Veterans of Tasmania’s media industry have gathered in Hobart to mark 65 years since Tasmania’s first television broadcast.
The reunion celebrated the journey of TVT6, which began broadcasting on 23 May 1960, through its various names as TasTV and now WIN Television.
The station started with a test pattern at 7:00pm on its opening Monday night in 1960, followed by an official opening by then Tasmanian governor Lord Rowallan at 7:30pm and a news bulletin read by news editor Gordon Leed.
The first transmissions, broadcast from the station’s original home on New Town Road, were viewed by thousands around Hobart, including large groups of people watching through screens placed in shop windows.
Tom Payne, who read the news for almost 30 years after joining the station in 1971, attended Saturday night’s 65th anniversary – the first time he has joined a reunion of former staff.
Speaking to Pulse, he reflected on the transformation of Tasmania’s television landscape from a bustling local operation to today’s mainland-controlled feeds.
“Back then it was the nerve centre of Hobart,” Payne said. “On an average day, [there was] probably a hundred people worked in the building. Today there is nearly no station to speak of.”
The former newsreader recalled his unexpected start in television, effectively being put straight on the news desk after a quick call.
“I was working on radio and I thought, I can do more than this, so I phoned the station manager and said, have you got a job? He said, well, funny you should say that.”
He described how the industry evolved from showing day-old news footage flown in from the mainland to footage sent down microwave links hopping across the Bass Strait islands in real-time, before satellite and fibre optic feeds eventually transformed broadcasting.
“When I first started, we used to get a plane that transported news from the mainland and we’d show it the next day,” Payne said.
“When there was a line directly from Melbourne or Sydney, we could suddenly show today’s news today, which people weren’t used to.”
Payne reflected on his celebrity status during television’s golden era.
“I could walk down the street and people would say hello and the kids would say to me, do you know him? I’d say no. Oh, well why did you talk to him? Well, because he said hello to me,” he told Pulse.
“I still get a lot of recognition from the older people in the society. Younger people, of course, don’t give a damn, nor should they.”
Tony Fox, who started his career as the well known TV character Rupert Rabbit, helped lead TasTV through its creative heyday in the 1980’s.
“I had a part-time job playing the character of Rupert Rabbit for three years before I actually ended up on air with my own show, Take Six,” Fox said.
“I developed a couple of programs after that, Tracks on a Saturday morning, a music program, and then came off air in ’84 and developed two really good programs … KTV and Good Sports.”
“By law, each station had to play one hour a day between four and five, Monday to Friday, of C [Children’s] Classified material,” he explained. “Very quickly, I thought, well, we’re in a great position.”
“Myself and the program manager caught the plane to Melbourne, got in the car and drove to stations in every region of Australia between Melbourne and North Queensland with the program as a pilot, and sold them.”
His programmes aired on the Nine Network, 23 regional Australian stations and on various stations in eight countries including Belgium, Israel and Malaysia.
He said TasTV was Tasmania’s gateway to the world in the 1980’s, which saw the station’s premises on New Town Road remain a constant hive of activity.
“It was magnificent because we had a women’s program two days a week. We had a Sunday sport program. We had news seven nights a week,” he told Pulse.
“We had a cooking program. We had my music program on Saturday morning. We had KTV”
“We had a documentary series with Taylor’s Tasmania that would go right throughout the year, and Saturday morning Confusion with Bob Cooke and Richard Moore.”
“It was full-on production, seven days a week, and everybody was involved, which was great.”
The era of local production began to fade with the introduction of federally-enforced aggregation in 1994.
Aggregation saw Tasmania’s two commercial TV broadcasters, TVT6 in the south and TNT9 in the north, each assume statewide coverage in their own right.
The change eventually saw the two local stations turn into extensions of the 7 and 9 mainland networks.
Today, WIN News on TVT6/WIN TV and 7 Tasmania News on TNT9/7 Tasmania remain the only shows produced locally by the stations.
Saturday’s reunion was delayed from the station’s 60th anniversary due to COVID-19.
