structured; the period 1983–2006 is divided into five time periods but no hint is given of the rationale for this division. One can guess: 1983–1986 is obviously the period that begins with the establishment of the new Australian Broadcasting Corporation and ends with the departure of its first Managing Director, Geoffrey Whitehead. But what do we make of the period 1993–1995, which starts halfway through David Hill’s period as Managing Director and ends just before the Coalition government is elected in 1996? The starting date might have to do with the fact that the new Broadcasting Services Bill came into effect at the beginning of 1993 but, while this had quite serious implications for the whole broadcasting landscape, it did not immediately affect the ABC. This fuzziness about what bigger factors give shape to the trajectory of the ABC is frustrating, as is the rather too minimal approach to referencing (undoubtedly at the publisher’s behest).

Having said what this book does not do, let me now say what it triumphantly and brilliantly does achieve. Focusing on the personalities who have shaped the ABC over this period it gives a lively and comprehensive account of all the main themes which constantly re-emerge whenever the ABC is discussed: funding woes, political interference, conflicts between the Board and the management, ‘left-wing bias’, staff unrest and industrial action, the relationship to SBS, ‘dumbing down’, political appointments, advertising on the ABC, staff capture of the ABC, the aging demographic, accountability.

Inglis is deft at sketching characters; among the government, board and management figures, Ken Myer, Bob Somervaille, Mark Armstrong, David Hill, Donald McDonald, Richard Alston and Jonathan Shier come strongly to life. Among program makers Peter Manning, Chris Masters, Phillip Adams, Geraldine Doogue and Kerry O’Brien are given due appreciation and we are given a very good idea of the stances taken by the staff-elected directors, Tom Molomby, Quentin Dempster, Kirsten Garrett and Ramona Koval. The David Hill story is particularly fascinating; he is a character who has intrigued and even seduced many a commentator before Ken Inglis. At a time when it seems as if the Coalition attacks on the ABC have been on for at least a century, the David Hill story reminds us how viciously antagonistic were the relations between the ABC and the Hawke and Keating Governments.

And this leads me to a further aspect of Inglis’s great achievement. The recounting of the ABC’s story over two and a half decades and over two long-lived governments allows us to see the trends and the similarities and contrasts that emerge over the period. One similarity is to see just how much the ABC has been attacked and reviled and starved of funds by both sides of the political fence. After all it was under a Labor government that David Hill instituted his famous (or infamous) ‘eight cents a day’ campaign in 1988; this together with the furore over the ABC’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War earned Hill the lasting enmity of both Hawke and Keating, an enmity which had begun in 1983 with Richard Carleton’s question to Hawke about ‘blood on his hands’, which was followed by vaguely threatening statements by Hawke in relation to ABC bias.

Since the election of the Coalition government in 1996 there has been a virtually constant attack from government, especially Minister Richard Alston, who took this to extreme heights during the second Gulf War by pursuing bias complaints all the way to the Australian Broadcasting Authority. The difference between Labor and the Coalition on this seems to be that since 1996, and certainly in the past five years, there has been a diminution in respect for the independence of statutory authorities on the part of government, with more and more functions coming directly under the control of ministers via hopelessly compliant public-service departments. These issues are well covered by Inglis who concludes that the Alston complaints were partly inspired by the ABC having embarrassed him by discontinuing the two digital TV channels which were the only visible signs of an otherwise moribund government digital strategy.

Another theme to emerge from considering the whole period is the paucity of female managers at the ABC – since 1983 no female has ever been Chair or Managing Director, though often there has been a female Deputy Chair whose main job has been to mediate between warring Chairs and MDs. But hearteningly, what also emerges is the resilience of the ABC in spite of really swingeing budget reductions over the twenty-three years, all the turbulence of the Hill and Shier eras, a rapidly changing media environment and a hostile government. Inglis describes some of the jewels in the programming crown of the ABC vividly and lovingly, and we can note the extent to which, in spite of constant threats, Radio National is still brilliant ‘brain food’, ABC Online is constantly inventive, local radio still pulls in a big and loyal audience, ABC news and current affairs is still ‘without fear or favour’ and increasingly precious in a dumbed-down media world, Triple J and Classic-FM still do more or less what they were set up to do, and poor old ABC TV, terribly affected by tight budgets, still pulls off stuff of genius such as Kath and Kim.

Inglis’s very up-to-date last chapter – clearly written just before the book went to press – is upbeat about the ABC’s future. He quotes again the words of Selwyn Speight which he used in his first volume: the ABC is “an amorphous animal with a life of its own, both sensitive and resistive to pressure, frequently baffling friend and foe by its ability to change shape when change will ensure its survival or further its purpose”. These words seem true of the period 1983–2006. Why should they not be true of the future? Certainly Inglis’s new book, like its pre­decessor, will have a long life. Its comprehensiveness, detail and accuracy will make it an indispensable and definitive source for future analysts of the ABC.

Liz Jacka is a Professor of Communications Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the author of a number of books on aspects of the Australian media, including the ABC, and an inveterate ABC observer.

© Liz Jacka

Overland 185–summer 2006, pp.79–81