History
It’s the biggest show in town when TV comes to Brisbane
MYLES SINNAMON tunes into the State Library of Queensland collections and goes back to 1949, when watching television was an exclusive event.
While most of us now take television for granted, some of us remember a time when it was a real novelty.
The first public demonstration of television toured Australia in 1949, featuring state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment shipped from Great Britain – reportedly similar to what had been installed at the BBC.
The two tonnes of equipment was so fragile and expensive (valued at an estimated £25,000 – nearly $1.7million today), it had to travel in a 10-tonne semi-trailer that could go no faster than 16kmh.
After Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, it was finally Brisbane’s turn to marvel at this new technology.
The first public demonstration was given at the Lennon’s Hotel ballroom in Brisbane’s CBD in August 1949.
Performers were engaged to deliver a “fast live artist variety show” in front of closed-circuit cameras in the centre of the ballroom which would be transmitted to 20 television sets positioned on the walls of the room.
Audiences would be able to watch at once “the whole process of television transmission”, viewing the live performance or turning their backs to take it in on a “crystal clear in daylight” broadcast.
Photographs and newspaper reports from the State Library of Queensland collections show us just how big the undertaking was and how excited the public was to experience it.
Performances on August 1 and 2 were only for private guests invited by the tour’s sponsor: the Shell Company of Australia Ltd.
The next two days were open to the general public who had paid for tickets to one of 12 half-hour performances (with proceeds going to the Brisbane Legacy War Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund).
Audiences in their thousands enjoyed entertainment including a musical comedy act by Norma Hall (reported by The Telegraph newspaper as “the first woman to be televised in Brisbane”), a golf lesson from prominent professional golfer Mick Stafford, tap dancing, a piano solo and “a model having her hair waved”.
One television was situated in a display window facing the footpath outside the hotel and caused such excitement among passers-by that police had to be called to control the crowd congregating outside.
The event sold more than 4000 tickets, raising £409 for Legacy.
The entire enterprise was to encourage the public to purchase television sets when they were eventually introduced to Australia, and Shell would be “among the first to sponsor television programs”.
Following the demonstration, it was intimated that the introduction of home television sets in Australia was likely only a few years away.
It wouldn’t be until a decade later, however, that Queensland’s first TV set went on sale, with QTC (Channel 9) making the Sunshine State’s first broadcast on August 16, 1959.
(Up until the mid-1970s, any household wishing to operate a radio or television set in Australia had to purchase a licence costing about £6, or higher if combined with a radio licence.)
The state’s 10,000th TV licence was sold in Brisbane on September 25, 1959, showing Queenslanders were keen to embrace this new technology and indeed have never looked back.
