The 1960s down under: Television, documentary and the ‘new nationalism’

Abstract

This article considers some documentary programs produced by the Commonwealth Film Unit and ABC Television and broadcast during the 1960s – a period often held to be the nadir of Australian filmmaking. It explores how such documentaries were shaped institutionally and notes the local impact of international shifts in the aesthetic and technical practices of documentary filmmaking such as cinéma-vérité. It also speculates on the relationship of this documentary production to the development in that decade of the ‘new nationalism’ and aims to contribute to a wider reassessment of cultural change in the last decade of what Manning Clark has dubbed ‘the years of unleavened bread’.