The ABC That Might Have Been

Not long ago I idly turned on ABC television in the middle of the evening. An Aboriginal woman was speaking, or rather yelling, and the first words I heard were a complaint in graphic terms about anal rape (I will spare you the exact phrase). Not exactly what one is used to hearing by one’s own domestic hearth.

Dear me, I thought, switching off, how our national broadcaster has changed since its courtly days more than six decades ago. 

This set me delving into my misty impressions of the ABC as it was in that remote era when manners and opinions were so alien to our own. To start with, it was dignified. It never in those days tried to touch the lowest common denominator of vulgarity. Its hierarchy was headed by serious-minded public-spirited men (none of whom had made their careers publishing a magazine that encouraged teenage girls to lose their virtue). Its radio announcers (also male, though no longer in dinner jackets—that was before the war) would never have dreamt of…