In 1959, when David Forbes Martyn of the CSIRO delivered the first of the Boyer Lectures – modelled on the BBC’s Reith Lectures – the Australian Broadcasting Commission (as it was then called) seemed far more secure than it became in later decades. The government of the day was probably just as suspicious as subsequent governments (of whatever political persuasion) were to be about what they perceived as political bias; and there were, no doubt, various attempts to bring pressure to bear on the organisation to change its errant ways. Yet, the ABC commanded considerable respect. It was, by and large, the voice of the nation, a reliable source of information and a purveyor of high-quality entertainment. During the great national and international conflicts and disputes of those decades, large sectors of the population turned to the ABC for news and commentary they knew to be trustworthy and authoritative. That seems no longer to be the case, despite the excellence of several news and current-affairs programmes, particularly on radio.

The responsibility for the current sorry state of the corporation does not rest solely with the present (and wayward) management and its aspirations, nor with the government’s paranoia about the ABC’s baleful influence – vividly confirmed every time Mr Howard and his teacup turn up in a commercial radio studio. The ABC, in common with other social and cultural institutions, universities and the churches among them, is a victim of declining public esteem. The cultural and ethical priorities of contemporary life reveal a notable reluctance to invest (in the broadest sense of the term) trust and respect in such institutions.

Some benefits have flowed, it is true, from these changed perceptions. Our sceptical and ironic age has had some effect in persuading the ABC to avoid much of the pomposity to which it was prone in former decades. Nevertheless, the present state of the organisation is generally deplorable. Television is something of a joke – and a bad one at that, as it chases audiences it cannot hope to wean from the commercial channels, and neglects, in consequence, those areas where its strengths reside: documentaries, current-affairs programmes and high-quality (though not necessarily high-culture) drama. That is why many discerning people are switching to SBS, and praying, no doubt, that the tycoons of Ultimo will be prevented from getting their sticky fingers on that institution.

Radio has prospered somewhat better, though I find the increasing tendency towards snippets and chatter on the FM fine music network, for instance, a worrying portent of what might be just around the corner. The remaining networks seem on the whole, at least to my mind, to be fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of a public broadcaster. This, I must stress, is not synonymous with those exclusively high-culture preoccupations that some would wish to impose on the ABC. But intellectually demanding material that cannot find an outlet in commercial broadcasting should be represented in the interests of those whose needs are not met by other broadcasting organisations. It is some years now since ABC television abandoned all but token attempts to cater for a significant part of its constituency. On radio, by contrast, we still have the Boyer Lectures.

The forty-three lectures included in this collection – there were two speakers for the 1991 series and seven in 1993, two of whom are represented here – reveal, almost without exception, authority, eloquence and intellectual acumen. And even more significantly I think, more than a few display sturdy determination to go against the grain, to fly in the face of what was, at the time their lectures were delivered, conventional wisdom. In that respect, this retrospect furnishes a snapshot, as it were, of developments in intellectual, social, political and cultural thought and discourse spanning some four decades, and of the ABC’s contribution in that time to what might be called the national debate.

Accordingly, the extract from W.E.H. Stanner’s 1968 lectures – possibly the most influential of the Boyers so far – signposts the direction in which discussions of the relationship between European and indigenous Australia would proceed in the following thirty years. Some of the concerns in Stanner’s lecture reprinted in this volume reappeared in later years: specifically in Noel Pearson’s tribute to Stanner in his contribution to the 1993 series, in Bernard Smith’s 1980 talks and, more obliquely perhaps, with Inga Clendinnen in 1999. It may not be too fanciful, moreover, to catch a glimpse of Stanner’s spirit hovering over Martin Krygier’s 1997 meditation on the ‘hybrid’ complexion of contemporary Australia.

