Jennifer Bowen
The task of producing a website telling the history of ABC Friends began almost by chance – in 2023, several boxes of old documents had to be cleared from a storeroom at Ross House, home of ABC Friends Victoria, and knowing my interest in media history, then ABCF Victoria President Michael Henry suggested I take a look before they were discarded.
Well! Three years later, material retrieved from those boxes became the kernel of the multimedia display we were able to assemble for the 50th birthday of ABC Friends– photos, newsletters, newspaper cuttings, campaign materials, unlabelled USB sticks, letters, CD-Roms and faxes (remember those?), covering decades of volunteers and activism.
As the project began in earnest, I researched public archives for material relating to ABC Friends and quickly found a collection of the earliest Aunty’s Nieces and Nephews newsletters at the State Library of Victoria. Aunty’s Nieces and Nephews was the original group in Melbourne, starting the same time as Friends of the ABC in Sydney, with both responding to the Fraser government’s decision in early 1976 to cut the ABC’s funding. The founder of Aunty’s Nieces and Nephews, Meg Paul, still lives in Camberwell and I was able to visit her. She told me of reports about the group on the ABC’s This Day Tonight program and I chased up ABC Archives to find that ABC Friends had been filmed on many occasions over the years – we were subsequently able to use 8 video pieces in the website. Meantime, present day ABC Friends in Sydney were uncovering the origins of the Sydney group and we were able to pool findings.
In 2025, ABC Friends National agreed to support the costs of web design for the project, though it now needed to cover the whole of Australia. Calls went out to groups across the country, leading to oral history interviews with 30 people in person and on Zoom. It has only been possible to use small extracts of these on the website, but they show the range of people who have been committed to the ABC – and how in every case, their motivation arises from a combination of fondness for the ABC, and the belief in the importance of independent journalism. From the start, the objective of ABC Friends has been both appropriate funding for the ABC and its freedom from interference as a foundation for democracy.
On the website, the span of 50 years is presented in five decades, each around a timeline. The timelines identify events from the past that were significant to ABC Friends, whether threats to the ABC against which Friends mobilised – or campaign highpoints. At certain points along each timeline, there is the option to access additional content for more on an idea (including differences). As well as oral history and archive video, you’ll find photos, songs, cartoons, campaign material and text explaining key players and events. There are also external links, for anyone wanting to take an issue further.
The website was immensely rewarding to work on, and utterly dependent on the many people who provided information and material included in it: enormous thanks to everyone who helped. Do give it a visit – perhaps several!
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