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Clip description
Robert Moore introduces the two guests and the very partisan audience for this debate about whether Australia should take sides in the future of Rhodesia. The first question is to Senator Sheil about whether sanctions are a good idea. He offers himself as an expert on that country after a flying visit of one week as the invited guest of the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Mr Ian Smith.
Curator’s notes
By the end of its first year, Monday Conference had settled into its trademark style, shown here, with Bob Moore chairing a debate between experts who are grilled by an audience of interested parties from either side. Here we see Bob Moore expertly setting up the debate and drawing out Senator Sheil’s position, without himself taking a stance. He rarely interrupts, allowing the speaker to go on at some length, which clearly exposes his position. Bishop Lamont seems clearly engaged and involved in the debate, but he too is happy to let Sheil expose himself.
In this clip, Moore is the perfect chair: calm, alert, quick to open up the important issues. This program, like many other Monday Conferences at that time, was taken out of the studio and into the community. This is a very effective technique, heightening the drama of the exchanges as the audience’s reactions punctuate what is happening on the stage.
Over the years, until his untimely death of a heart attack just before the taping of a new series of interviews called Faces in the ’80s (1979), Bob Moore chaired many a heated debate in his polite and gently firm manner. These included a discussion about homosexuality in Mt Isa and another about the death penalty in Queensland, in which one of the guests was the larger than life Russ Hinze, a Minister in the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen Country Party Government of the day.
