The
ABC of Controversy
Morag Fraser
Ken
Inglis
This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting
Commission 1932–1983
Black Inc., $39.95, 525 pp, 1863951814
Ken
Inglis
Whose ABC?: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation
1983–2006
Black Inc., $39.95, 645 pp, 186395189X
Ken
Inglis is now as much a part of the history of the ABC as any
of the charismatic broadcasters, mercurial managers or audiences
— devoted and indignant — that his two monumental histories
chronicle. He has become the repository, the source, the critical
race memory of the ABC, ‘just three years older’ than
the phenomenon he examines.
The list of corrigenda at the end of the new edition of This
Is the ABC (first published by Melbourne University Press
in 1983) underscores the point: insiders, listeners, viewers and
politicians have inundated him with corrections and information
to refine and expand his already minutely detailed volume one
of the history. Listeners plead with him to include the story
of the newsreader who announced that a lady had been bitten on
the funnel by a finger-webbed spider. Other responses are less
benign. Solicitors for Sir Charles Moses, for thirty years the
ABC’s general manager, write to Inglis in 1983 listing ‘imputations’
in his book which they claim are grossly defamatory of Sir Charles’s
good name and reputation. Sir Charles himself, at the Broadcast
House launch of the first volume in 1983, greeted the disconcerted
author with the news that he would be hearing from his solicitors.
‘I did my best to look and sound at ease when Dame Leonie
called me to the dais’, recalls Inglis. The case was not
pursued, and the relevant documents are now deposited in the National
Library. But it is characteristic of the man and the historian
that Inglis should ‘remain sad that although my admiration
for the ABC’s principal maker was evidently clear to reviewers
and other readers, the subject himself could not see it’.
 Sir
Charles’s reaction tells us something about Inglis’s
mode as historian. Modest in opinion, indefatigable in research
and deft in the kind of organisation that yields conclusions by
establishing context and weighing event and personality against
like or unlike event and personality, he is a model of engaged
detachment. His enthusiasm for the ABC is clear: the second volume,
Whose ABC?, is dedicated to ‘the makers of the ABC,
past, present and future’. He volunteers the view, in the
first volume, that ‘A lot of history is concealed autobiography,
and this book more than most.’ But his analysis of the ABC’s
many crises, personality wars, political battles, managerial and
staff manoeuvres is clinical and relentless in its detail. It
is not, and will not be, comfortable reading for many of the players
who are still alive and involved in the complex life of this extraordinary
national institution.
But for readers, for the nationwide audience that the ABC serves,
this is rich, readable history, evocative in its recall of programmes
and their makers, fascinating in its minutiae. Yes, it feeds nostalgia,
inevitably and joyously. Inglis remembers Alan McGilvray’s
century of test commentaries celebrated on the scoreboard of the
Melbourne Cricket Ground. But he doesn’t just remind us of
events, or of the characters we have listened to and watched over
the years; he gives us their lineages. Thus, current affairs specialist
Max Uechtritz:
[whose]
lineage was exotic enough to make the family a subject in 2004
for Australian Story. He was born on a plantation in Papua
New Guinea in 1958, one of ten children whose mother was an English-born
schoolteacher and whose father’s ancestry was a Pacific mixture
of German, Danish, American and Samoan. In 1977, after schooling
in Queensland, he began in Brisbane a career in print and electronic
journalism, as Kerry O’Brien, thirteen years his senior and
now to be working under him, had done. He came to ABC television
in 1986 from Nine, inspired by Four Corners, whose episode
on the Rainbow Warrior had made him believe that the ABC was the
place to be.
The
effect of such detail is to make individuals, not just generic
journalists — so easy to pigeonhole and disparage —
out of the men and women who bring news and current affairs into
Australian homes. The familiarity doesn’t, in this case,
breed contempt. Inglis teases out motivation, formation, influences.
It is hard to make accurate predictions about what these men and
women will do, say or broadcast after reading Inglis’s accounts
of them and where they have come from, what they have been through.
A left-wing cabal? Unlikely. There is too much counterfactual
evidence. The Ultimo collective? Even less likely. These people
show few signs of being compliant enough to belong to any group
for long. They certainly make one wonder what is meant by the
catch-all phrase of critics. An ABC culture? It can’t be
any simple unitary thing. ABC figures who have variously moved
to commercial television and back again say, by way of explanation,
that they miss the place and what it does. Testimony to the strength
of their homing instinct is the size of their salary cuts upon
return. But they are none of them cut from one mould. If there
is an ABC culture in Inglis’s narrative, it emerges very
gradually, compounded out of ambition, nationalism variously conceived,
professional drive for quality, ego, selflessness, anarchy, competition,
per-versity, vision, vocation, energy, critical reflexes, creative
drive and wit. But you’d be a fool to presume that you know
what it will do next.
