Sir Charles’s reaction tells us something about Inglis’s mode as historian. Modest in opinion, indefatigable in research and deft in the kind of organisation that yields conclusions by establishing context and weighing event and personality against like or unlike event and personality, he is a model of engaged detachment. His enthusiasm for the ABC is clear: the second volume, Whose ABC?, is dedicated to ‘the makers of the ABC, past, present and future’. He volunteers the view, in the first volume, that ‘A lot of history is concealed autobiography, and this book more than most.’ But his analysis of the ABC’s many crises, personality wars, political battles, managerial and staff manoeuvres is clinical and relentless in its detail. It is not, and will not be, comfortable reading for many of the players who are still alive and involved in the complex life of this extraordinary national institution.

But for readers, for the nationwide audience that the ABC serves, this is rich, readable history, evocative in its recall of programmes and their makers, fascinating in its minutiae. Yes, it feeds nostalgia, inevitably and joyously. Inglis remembers Alan McGilvray’s century of test commentaries celebrated on the scoreboard of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But he doesn’t just remind us of events, or of the characters we have listened to and watched over the years; he gives us their lineages. Thus, current affairs specialist Max Uechtritz:

[whose] lineage was exotic enough to make the family a subject in 2004 for Australian Story. He was born on a plantation in Papua New Guinea in 1958, one of ten children whose mother was an English-born schoolteacher and whose father’s ancestry was a Pacific mixture of German, Danish, American and Samoan. In 1977, after schooling in Queensland, he began in Brisbane a career in print and electronic journalism, as Kerry O’Brien, thirteen years his senior and now to be working under him, had done. He came to ABC television in 1986 from Nine, inspired by Four Corners, whose episode on the Rainbow Warrior had made him believe that the ABC was the place to be.

The effect of such detail is to make individuals, not just generic journalists – so easy to pigeonhole and disparage – out of the men and women who bring news and current affairs into Australian homes. The familiarity doesn’t, in this case, breed contempt. Inglis teases out motivation, formation, influences. It is hard to make accurate predictions about what these men and women will do, say or broadcast after reading Inglis’s accounts of them and where they have come from, what they have been through. A left-wing cabal? Unlikely. There is too much counterfactual evidence. The Ultimo collective? Even less likely. These people show few signs of being compliant enough to belong to any group for long. They certainly make one wonder what is meant by the catch-all phrase of critics. An ABC culture? It can’t be any simple unitary thing. ABC figures who have variously moved to commercial television and back again say, by way of explanation, that they miss the place and what it does. Testimony to the strength of their homing instinct is the size of their salary cuts upon return. But they are none of them cut from one mould. If there is an ABC culture in Inglis’s narrative, it emerges very gradually, compounded out of ambition, nationalism variously conceived, professional drive for quality, ego, selflessness, anarchy, competition, perversity, vision, vocation, energy, critical reflexes, creative drive and wit. But you’d be a fool to presume that you know what it will do next.

The interrogative title of the new volume, Whose ABC?, indicates the political and ideological temper of the times. This is a less assured period. The 51-year history of the Australian Broadcasting Commission spanned the aftermath of the Depression, World War II and subsequent conflicts including the Cold War, the introduction of television and the exploration of space. The 1932–83 Commission had its share of internal turmoil and external pressure, but there was not the intensity of questioning of its raison d’être that its successor, the Corporation, now routinely experiences. Inglis’s book is not a defence of the ABC against those who would have it starved or privatised out of existence. Nor is it like ABC staffer Quentin Dempster’s Death Struggle: How Political Malice and Boardroom Powerplays are Killing the ABC (2000). It is a much larger project, a long view of a complex cultural institution, one that is intrinsically controversial because it deals with events and their interpretation, and riven with conflict internally because it is home to people whose creative blood runs hot and whose egos wax ferocious and wane fragile.

