Australian television has been transformed over the past decade. Cross-media ownership and audience-reach regulations redrew the map and business culture of television; leading business entrepreneurs acquired television stations and then sold them in the bust of the late 1980s; and new television services were developed for non-English speaking and Aboriginal viewers.
Australian Television Culture is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental changes of this period. It is also the first to offer a substantial treatment of the significance of multiculturalism and Aboriginal initiatives in television.
Tracing the links between local, regional, national and international television services, Tom O'Regan builds a picture of Australian television. He argues that we are not just an outpost of the US networks, and that we have a distinct television culture of our own.
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Glossary
Introduction
1 Australia's television culture
2 High communications policy in Australia
3 The rise and fall of entrepreneurial television, 1986-92
4 Television's double face: Of imported and local programming
5 Television and national culture
6 National television in the new cultural order
7 SBS-TV: Symbolic politics and multicultural policy in television provision (with Dona Kolar-Panov)
8 SBS-TV: A television service (with Dona Kolar-Panov)
9 An Aboriginal television culture: Issues, strategies, politics (with Philip Batty)
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Tom O'Regan is Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at Murdoch University and an editor of Continuum: the Australian journal of media and culture. He co-edited An Australian Film Reader and The Australian Screen, both with Albert Moran.
'.a truly innovative book. The author ambitiously strives for a large-scale synthesis of policy, program analysis, history, politics, international influences and the Australian television system's place in the world.' - Associate Professor Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology
