It’s now 1950 and Australia still doesn’t have TV. Despite public demonstrations the year before giving huge crowds a taste of the future, it would take the combined weight of a royal commission and Australia’s first Olympics to finally get the first stations on the air from September 1956. Yet over the next two decades, the world would not only see television in colour, it would end the ‘60s with ground-breaking vision of humans landing on the moon. Even more astoundingly, the 1960s would provide us an early glimpse of technologies that continue to drive electronic displays today.
Better late than never…
In 1949, then-prime minister Ben Chifley had hoped to seal a federal election win for the Australian Labor Party by announcing plans for a national television service. It wasn’t enough and Robert Menzies was elected to begin his second stint as Prime Minister. Menzies’ eventual response to the ever-growing calls to introduce television came in February 1953, with the launch of ‘CA 2641, Royal Commission on Television’. A year-long investigation into the introduction of television in Australia, it considered everything from the technical issues to the social impact of its arrival.
The end result was that there would be no mad-panic rush to launch stations, but rather an orderly beginning, with the plus two commercial station licenses awarded in Sydney and Melbourne (prior to 1974, you required a licence to’s television bill would be covered by the existing fees paid by radio listeners).