In an undertaking of this scale, Inglis is able to show how history repeats itself, with subtle variation; how political pressure on the ABC from ministers and prime ministers of the day, from both sides of politics, is inevitable. Some ministers, Michael Duffy as Labor minister for communications, for example, behave with more grace and integrity than others, and have a conception of the importance of the ABC’s statutory independence that is practical as well as theoretical. Indeed, if the second volume has any heroes (there is a multitude of anti-heroes), Duffy is paramount among them. His dealings with the ABC, and with those in his own party who would interfere with it, are exemplary. Inglis quotes one heated exchange between Duffy and Bill Hayden at the time when the Labor Party was accusing the ABC of a conspiracy against it. Hayden wanted ‘something done’ about the ABC. Duffy said that would involve changing the legislation guaranteeing its independence. 

When Hayden persisted, Duffy shouted: ‘Have you read the fucking Act?’ It was a pithy invocation of the ABC’s character as a statutory authority, by a minister whose temperament and convictions fitted him as well as any in its history to mediate between politicians and the national broadcaster. Only once did Michael Duffy ever try to influence program policy – in a jocular request to Geoffrey Whitehead [the then general manager] for more jazz.

The focus upon Duffy establishes a mark against which all of the political operators within and without the ABC are tacitly measured. Inglis is, as I have said, sparing in his judgments. But he does have a canny way of establishing perspectives that show actions in comparative light. Some ministers look shoddy in that light. Duffy never does. Given that, it is irritating that in the rush through to production, the book’s index should fail to differentiate Duffy, Michael, Labor minister, from Duffy, Michael, broadcaster of Counterpoint, the programme, begun in 2005, that was to be the right-wing counterbalance to Phillip Adams, but which, like so many things on the ABC, has escaped its niche and sur-prised its left-wing critics. There are other signs of too much speed in the editing process: infelicitous commas or lack of them, index references wrong etc. A book of this quality deserves better production. But that is a minor criticism of a laudable publishing venture. Without Black Inc., I doubt the earlier volume would have appeared in tandem with the new one, and as the books speak to one another, that would have been a considerable loss.

Where many writers and critics must focus upon the issues and crises of the moment, Inglis is able to look at the structural forces that have shaped the ABC. He notes that administrators and reviewers have been reluctant to tamper with the statutory nature of the ABC. Why? In answer, he quotes Australian social philosopher John Passmore’s reflection on our fondness for that particular constitutional form:

 Even when an organisation is largely, or totally, funded by governments, we do not always bring it under the direct control of the public service, we do not subject it to governmental intervention in its day-to-day activities … even governments distrust governments; if they do not mistrust themselves they mistrust their possible successor. By this indirect method of rule, governments both assuage the qualms of electors and diminish the power of subsequent regimes.

It is wonderfully Australian that such a cornucopia should have come out of the hard ground of suspicion. But if Inglis’s account of the battles fought for the statutory independence of the ABC give one hope, he tells many cautionary tales to remind one that independence can never be guaranteed.

Americans often tell me how much they admire and envy us the ABC (or the BBC), but when asked why it has never been replicated in the United States they say they could not endorse a major media body financed by government. I understand their misgivings now better than I did in 1990, when I interviewed a number of American enthusiasts for the Corporation. But it was clear then, as it is now, that they didn’t understand, or accept, the arm’s length nature of the Australian structure, or indeed of the British model. Even if they did, I suspect they would never trust it. America is a very different place, built on very different conceptions of the common good and how to achieve it.

Many of the highlights of the second volume, Whose ABC?, will be familiar even to occasional ABC audiences. Inglis goes backstage and rehearses the comings and goings of the ABC’s board chairs, general managers, programme heads and producers, presenters, reporters and correspondents. David Hill, Brian Johns, and Jonathan Shier have their terms as managing director minutely examined. Inevitably, these accounts all involve examination of the political influences, internal and external, that were brought to bear at the time. Not pretty. More edifying is the way Inglis shows an ABC gradually understanding and incorporating the richness and talent that women and Aboriginal Australians brought to the ABC.Inglis has interviewed many of his subjects. Some he seems to know personally, hence the spark of idiosyncratic detail. Geraldine Doogue’s convent schooling is noted. Sean Dorney, the ABC’s indispensable Pacific and PNG correspondent, is ‘a slight and delicate-looking young man with a sense of fun, a love of sport, and a deep commitment to his craft. At James Cook University in Townsville, he had stood for election to student office as Dawn Shorney.’ More weightily, Inglis tells us that Dorney has, during his career as a journalist, been expelled from PNG and welcomed back again with an MBE, reporting all the while with integrity and inside knowledge on every significant event in that region over the past few decades.

