This week marks the 70th anniversary of the first television broadcast in Australia. This is important to me because I spent much of my early career working in the television industry.
It’s where I met my husband, who was also a film editor and made lots of excellent dramas including Brides of Christ which starred a very young Naomi Watts (bottom row centre), and an equally young Russell Crowe.
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald described the series as “Still the best six hours of television ever made”. You can find most of the series on YouTube.
Tony’s dad, Pat Kavanagh, was one of the first camera operators in Australia and worked at the Olympic Games held in Melbourne in 1956. You can see him in the centre of this photo, leaning on his knee in a nonchalant way.
As a young child, we didn’t own a television set and would frequently stand outside the local electrical store watching the small black and white set through the window. On Sunday nights our mother would bathe and feed us and we would all toddle down the street in our pyjamas to watch Disneyland at our neighbours home. It was magical!
I came to work in the television industry in a roundabout way.
As a young person, I wanted desperately to be a sound technician. I loved music, but I wasn’t a very good musician, so I thought working in a recording studio would suit me. I also had ‘good ears’ and was interested in all things related to audio production. Unfortunately, there was only one recording studio in Perth, and they had no interest in hiring a 15-year-old with no training or experience, so I wrote to all the television stations and film production companies to see if I could find a job.
An offer came (by mail) from Channel Nine to work in telecine (where they put programs to air), but Channel Nine was out in the sticks and I didn’t have a car, so that was out of the question. Another small independent producer gave me a job as an editing assistant/typist/sandwich-getter, and I learnt a lot about film production and about being a working girl. To be honest, I spent most of my time alone in the office re-typing the same letter over and again. I was a terrible typist, and they were riddled with mistakes. I very much regretted not learning to type at school and this came back to haunt me when we purchased our first Apple computer.
In the early seventies I went to London and got a job as a photographic printer, again without much experience. It was impossible to get film work because the unions tightly controlled the industry, but in those days (the early 1970s) you could learn most things ‘on the job’ and I became quite good at photographic printing. My favourite task was printing copies of fine art collections. These prints were required for insurance purposes, so the colours had to be just right. I frequently went to see private collections in fancy homes so I could check the accuracy of my work.
When I returned to Australia in 1975, I got a job at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, thanks to my friendship with Helena, who already worked there as a film editor. I started as a sound editing assistant and then moved to the documentary area where I worked on A Big Country (a long running series produced by the Rural Department). One of the highlights was working on Heartland, a series that documented changing attitudes to land use in Australia and included interviews with Permaculture’s Bill Mollison. It also included a detailed examination of bio-dynamic farming practices, so when a friend recently tried to explain everything she knew about burying cow horns full of manure, she was surprised to find I already knew about it. The series was awarded the Sir William McKell Award for Excellence in environmental journalism for film and television.
I feel very lucky to have had such an interesting and varied career. This is especially true given that I don’t see myself as terribly creative. Looking back at some references from my ABC days, I can see that perhaps I have misjudged myself. One reference mentions that I had a ‘meticulous attention to detail and creative flair in an often chaotic and heated environment’ and that made me feel proud, but mostly I feel fortunate to have worked with vibrant people bursting with great ideas.
Happy birthday television. It’s been fun!
