Station Identification: The Aboriginal Programs Unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Over the last decade, the production of media by and about Aboriginal Australians has undergone geometric expansion, from a few experimental efforts at developing local video production in the early 1980s in remote communities, to the current situation in which video equipment and television broadcasting are available to practically every Aboriginal settlement that wants it. It is not only the work of remote-living Aboriginal people that has taken off. Urban Aboriginal independent filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt are well-known in independent film circles; Moffatt has just completed her first feature, "Bedevil," that was shown at Cannes and is circulating in an international market. While the costs and benefits of such developments are still being debated (Ginsburg 1991; Langton 1993), Aboriginal media has triggered interest worldwide for indigenous groups that have formed alliances around the production of their own media. It has also engaged the interest ofwesterners who seem to be fascinated by the seeming disjunction of Aboriginal people — stereotypically identified by their relatively simple material culture and distinctly nonwestern cosmology—working comfortably and on their own terms with the latest in satellite and video technologies. To most people interested in media and/ or things Aboriginal, the mention of indigenous media in Australia evokes one of those two developments. Less well-known is the remarkable growth since 1987 of an Aboriginal Program Unit (APU) as part of the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC), Australia's national state-supported television channel. Because of the broadcast range of the ABC (a national network that regularly commands 20% of the television audience) and the resources it has as a state institution (approximately $450 million/ year) (Meadows 1992) which allow it freedom from commercial sponsorship, the APU is playing an important part in increasing the televisual representation of Aboriginal people throughout Australia. However, perhaps due to television's distinctly national profile, ephemeral character, and middle-brow status among intellectuals and artists, the APU has had virtually no recognition outside of Australia, despite the quality of the work it produces. This article (and the accompanying interview by Jacqueline Urla with Frances Peters, a producer for the APU) are first efforts to introduce some of the work of the APU to people outside of Australia. Its programs bear consideration in terms of form, substance and reception; and the Unit itself is of interest as a precedentsetting model for including indigenous people and their concerns in the televisual imaginary of the nation state and beyond.