This Is the ABC is therefore, through no fault of its author, an unfinished symphony. It is worth putting on record that while, in one obvious sense, the Commission had to wait for a government decision on the Dix Report before it could look firmly ahead to its new status as a Corporation, in another sense, it could not afford to wait. Therefore, from the time then Minister Neil Brown announced the Fraser government’s response to Dix in 1982, and indeed before, many of the 273 recommendations had either been put into effect, or were in the process of being implemented. Of these, two of the most administratively important were the revision of the accounting systems, and the updating of ADP systems. Progress had also been made towards curing the seemingly chronic accommodation problems. During 1982, the government abolished staff ceilings for the ABC (though still requiring a manpower plan), and the Budget of 1982–83 provided a considerable injection of capital funds. Indeed, the ABC’s negotiations with the Department of Finance during 1982 and early 1983 concluded very favourably.

But in fact, This Is the ABC is anything but transient. One does not have to know the ABC to admire the way in which Inglis has taken command of the vast volume of source material he had available to him. Written and audial archival material, books, articles, correspondence, and the daily output of radio and television are daunting enough. But when one adds, as he did, a very large number of interviews here and abroad, the immensity of the task of ordering, and greatly compressing the evidence is apparent. To accomplish that task and remain readable requires uncommon skill. The critic, however well-informed on the subject, must first of all pay tribute to the sheer professionalism which marks this book, and which will make it the first point of reference for anyone wanting to begin to understand the Corporation and its antecedent.

For there is nothing new under the sun, however many superficial changes might occur, and history itself determines the shape of the present and the future. Even if Inglis did not set out to demonstrate that history is a seamless web, he has succeeded in doing so. Sometimes the connecting threads, like the book’s title, take on ironic undertones, as when Inglis reflects on the fact that Charles Moses has seen the chief executive made a member of the Board, a situation he himself unsuccessfully sought to bring about for many years. But, the most consistent evidence of continuity is the history of government dealings with the ABC. There is no reason to doubt that in principle, governments recognise the ABC’s right to life. Yet, there is also no doubt either that, in practice, they do not find it so easy to support – especially when it produces programs which are critical of government policy, or of the performance of political figures. It requires not only generosity, but a special kind of wisdom to provide an organisation as volatile as the ABC with the wherewithal to attract controversy and make mistakes; governments must sometimes feel that they have given a wayward child pocket money, which it spends on bungers to hurl at its benefactors. Perhaps one should not be surprised that three of the ABC’s nine chairmen have been removed against their wishes.

The racy narrative style in which the history is told does much to produce a sense of an unrolling of a long scroll of events. When one actor retires, another steps into his role. One chairman has views about ‘opening up’, another about helping the ABC to survive its hard times, and to make the best of living on a shrinking income. One long-serving broadcaster said to me not long ago that he was immensely impressed by the way Inglis ‘got the feel’ of life at the ABC. It stands to reason that everyone who has some knowledge of the incidents and people who are part of the narrative will have individual versions of what happened, why it happened, and what its consequences were. These differences are inevitable in such an organisation, because problems and events are seen and interpreted from one’s own piece of ground, not from someone else’s. But disagreements, whether they are a matter of interpretation or a matter of fact, do not alter the sense of how it feels inside the organisation. The extent and diversity of the ABC, the complexity of its internal relationships and structure, the constant publicity, the meeting and sometimes clashing of very different personalities, and, driving it all, the talent and inventiveness of program makers and broadcasters – all this and more is vividly presented. It is an anecdotist’s view of the ABC – one with a passion for detail and an intense interest in personality. This Is the ABC is like one of John Perceval’s close-up paintings of the bush. It is full of dense life and colour, ‘one yard of earth’, as it were, magnified and shown in all its intricate connections. Coherence comes from the author, whose sense of dramatic climax and anti-climax determines the placement of details.

It is inevitable that given the amount of material to be assimilated, and the restrictions on space, a sense of the larger perspectives of the ABC should not form part of lnglis’s history. It is a deficiency that opens the way for a different kind of history, one which, building on the foundations of this work, would see beyond the ABC’s ‘yard of earth’ to the society which produced it. For in spite of hard times, political and bureaucratic interference, and an apparently small share of the market as these things are now measured, it has managed, not just to survive, but to set the pace in many different program areas, not in the least thanks to the outstanding broadcasters it has attracted.

This Is the ABC, for all its sense of ‘felt life’, surprisingly does not have anything substantial to say about the ABC’s role and influence in the cultural life of Australia. This is in part a consequence of the structure of the book. The chapter ‘Public Affairs’ should in fact be balanced by a chapter on education and the arts. As it is, the scattering of references to these matters throughout other chapters reduces the impact of the innovations made, and conceals the scale of activity in the arts. Even the many references to music do not add up to a comprehensive account of the combined achievement of the orchestras, the subscription concert series, the overseas artist policy, and the educational benefits of children’s and youth concerts. In this area, one does not ‘get the feel’ of it. The inside perspective needs to be turned outside – the voyeur needs to become the long-sighted observer.

Inglis’s opening words are: ‘As the bells in the tower of Sydney’s General Post Office chimed eight o’clock on the evening of Friday 1 July 1932, the peals were picked up by a microphone and carried to every state of the federation.’ It is important to remember not just that the bells sounded the birth of the ABC, but that the year was 1932. It was not a great year for the arts – not for literature, music, painting, nor the theatre. There were brave attempts in the 1930s to carry forward the struggle for national expression in the arts, but, with obvious exceptions, there was a considerable gulf between aspiration and performance. Yet, less than a decade later began stirrings of imagination, which rapidly advanced the arts during the following decades, and especially, as Douglas Stewart has recently remarked, during the 1940s and 1950s. One would like to think that the ABC was one of the forces in that cultural change, as it certainly was in the lives of many young listeners. I would sacrifice some of the anecdotal and gossipy details included in This Is the ABC for the favour of speculation on its influence in these essential matters. For, in the end, what is produced is more important than those who produce it, especially in a country whose indigenous cultural life is so fragile. I should like Inglis to have made it clear that a major achievement of the ABC in its first fifty years is to have been a constant discoverer and supporter of Australia’s emerging modern culture. This is not to deny the ABC’s importance as a pioneer of public affairs programs, but merely to say that the future will benefit more from its less conspicuous, but less transient work.