The Blainey View (1982 - 1982)
Mixed type series
10 episodes x 30 minutes
Series synopsis:
Professor Geoffrey Blainey presents his view of Australia, past and present. He looks at the major influential events including the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression, as well as the lifestyle changes that have given us increased leisure time, which we now have to learn to use more effectively.
Curator’s Notes:
Professor Blainey has had a distinguished career as an academic and a prolific writer of academic papers, newspaper articles and books. Probably his best-known writings are Tyranny of Distance (1966), Triumph of the Nomads ( 1975) and British Twilight (1987). Like fellow historian Manning Clarke, Professor Blainey has never been afraid to present the story of Australia’s past in a thought provoking and often controversial way.
The ABC has had a long tradition of inviting leading Australians to develop their political, historic or scientific ideas into a series of essays, which are then translated into television scripts. In this case, Professor Blainey collaborated with Chris Masters, then working as a reporter for The Big Country unit of the Rural Department. The strength of this approach to documentary making is the popularisation of an 'expert’s’ ideas to a wide new audience who may never read any of their original works. The negative can be the lack of presentation skills of the 'expert’ and a sense that the visuals are being used simply to illustrate the words with no real fusion between them.
Titles in this series
The Blainey View – Footprints 1982
Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey takes us from the southernmost reaches of Tasmania to the edge of the continent in the Northern Territory to tell the extraordinary history of the first humans to live in Australia, from their earliest footprint on ...
