Book Award & Media Award

Creator: Jeannine Baker

Project title: The Women Who Made Australian Television

Online information: https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/women-who-made-australian-television-1-beginnings-television

Brief Description: The Women Who Made Australian Television is a series of five online multimedia articles researched and written by Jeannine Baker, hosted by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA).

Judges’ comments

This five-part multimedia series is a deeply engaging, accessible and immersive introduction to women’s experiences of working in early Australian television production. Each article highlights a different theme of women’s work in television. Baker uses both audio interviews and video oral histories to illuminate the experiences of several women who worked in the industry. The series features extracts from interviews conducted by different interviewers, including Baker, recorded at various points across the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. The oral histories offer rich personal insights into the opportunities, joys, demands, and barriers that interviewees encountered while working in the industry, and explain some of the technical aspects of the creation of early television in Australia.

The oral histories are contextualised within an impressive array of other evocative sources including archival footage of old television programs, photographs, and letters. The series also increases awareness of the NFSA’s oral history collection, as the project involved digitalising analogue audio interviews (which are showcased in the series) and providing the NFSA with accompanying transcripts for future research.