The interrogative title of the new volume, Whose ABC?,
indicates the political and ideological temper of the times. This
is a less assured period. The 51-year history of the Australian
Broadcasting Commission spanned the aftermath of the Depression,
World War II and subsequent conflicts including the Cold War,
the introduction of television and the exploration of space. The
1932–83 Commission had its share of internal turmoil and
external pressure, but there was not the intensity of questioning
of its raison d’être that its successor, the Corporation,
now routinely experiences. Inglis’s book is not a defence
of the ABC against those who would have it starved or privatised
out of existence. Nor is it like ABC staffer Quentin Dempster’s
Death Struggle: How Political Malice and Boardroom Powerplays
are Killing the ABC (2000). It is a much larger project, a
long view of a complex cultural institution, one that is intrinsically
controversial because it deals with events and their interpretation,
and riven with conflict internally because it is home to people
whose creative blood runs hot and whose egos wax ferocious and
wane fragile.
In an undertaking of this scale, Inglis is able to show how history
repeats itself, with subtle variation; how political pressure
on the ABC from ministers and prime ministers of the day, from
both sides of politics, is inevitable. Some ministers, Michael
Duffy as Labor minister for communications, for example, behave
with more grace and integrity than others, and have a conception
of the importance of the ABC’s statutory independence that
is practical as well as theoretical. Indeed, if the second volume
has any heroes (there is a multitude of anti-heroes), Duffy is
paramount among them. His dealings with the ABC, and with those
in his own party who would interfere with it, are exemplary. Inglis
quotes one heated exchange between Duffy and Bill Hayden at the
time when the Labor Party was accusing the ABC of a conspiracy
against it. Hayden wanted ‘something done’ about the
ABC. Duffy said that would involve changing the legislation guaranteeing
its independence.
When
Hayden persisted, Duffy shouted: ‘Have you read the fucking
Act?’ It was a pithy invocation of the ABC’s character
as a statutory authority, by a minister whose temperament and
convictions fitted him as well as any in its history to mediate
between politicians and the national broadcaster. Only once did
Michael Duffy ever try to influence program policy — in a
jocular request to Geoffrey Whitehead [the then general manager]
for more jazz.
The
focus upon Duffy establishes a mark against which all of the political
operators within and without the ABC are tacitly measured. Inglis
is, as I have said, sparing in his judgments. But he does have
a canny way of establishing perspectives that show actions in
comparative light. Some ministers look shoddy in that light. Duffy
never does. Given that, it is irritating that in the rush through
to production, the book’s index should fail to differentiate
Duffy, Michael, Labor minister, from Duffy, Michael, broadcaster
of Counterpoint, the programme, begun in 2005, that was
to be the right-wing counterbalance to Phillip Adams, but which,
like so many things on the ABC, has escaped its niche and surprised
its left-wing critics. There are other signs of too much speed
in the editing process: infelicitous commas or lack of them, index
references wrong etc. A book of this quality deserves better production.
But that is a minor criticism of a laudable publishing venture.
Without Black Inc., I doubt the earlier volume would have appeared
in tandem with the new one, and as the books speak to one another,
that would have been a considerable loss.
Where
many writers and critics must focus upon the issues and crises
of the moment, Inglis is able to look at the structural forces
that have shaped the ABC. He notes that administrators and reviewers
have been reluctant to tamper with the statutory nature of the
ABC. Why? In answer, he quotes Australian social philosopher John
Passmore’s reflection on our fondness for that particular
constitutional form:
Even
when an organisation is largely, or totally, funded by governments,
we do not always bring it under the direct control of the public
service, we do not subject it to governmental intervention in
its day-to-day activities … even govern-ments distrust governments;
if they do not mistrust themselves they mistrust their possible
successor. By this indirect method of rule, governments both assuage
the qualms of electors and diminish the power of subsequent regimes.
It
is wonderfully Australian that such a cornucopia should have come
out of the hard ground of suspicion. But if Inglis’s account
of the battles fought for the statutory indepen-dence of the ABC
give one hope, he tells many cautionary tales to remind one that
independence can never be guaranteed.
Americans often tell me how much they admire and envy us the ABC
(or the BBC), but when asked why it has never been replicated
in the United States they say they could not endorse a major media
body financed by government. I understand their misgivings now
better than I did in 1990, when I interviewed a number of American
enthusiasts for the Corporation. But it was clear then, as it
is now, that they didn’t understand, or accept, the arm’s
length nature of the Australian structure, or indeed of the British
model. Even if they did, I suspect they would never trust it.
America is a very different place, built on very different conceptions
of the common good and how to achieve it.