There is material enough here for playwrights, satirists and bards — and ironists. Senator Florence Bjelke-Petersen, in a conversation with an ABC executive, once called the ABC ‘the backbone of the nation’. The tenure of Donald McDonald, ABC board chair and close friend of Prime Minister John Howard is in itself a parable of unpredictability. He has been variously seen as a Coalition Trojan horse, a Machiavelli and a man ‘captured’ by the ABC culture. What his time at the ABC has demonstrated is that none of these epithets and slogans will serve. He has proved a staunch defender of the ABC – which leads one to reflect that none of the reductive phrases bandied about in the heat of political conflict serve much purpose, except to round the mouths and feed the rhetorical instincts of those who coin them.

Inglis, throughout both books, pays subtle tribute to the work of generations of journalists by remembering and marking what they achieved. He notes how Chris Masters’ career as an investigative reporter is an index of the high cost of such commitment. Masters has been pursued by defamation lawyers for years. Inglis notes, too, the support given to journalists such as Masters by Bruce Donald, as the ABC’s general manager for administrative and legal services. Donald was an enabler. One wonders what he thought of the ABC’s recent débâcle over Chris Masters’ book on Alan Jones. In more supportive days, legal advisers believed that their job was to enable as much information as possible to reach the public, not to protect the sensitivities of the institution or of the powerful.

The ABC is rich pickings for the social historian. As an organisation with such reach, so many tentacles looping through Australian society, into remote country and metropolises, it is the ideal subject for extended study. What else (not even cricket) takes an audience into parliament, pubs, down rivers, into our region north and beyond? And because this has been the endeavour of thirty years, all the cross hatching  is in place. Praise be slow writing! Inglis has used archives, interviews, books on the ABC, board records, minutes (for the first volume; not made available for the second), anecdotes, newspaper files and the great wealth of his own personal recollection. When he discusses John Cargher’s accent (which Cargher himself dislikes, just as he dislikes scratches on vinyl), you know he has heard it hundreds of times. When he pays tribute to the ABC’s millennial celebration, ‘One Thousand Years in a Day’, his enthusiasm is fresh minted. His excitement at the quality of that production, got together on a shoestring and talent, is the reaction of an historian hearing high wire work in his own discipline.

For all the enthusiasm, there is a steeliness in Inglis’s history of the ABC. He was surprised that Sir Charles Moses should have expected him to be the great man’s amanuensis, not the stringent historian of an institution. (It was Dr Earle Hackett, not Moses, who, as acting chairman in 1976, asked Inglis to write the first volume.)

The steeliness shows throughout, more in the ordering and juxtaposing of events than in overt judgment. His analysis of the trials of This Day Tonight (attempts to censor, suppress) sits tellingly alongside his analysis of the fracas over ABC’s television coverage of the first Gulf War. Plus ça change. In the latter case, he examines both the coverage, the propriety of the use of academic Robert Springborg, the furious response of the Hawke government and the review procedures that looked at allegations of bias. Make up your own mind? Inglis provides more than the necessary material for you to do so.

Often he works by indirection, and will quote a journalist, or a commentator, rather than make a judgment himself. I found this initially disconcerting, particularly when the other party was writing or speaking about ABC people I know (or to whom I am related). But the tactic is effective overall, because it admits a range of views, a perspective from the outer as well as the members’ stand. Someone else’s ABC, not mine. Or ours, perhaps, whether we like it or not.

These two volumes, like Ken Inglis’s other celebrated work, Sacred Places (1998), are triumphs of scholarship and social history. They are also compellingly readable. For what more could one ask?