Meanwhile, Dorothy, a petite and lively presence, was active in amateur theatre, organising her own company of players, which Hector acted in and helped manage. She also was busy gaining qualifications as an elocutionist; while Charlotte would have frowned at the prospect of a stage career, teaching elocution was considered a useful and respectable occupation. But there was already a sense that both she and Hector were restlessly seeking an outlet for their creative energies which would take them beyond the suburban world of their upbringing.

Hector took conducting classes from Fritz Hart, the director of the Albert Street Conservatorium, and, according to Rozzi Bazzani, impressed by a concert he had once seen Hart stage in the Royal Botanic Gardens, dreamed up the idea of 'Music for the People', a series of open-air orchestral concerts, which would eventually attract commercial sponsorship and be broadcast. Founded just after the outbreak of World War II, 'Music for the People' established Hector Crawford, who instinctively knew how to cut a figure, as a Melbourne identity. His most famous concert, in 1967 in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl featuring The Seekers, attracted a crowd variously estimated at 150,000 to 200,000.

Throughout the 1930s Hector had secure employment as a clerk in the State Electricity Commission while pursuing his busy musical interests in his spare time. Only when, during the war, he was asked to help an ailing music recording business, Broadcast Exchange, did Hector sense an opportunity to advance his career in a new direction. He made a modest success of the business, recording music programs and selling them to radio stations which, because of the war, were having trouble importing programs. At the same time, the war offered Dorothy the opportunity to join the ABC, which, with men in short supply, engaged its first female announcers. Subsequently, she moved to the talks department where she gained valuable experience dealing with writers. In 1944 Hector, conscious of the market for popular radio serials, suggested that she join him at Broadcast Exchange and help develop drama programs. So this remarkable sibling partnership was born, with Hector the entrepreneur and salesman, maintaining his interest in musical matters, and Dorothy in charge of drama production, script writing, and casting.

'Crawford lobbied, argued, cajoled, persisted: he has a right to be called ... the father of Australian television'

Hector Crawford Productions – later, more accurately, Crawford Productions – thrived in the early postwar years. At a time when little in the way of training was available for would-be radio actors, Hector and Dorothy set up the Crawford School of Broadcasting. Radio actors in successful programs could become minor celebrities, and Dorothy took great interest in the actors they employed, advising them on clothes grooming and behaviour. There was something of a family atmosphere to Crawfords.

Filming Homicide in a suburban Melbourne location, 1970. On the top of the car is director George Miller (photograph by Ken Ophel)

By the mid-1950s Hector and Dorothy were preparing for the advent of television in time for the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. It was tough going: only in 1961 did Channel Seven agree to screen an adaptation of an existing radio program, the court-room drama Consider Your Verdict. This was a relatively cheap program with little in the way of outside filming, and featured a mixture of real-life lawyers, actors, and ordinary citizens. Bazzani has it that 'the accused and witnesses were usually ordinary citizens', but I can place on record here that as an actor I appeared in one episode accused of murder. I recall with some satisfaction that I was found guilty.

In 1964, Seven – which was the channel Hector had most dealings with – took the plunge with the first Australian crime series, Homicide, and found, to their own astonishment, that they had a ratings success on their hands. It is hard for us to appreciate today that there was a novelty about hearing Australian accents in a police drama series. Homicide ran for twelve years; in its wake came Division Four and Matlock Police.

Hector Crawford conducting his Music for the People orchestra (Photograph by Laurie Richards, Arts Centre Melbourne, Performing Arts Collection)

Hector and Dorothy, through all this hard work, were leading rather complicated private lives in the course of which they had clearly left Charlotte's moral code behind them (one can't be too sure about Will – he was a travelling salesman). Both divorced and remarried, and it would seem they had other affairs. Here Bazzani's narrative takes on the flavour of the radio soaps that Crawfords produced. When Hector's first wife, Edna, who had been a principal violinist in his orchestra, found a lover's note in his jacket, she 'took her courage in one hand, her broken heart in the other, and fled Melbourne, taking nothing but her violin', balancing it on her head perhaps? Hector's second wife, the singer Glenda Raymond, was better able to integrate herself into the Crawford family than her predecessor.

Hector was never really interested in developing an Australian film industry, even when the efforts of Phillip Adams and Barry Jones led to some government subsidy. He was always focused on television, particularly as competitors like Reg Grundy emerged. As the company grew and programs were sold overseas, actors started to agitate for residuals (payments for repeat broadcasts which was the normal practice overseas). Bazzani doesn't seem to have much sympathy for their campaign.

'There was something of a family atmosphere to Crawfords'

There is much of interest in this book, but it is an awkward narrative, lacking in structure. Instead of chapters there are something like a hundred sections, with titles such as 'No place like home', 'Nuts and bolts', 'Was I dreaming?' and 'A sister's heartbreak', which aren't much help. Evocative photographs turn up unannounced, some in such shrunken form as to be pointless. One does wonder about the extent to which some publishers take responsibility for the books bearing their imprint.

This is very much the story told from Hector's point of view, and Bazzani is reluctant to criticise her hero. Although the author acknowledges the importance of Dorothy in the rise of Crawford Productions, one senses there is much more to be said about her and her relationship with her younger brother, though a lack of personal sources is a hindrance. Together they built a unique organisation which helped Australianise radio and television and which is remembered with great affection by many who worked for it.