Broadcasting inclusion and advocacy: a history of female activism and cross-cultural partnership at the post-war ABC

Abstract

During the first decade of television in Australia, a cohort of female broadcasters used their hard-won positions at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) to challenge the social and cultural complacencies of post-war society. Counteracting the assumption that women were largely absent in post-war broadcasting, this research discusses how two of these producers used their roles as public broadcasters to enact their own version of feminism, a social and cultural activism framed through active citizenship. Critiquing race, gender and national identity in their programmes, they partnered with Indigenous Australian activists and worked to amplify the voices of minorities. Referring to documentaries produced in Australian television’s formative years, this article describes how ABC producers Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage worked to disrupt programming cultures that privileged homogeneous Anglo-Australian perspectives. As a consequence, documentaries like A Changing Race (1964) presented empathetic and evocative content that challenged xenophobic stereotypes and encouraged cross-cultural understandings.