Abstract
'Mum likes Bandstand too': Creating the teenage audience: Youth culture and early Australian television
The arrival of television in Australia in late 1956 neatly coincided with a seminal event in the history of Australian rock 'n' roll: the local release of the film The Blackboard Jungle, which introduced Bill Haley and the Comets' 'Rock Around the Clock' to Australian teenagers. The popularity of both television and rock 'n' roll was viewed as a sign of Australia's increasing prosperity and the embrace of consumerism, especially the new spending power of youth: but both were also seen as evidence of excessive Americanisation and potential family fragmentation, because they offered access to representations of sex and race (music) and violence (television). Teenagers too, were objects of anxiety in the 1950s, and several historians have documented the discourses of moral panic that circulated around teenagers - especially Bodgies and Widgies - in this period. 'Bad' (ie. Bodgie, working class) teenagers were often set against 'good', (ie. upstanding, middle class) teenagers in popular representations of adolescence.
The image of the teenager as an agent of disorder coexisted with that of the teenager as consumer, and it was this teenager - buying teenage clothing, reading specially created supplements for teenagers in women's magazines, and listening to music via transistor radios and record players - whom television networks sought to cultivate as a distinctive audience. This paper will explore the ways that television networks shaped and catered to a teenage audience in the early years of Australian television through examining early teenage music programs like Six O'Clock Rock and Bandstand, with a particular focus on audience responses through letters to television magazines. The paper will argue that television facilitated the 'mainstreaming' of the well-behaved, consumerist Australian teenager, fostering the dissemination of a widespread youth culture in the process.
Michelle Arrow
Macquarie University