Why every ABC office in Australia uses PO Box 9994
Write to Australia's public broadcaster in any state capital and the address is the same: PO Box 9994. The digits echo the record-breaking Test batting average of the cricketer Don Bradman. It is a fitting quirk for an institution that Australians, borrowing from Britain, fondly call Aunty.
The Australian Broadcasting Commission was created on 1 July 1932, after it became politically awkward to leave the Postmaster-General in charge of the government's radio service. It absorbed the private Australian Broadcasting Company and modelled itself closely on the BBC, buying in most of its imported programmes from London and inheriting the BBC's affectionate nickname. At first a licence fee paid for it, but the Chifley government decided that was inefficient for a small population spread across a vast continent, and from 1949 taxpayers funded it directly.
Television came in 1956, when Prime Minister Robert Menzies opened ABN-2 in Sydney on 5 November, with James Dibble reading the first news bulletin. Because relay links did not arrive until the early 1960s, each capital prepared and read its own bulletins from reports sent by teleprinter. In 1975 the ABC launched 2JJ, a round-the-clock rock station in Sydney that grew into the national youth network Triple J, and a year later a classical FM network broadcasting from Adelaide, its name a pun on both fine music and the frequency band.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act of 1983 renamed the organisation and guaranteed its editorial independence despite government funding and ownership. Budgets were squeezed repeatedly between 1976 and 1998, with the deepest cuts, reckoned by the ABC at a quarter in real terms, falling between 1985 and 1996. Dick Boyer, chairman from 1945 to 1961, fought to keep the broadcaster autonomous and founded the Boyer Lectures in 1959.
Today the ABC runs five free-to-air television channels, more than fifty local radio stations reaching regional and city audiences, the streaming service iview launched in 2008, and a 24-hour news channel that began in 2010. Its news division is rated the most trusted in the country, and it also carries emergency information during disasters.
Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
