Most Australians don’t know that remote areas have only had access to television services since satellite television came into being in the late 1980s. Until then it was impossible to receive a television signal in remote areas, regardless of how high the aerial.
Even today, most of regional Australia can receive a signal from one ABC radio station and perhaps one commercial radio station, but in more remote areas (Queensland’s Cape York and far central/south west, parts of the NT, north/central WA etc it’s not possible to get good reception for any radio station at all. In the far northwest corner of Australia, the radio signals from our northern neighbours (Indonesia etc) beam in strongly at night and it’s hard to find a single English-speaking radio station amongst the clamour.
So much for the taxpayer-funded ABC being ‘national’.
Television in remote areas has never been free, unlike in town where all you have to do is buy a TV and pay for the electricity to run it. In the bush you have to buy a satellite signal decoder. Remote area television could have been provided relatively cheaply however due to the power of television station owners at the time, protecting their commercial vested interests in television broadcasting in more densely populated areas, this was not the case. Remote area residents receive the ABC, SBS and Imparja – a special television station based in Alice Springs, which screens a mixture of programmes screened by other television stations.
When staying overnight in Augathella a few weeks ago I put the TV on early in the morning for a while, because I prefer to leave after sunrise in order to beat roo peak hour. I had a choice of watching Japanese news (in Japanese) on SBS, Rage (mostly gross American videos of bimbos wearing very little, presumably to distract from how awful the music was) and two American breakfast programmes. AMERICAN breakfast programmes? I’ve never seen these on Australian television before and when there’s just four television stations to choose from, it’s astonishing that the two commercial channels couldn’t find anything more relevant and better quality that this irrelevant, imported drivel. Presumably only on air because it cost them next-to-nothing to buy.
Every other time I had the TV on when I was away there seemed to be a choice of sport, sport, sport or sport. We spent years living in the bush but I guess it’s the new digital services offering so many extra channels that has made the appalling lack of choice in the bush, all the more obvious. Coastal and city regions have moved on to even more choice with the introduction of digital TV, but remote residents have been left having to pay for a satellite service such as Austar or Foxtel if they want more choice; or they have to tolerate choosing between foreign language news services, American breakfast television or endless sporting broadcasts.
In a great irony, the new series filmed on the Northern Territory’s Coolibah Station, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is not viewable in the Northern Territory apart from in Darwin, because it won’t be shown on Imparja.
Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Australian outback TV and film