Social history is highlighted. We read how 5DN radio announcer ‘Big Bob’ Francis raised a petition in 1964 in the hope of adding Adelaide to the forthcoming Beatles tour; the outcome was that the largest crowd ever to hear them ‘live’ gathered in that city. In this book, tenacious myths are pricked; and it is no longer true that the Salvation Army in Australia produced the world’s first feature film.

The slow but growing acceptance of women in journalism and radio is told in various articles, including their success in editing big-circulation magazines. Thus, Dulcie Boling turned New Idea, once known for its recipes and knitting patterns, into reportedly the biggest selling women’s journal, per capita, in the world. Frances Bonner reveals the dominant role of magazines ‘that target women’. One of their features is incessant gossip about which star is pregnant. The rate of speculation far exceeds the rate of pregnancy.

On the environment, the conservative Melbourne Argus was perhaps the most diligent reporter for seventy years beginning in the 1860s, while the Launceston Examiner earns black marks for scorning a proposed law to protect the black swans. ‘Of what special use are black swans to the colonists of Tasmania that the legislature should be asked to throw over them the shield of its protection?’ Green crusades come and go. Libby Lester, the author of this fascinating article, detects a notable gap or lull between the sustainability fears of the late 1980s and the warnings about climate change some twenty years later. The latter, she affirms, have had ‘a longer shelf-life, despite dips in public concern’.

The index notes at least 250 references to the ABC, on which the key article is by Quentin Dempster. Created in 1932, the ABC at first reached only about six per cent of the nation’s population – most people did not then own radio sets. Dempster reminds us that the early ABC was prevented by its rivals, the well-established newspapers, from collecting its own news directly.

According to John Tebbutt, the ABC in the 1930s was roundly criticised when, reporting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, it used sound effects in a radio broadcast. In another article, Warren Denning, a young man in the first Canberra press gallery, became the first journalist to provide the ABC with an independent voice and news service there. Denning started work in 1939;two years later, former journalist John Curtin, the new prime minister, helped him, having long complained about the mainstream press’s failure to give ‘impartial treatment’ to Labor.

Ben Chifley went further and compelled the ABC to recruit its own staff to collect news around Australia. This comes from Graham Freudenberg, whose pithy article concludes sadly: ‘Denning’s essentially tragic vision of Labor, its idealism fatally flawed by opportunism, has influenced the literature of Australian politics ever since.’ These observations by experienced writers make the book far more than a compendium.

‘Accent’ is not in the list of contents, but here and there are revealing comments. Quentin Dempster reports that the very first words on the ABC, read by Conrad Charlton, were ‘intoned in a refined English Australian accent’. According to Anthony Rendell, Talbot Duckmanton, who joined the ABC as an announcer and sports broadcaster in 1939, was one of the first to desert the familiar BBC accent and speak in an ‘educated Australian’ voice. Even in early television, the voice held its own against the picture. Four Corners began in 1961 as a conversation on current affairs between Bob Raymond, Michael Charlton, and Clem Semmler.

Swift changes in technology permeate this big book. Thus, the traffic report which now peppers breakfast radio was inconceivable in 1950, because so few cars possessed a radio and so few cars were on the road. Nor did I know that in 1958 the advent of The Top 40 on radio owed much to the transistor radio that young people pressed against their ear. ‘The Tranny’ was the disc jockey’s first friend.

The book illuminates technological topics which I thought I would never understand. It is not just for the media. Every public library and senior school library should possess a copy.

Humphrey McQueen, in a vivid article on Julian Assange, lands us in the realm of the Internet and email. Assange began his hacking career in 1987 as a teenager under the name of ‘Mendax’, a Latin word which is the root of mendacious. The enormous output in this supposedly paperless world of the Internet can be seen in one statistic. On one single day – 28 November 2010 – Assange released information culled from 260,000 confidential US cables. He is admiringly described as Rupert Murdoch’s ‘only Australian-born rival for influence over the global mediascape’.

We learn that Assange was born in Townsville. Though the birthplaces and first jobs of many of the listed people are not mentioned, the picture emerges of an industry that offered countless opportunities in small cities, suburbs, and country towns. The first of the Packer dynasty arrived in Sydney via newspapers in Tasmania, Dubbo, and Townsville, and Keith Murdoch collected news in his own Melbourne suburb. Frank Devine and Derryn Hinch began their careers as teenagers in small-town newspapers in New Zealand. Victor Carroll came from Mackay, and Graham Perkin from the Wimmera. Among numerous others the Sommerlads were from Inverell, and T.M. Shakespeare of the Canberra Times (at first a weekly) started as a compositor on the Forbes and Parkes Gazette.

Here are tens of thousands of facts. Some will be a bit astray. Brian Shoesmith’s challenging essay on space and distance falters because parts of his chosen evidence seem to contradict him. On the other hand, numerous articles are crammed with information that would be hard to gather from any other source. Andrew Jakubowicz is illuminating on the ethnic press which now numbers a total of fifty-five newspapers in Indian, Chinese, Arabic, and Korean alone. He points to the editorial and official tensions ‘between opening Australia to immigrants and protecting them from Australia’.

Many pieces are written with a generous spirit. Of Andrew Olle, who died in 1995 while still a vigorous creator of quality work, Peter Manning writes: ‘Olle was known for his gentleness, humour, charisma, humility and open-mindedness.’ Victor Carroll is described as ‘the undisputed giant of Australia’s post-war journalism’. The versatility or prolific output of others is praised. The Welsh-born Pedr Davis became a motoring writer in the 1950s, and ‘his road tests appeared in countless rural and suburban newspapers around Australia for 40 years, and he wrote more than 50 books’. Incidentally, book publishing is not one of the media surveyed in this Companion.

Editor Bridget Griffen-Foley provides a captivating afterthought: ‘In the course of undertaking this Leviathan, I acquired not just 300 contributors, but a husband.’ He is described as ‘the most precious companion’, a phrase that will come to the mind of many readers who devour this hardcover Companion.