Some of the lecturers revealed equal prescience in isolating issues that were to become major and troubling preoccupations in later years. So, in 1961, the demographer W.D. Borrie raised questions about the earth’s capacity to sustain a rapidly increasing population that came to preoccupy ecological thinking, and led, albeit indirectly, to such contemporary phenomena as the widespread misgivings over the consequences of globalisation. Borrie’s themes were picked up by Sir Macfarlane Burnet in 1966, by H.C. Coombs in 1970 – ‘in this century, man has increased in numbers to an extent which now threatens to run beyond the capacity of the earth to feed, house, clothe and equip the bodies concerned’ – and, again obliquely, by Geoffrey Bolton in 1992, when he commented on the ‘parsimony’ of research funding for universities and the CSIRO, and on the detrimental impact of such miserliness on our ability to solve the technological, financial and ecological problems of a complex, prosperous society.

The contributions of lawyers and scientists chart the manner in which thinking about key issues in their respective fields has evolved over the forty-two years spanned by this anthology. In 1960, Julius Stone, in the second series of Boyer Lectures, examined the conundrums of the relationship between the individual and the state from the vantage point of what was then both recent and contemporary history: the collapse of Hitler’s tyrannical regime and the menace of the USSR. Concerns of this nature – though without Stone’s specific political and historical preoccupations in some cases – colour the contributions of several noted jurists: Zelman Cowen in 1969 on ‘The Right to Be Let Alone’; Roma Mitchell (the first woman to be invited to deliver the Boyer Lectures) in 1975 on criminal law; Michael Kirby in 1983 and Murray Gleeson, last year’s lecturer, in his examination of questions arising from current discussions of the Constitution.

In 1978, Gustav Nossal (whose name, incidentally, was dropped off the list of speakers on the back of the dust jacket) raised, inter alia, the topic of genetic engineering, particularly from the point of view of immunology. Eleven years later, in 1989, the philosopher Max Charlesworth focused on the bioethical implications of the remarkable scientific and technological achievements in this field in the decade separating his lectures from Nossal’s. Ian Anderson’s 1993 lecture, ‘Towards a Koori Healing Practice’, reflects the manner in which scientific and medical thought and practice had expanded in the time since the fine lectures John Eccles gave in 1965.

Arts and the humanities seem, from the evidence of this anthology, to have attracted less distinguished contributions to the lectures. There are, it is true, some wonderful things included here, among them David Malouf’s elegant and humane evocation in 1998 of the life-enhancing potentialities concealed beneath the grim circumstances of the early days of European Australia, and Pierre Ryckmans’s curious but enthralling cultural grand tour in 1996, ending with the cri-de-coeur: ‘Literary theory has something revolting about it.’

Douglas Stewart fared rather less well in his 1977 account of J.F. Archibald and the Bulletin. The extract from Shirley Hazzard’s 1984 lectures struck me as rambling and a touch woolly. To be fair, though, I think that the writers and critics represented here, and Hazzard in particular, suffer somewhat more than scientists, lawyers or political theorists from the basic, and to my mind, incomprehensible flaw in the conception of this volume.

Most of the Boyer Lectures given since the inception of the series have been carefully constructed arguments, examinations and expositions delivered over the course of several weeks – and, in many instances, published subsequently. I cannot imagine what prompted the decision to issue this selection of what might be described as bleeding chunks, with only the most cursory indications of the contents of the other lectures these speakers delivered, except a misguided attempt at public relations – or spin, to put it less politely. The Boyer Collection, like those CDs of Beethoven’s greatest tunes, struck me as an essay in tokenism. And that is precisely what seems to me to be so wrong with the current complexion of the ABC, at least at the higher levels of management and policy-making.

The Boyer Lectures, many of which are still in print, stand as a monument to the achievements the public broadcaster has made and remains capable of making. By contrast, The Boyer Collection, with its embarrassing chronologies of ‘significant’ events for each of the decades, is ultimately an exercise in futility, no matter what gems may be contained between its sturdy covers. A well-written account of the impact and significance of the Boyer Lectures in the last four decades would have been far more welcome.