Many of the highlights of the second volume, Whose ABC?,
will be familiar even to occasional ABC audiences. Inglis goes
backstage and rehearses the comings and goings of the ABC’s
board chairs, general managers, programme heads and producers,
presenters, reporters and correspondents. David Hill, Brian Johns
and Jonathan Shier have their terms as managing director minutely
examined. Inevitably, these accounts all involve examination of
the political influences, internal and external, that were brought
to bear at the time. Not pretty. More edifying is the way Inglis
shows an ABC gradually understanding and incorporating the richness
and talent that women and Aboriginal Australians brought to the
ABC. Inglis has interviewed many of his subjects. Some he seems
to know personally, hence the spark of idiosyncratic detail. Geraldine
Doogue’s convent schooling is noted. Sean Dorney, the ABC’s
indispensable Pacific and PNG correspondent, is ‘a slight
and delicate-looking young man with a sense of fun, a love of
sport, and a deep commitment to his craft. At James Cook University
in Townsville, he had stood for election to student office as
Dawn Shorney.’ More weightily, Inglis tells us that Dorney
has, during his career as a journalist, been expelled from PNG
and welcomed back again with an MBE, reporting all the while with
integrity and inside knowledge on every significant event in that
region over the past few decades.
There is material enough here for playwrights, satirists and bards
— and ironists. Senator Florence Bjelke-Petersen, in a conversation
with an ABC executive, once called the ABC ‘the backbone
of the nation’. The tenure of Donald McDonald, ABC board
chair and close friend of Prime Minister John Howard is in itself
a parable of unpredictability. He has been various-ly seen as
a Coalition Trojan horse, a Machiavelli and a man ‘captured’
by the ABC culture. What his time at the ABC has demonstrated
is that none of these epithets and slogans will serve. He has
proved a staunch defender of the ABC — which leads one to
reflect that none of the reductive phrases bandied about in the
heat of political conflict serve much purpose, except to round
the mouths and feed the rhetorical instincts of those who coin
them.
 Inglis,
throughout both books, pays subtle tribute to the work of generations
of journalists by remembering and marking what they achieved.
He notes how Chris Masters’ career as an investigative reporter
is an index of the high cost of such commitment. Masters has been
pursued by defamation lawyers for years. Inglis notes, too, the
support given to journalists such as Masters by Bruce Donald,
as the ABC’s general manager for administrative and legal
services. Donald was an enabler. One wonders what he thought of
the ABC’s recent débâcle over Chris Masters’
book on Alan Jones. In more supportive days, legal advisers believed
that their job was to enable as much information as possible to
reach the public, not to protect the sensitivities of the institution
or of the powerful.
The ABC is rich pickings for the social historian. As an organisation
with such reach, so many tentacles looping through Australian
society, into remote country and metropolises, it is the ideal
subject for extended study. What else (not even cricket) takes
an audience into parliament, pubs, down rivers, into our region
north and beyond? And because this has been the endeavour of thirty
years, all the cross hatching is in place. Praise be slow writing!
Inglis has used archives, interviews, books on the ABC, board
records, minutes (for the first volume; not made available for
the second), anecdotes, newspaper files and the great wealth of
his own personal recollection. When he discusses John Cargher’s
accent (which Cargher himself dislikes, just as he dislikes scratches
on vinyl), you know he has heard it hundreds of times. When he
pays tribute to the ABC’s millennial celebration, ‘One
Thousand Years in a Day’, his enthusiasm is fresh minted.
His excitement at the quality of that production, got together
on a shoestring and talent, is the reaction of an historian hearing
high wire work in his own discipline.
For all the enthusiasm, there is a steeliness in Inglis’s
history of the ABC. He was surprised that Sir Charles Moses should
have expected him to be the great man’s amanuensis, not the
stringent historian of an institution. (It was Dr Earle Hackett,
not Moses, who, as acting chairman in 1976, asked Inglis to write
the first volume.)
The steeliness shows throughout, more in the ordering and juxtaposing
of events than in overt judgment. His analysis of the trials of
This Day Tonight (attempts to censor, suppress) sits tellingly
alongside his analysis of the fracas over ABC’s television
coverage of the first Gulf War. Plus ça change.
In the latter case, he examines both the coverage, the propriety
of the use of academic Robert Springborg, the furious response
of the Hawke government and the review procedures that looked
at allegations of bias. Make up your own mind? Inglis provides
more than the necessary material for you to do so.
Often he works by indirection, and will quote a journalist, or
a commentator, rather than make a judgment himself. I found this
initially disconcerting, particularly when the other party was
writing or speaking about ABC people I know (or to whom I am related).
But the tactic is effective overall, because it admits a range
of views, a perspective from the outer as well as the members’
stand. Someone else’s ABC, not mine. Or ours, perhaps, whether
we like it or not.
These two volumes, like Ken Inglis’s other celebrated work,
Sacred Places (1998), are triumphs of scholarship and social
history. They are also compellingly readable. For what more could
one ask?
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