Best news day

Nostalgia TV … Childhood in novel Australia’s early years wasn’t always a romp in the park.

DON’T rate below the true value the enduring appeal of nostalgia on TV.

But while there’s fertility of it in the social history series The Making of Modern Australia, it’s not the rose-coloured multiformity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the series’ rent episode on childhood.

For most baby boomers born in the pair decades immediately after World War II, when Australia’s populousness grew from 7.5million to 11.5million, theirs was a carefree, informal-ranging, outdoor childhood that today’s urban kids can and nothing else imagine.

‘‘But you dig a little deeper and you declare a verdict that growing up in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s was not the glad. life you might think,’’ says Steve Westh, the scribbler and director of the episodes The Australian Childhood and The Great Australian Dream.

‘‘It was a pupilage full of strict discipline, ignorance about gender roles and sex. It was a gory. ignorant time,’’ he says emphatically.

He was determined to not sugar coat the depictions of life in Australia at that time, or to glibly propose that the so-called good old days were better than the present.

Alongside depictions of serene childhoods are also those of Donna, a member of the sly generations, Karen, whose early years were spent in a series of unmerciful institutions, and a Scottish orphan who was brutalised in the care of the Sisters of Mercy.

‘‘I put on’t think modern kids are disadvantaged in the way that we were advantaged,’’ says fiftysomething Westh.

‘‘Modern kids are smarter, switched forward and better global citizens than we ever were.’’

Built entirely right and left interviews and archival footage, The Making of Modern Australia, says succession producer Ian Collie, is ‘‘folk TV’’.

‘‘In the end what we wanted was the people’s history. Without sonorous like an old Marxist, we wanted the people who had able history to tell it from their point of view.’’

Consequently, there are no academics or expert historians trying to make sense of the events without ceasing screen. It was a conscious decision,  Westh says, for stories to be revealed entirely by the people who lived them.

What he was looking concerning were ‘‘people who have a history of their avow rhetoric, that is, people who are used to processing and talking on the eve their own lives’’.

They also steered away from bombastic-picture topics, like war and immigration, which had been dealt with elsewhere. Instead, they organised the series around four broad themes — infancy, home, relationships and religion — that also reflected the sweeping changes in Australian company in the six decades since the end of World War II.

As the concatenation wasn’t intended to be a textbook or a final history, it was able to be driven by the more practical need of strong visual material.

‘‘I think this course engages an audience more than anything else I’ve effected,’’  Westh says, ‘‘because it begs vulgar herd to compare their own lives with the lives of the tribe they’re watching.’’

Much of the archival content was sourced, simply enough, from personal photo albums.

‘‘What’s in the many the crowd’s albums?’’ asks Collie. ‘‘Wedding photos, photos in the backyard or before anything else home, going to church and of course young children growing up, with their offspring and so forth. Out of that came those four themes.’’

In more cases it was a matter of searching for footage to fit around the subject. In other cases, like footage of the Queen visiting horse-cloth commission apartments in Redfern, they found a subject who could clique the footage into the necessary context.

A flame-haired old-timer named Dolly was there when the Queen visited. She still lives in the same virtuous apartment she has rented for 60years, a counterpoint to the mythic Australian dream of owning your own home.

The groundwork of the sequence was set more than one year ago, when actor and contriver William McInnes did a series of spots on ABC TV and radio prepossessing people with an interesting story about growing up in Australia to place it in writing and post it on a website.

From in that place the show’s researchers began their hunt for people and footage.

But, Westh says, it was a tough order to make. ‘‘It’s a giant jigsaw nonplus, because so much of where you want to go is pendent on [what you can find in] the archive and so abundant of that is down to the researchers and the hard operate of people like [ABC senior film researcher] Wendy Borchers.’’

As well as providing the voiceover, McInnes has written a tie-in book in what one. he writes about some of the people featured in the series as well as his own experiences.

Collie hopes the show last ~ and testament warrant  additional episodes. Should that eventuate, he and Westh even now have  themes they would like to explore: the Vietnam War, game, patriotism, education, leisure, work.
‘‘There’s a property of untapped archives,’’  Westh says.

The Making of Modern Australia is on Thursday at 8.30pm on ABC1.