When we look at pictures: Travel television and the intimacy of companion memory

Journeys and memories

At a recent panel discussion marking a new issue of the literary journal McSweeney’s – an issue that contained a ‘suite’ of ‘Australian Aboriginal fiction’ – one of the contributors, Melissa Lucashenko, a distinguished Indigenous novelist and essayist, urged the audience to remember that ‘mainstream Australia’ is the product of a ‘convict culture’. Lucashenko had, reportedly, made a similar comment the previous week at a Writer’s Festival event in Brisbane, a comment that was said to have generated some controversy. Why such a comment might be regarded as controversial (presumably by non-Indigenous people) is worth considering. In some respects, it is a relatively unremarkable comment. It is historically accurate to say that the colonisation of Australia began in 1788 with the establishment of the convict settlement at Sydney Cove. Over the next 80 years, before the final transport of convicts arrived in Western Australia, more than 165,000 felons served sentences in Australia as a result of convictions for crimes committed in British jurisdictions. However, it is also a particularly partial account. Transportation to Queensland, where Lucashenko hails from, was of little significance. In Victoria, where I heard the claim, two small and early convict outposts in the district were soon abandoned and the 1000-odd convicts held there in the late 1840s were soon overwhelmed by the many hundreds of thousands who arrived as part of the gold rushes over the next decade. In other words, if she is fully committed to recalling founding fundamentals, Lucashenko might have been better off talking about the enduring significance of links between civility and penal servitude in Tasmania, between the corrupt machismo of the Rum Corp and a culture of corrupt property development in Sydney, and between manufacturing capitalism and working- class organising in Melbourne.

In some senses, these suggestions about historical inaccuracy are entirely beside the point because Lucashenko’s injunction to remember ‘convict culture’ is much less about historical veracity than it is a mobilisation of memory. To explain this, we need to take a brief historical tour of recent indigenous politics. If there is one claim that adequately names Australian Indigenous politics of the second half of the twentieth century, it is, ‘We Have Survived’. This declaration – both mundane and profound – is echoed and reiterated in many of the great artworks of remote Australia, in slogans, in access and equity programmes, in land rights claims and deals with mining companies. From mid-twentieth century, indigenous people were struggling for political recognition and inclusion that had been denied to them both as ordinary citizens and as members of a distinctive grouping within the national polity. More recently, Lucashenko – along with many indigenous writers, intellectuals, artists, activists and bureaucrats – has been shaping the next moment of indigenous politics, more than survival, more than recognition, more than done and dusted with an apology and more than just another story to be added to a narrative compendium of Australian history. In seeing what kind of a reaction she gets from ‘convict culture’, Lucashenko is, in the first instance, ‘reversing the negatives’ (Maynard, 2000). Once upon a time, it was common for non-indigenous people to recognise this or that group of ‘aborigines’ as real at the same time as they would judge the vast majority of indigenous people as deracinated: as actually uprooted to the extent that they were no longer ‘real aborigines’. Lucashenko inverts this still-common insult in the following manner: we (indigenous people) are in place but remember that you (non-indigenous people), you sons and daughters of thieves, are rootless and detached from your place of origin so that all you have carried with you are fragments of a debased, lumpenproletariat culture. In other words, Lucashenko is remembering the consequences of colonisation for the colonisers and at the same time, speaking about colonisation as if she (and her people) had not been colonised.

This anecdote immediately highlights some predicaments of remembering, location and space; of transcultural memory and of mobility and intimacy, all of which were key concerns of the ‘Memory Up Close’ Symposium. That meeting was organised around a question ‘whether memory studies approaches and perspectives developed in one nation or location could, or should be imported into research on another?’ and a consideration of ‘theories of memory’s global travels’. It aimed to explore further some of the questions raised in Susannah Radstone’s (2011) important essay ‘What place is this? Transcultural memory and the locations of Memory Studies’, in which ‘memory’s “travels” back home’ are narrated as a ‘journey through memories’ (p. 120). Melissa Lucashenko’s small act of historical recollection implicitly claims that to speak of remembering in or from Australia necessarily involves Australia’s First Peoples. This simple but fundamental recognition – that indigenous people and hence indigenous remembering was already in place before colonisation – has only assumed the status of a ‘public truth’ (Crenzel, 2011) since the judicial recognition of Native Title rights to land in the Mabo decision of 1992. One of the things that Mabo, and Lucashenko, radically undermine is the forgetfulness of twentieth-century Australian nationalism. After Mabo, many White Australian’s have had to recall something that was a commonplace in the nineteenth century: that (what was to become or was becoming) Australia was created by travel in the form of the transcultural processes of settler colonialism.

To put the matter another way, I think that Melissa Lucashenko is calling to mind two different forces. The first is that very old notion of continuity evoked by another slogan, ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land’. The second is much more about remembering in the present that Australia’s ‘scenes of memory’ (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2010: 404) have been made and re-made by the settler colonial travelling that has brought diverse flows of people, products, ideas and much else besides that to and across the continent. In this article, I take a specific kind of travel as my focus. This is not the travelling of ‘discoverers’ or of the first colonisers but the much more ordinary travelling, which is undertaken as a way of occupying country, of settling, of belonging, of feeling part of place on television. I want to suggest that ‘travel television’, a genre of series-based Australian television programming in which a host/narrator takes the viewer on a journey of discovery, is one of the key ways in which settler colonialism is perpetuated and forgotten. In the second half of the twentieth century, travel television was central to the production of an image-saturated popular pedagogy that connected television viewers to national and local places. It was organised around both participatory and mimetic travel and much of it aimed to inspire and train people to undertake their own journeys, producing new kinds of relations between routes, screens, car ownership, indigeneity, maps, petrol stations, tourism, self-formation and national identification. I begin by arguing that this kind of television is an example of a hybrid or non-human form of remembering that I call companion memory. I consider two examples: the first from the very beginnings of this form in the 1950s series, Australian Walkabout (Chauvel, 1958) and a recent series on Australian indigenous art, Art + Soul (Thornton, 2011), which both uses the tropes of (white) travelling television and turns them upside down. I conclude by considering how memory and travel might help us think about the kinds of intimacy and proximity implied by the notion of ‘memory up close’.

Television and companion memory

There are many reasons why television might seem an odd or perhaps inappropriate form to choose to investigate issues of location and memory. In the first place, over the last three decades, many humanities scholars have condemned television – along with Coke, McDonalds and Apple – as being a stand in for the forces of homogenisation and banality of contemporary commodity culture. For David Harvey, television was one of the key means by which post-modernity’s ‘time-space compression’ had been enacted. Television produces a world of ‘disruptive spatiality’ in which ‘divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen’ (Harvey, 1990: 302). For Fredric Jameson (1991), not only is television (like other ‘post-modern media’) without historical consciousness, but ‘memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise … nothing haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film’ (pp. 70–71). Although as of February last year, he – along with that impossibly large number of people who never watch television except for quality Home Box Office (HBO) series – seems to have decided that there are exceptions: ‘Nobody has to apologize for studying The Wire’ (Jameson, 2012).

I do not mention these eminent scholars in order to perpetuate what is, in relation to television, criticism largely uninformed by studies of television but to make the point that, happily, more recent scholarship has recast these dismissive characterisations. This work has rescued both a richer historical understanding of television and a sense of television’s located-ness. Charlotte Brunsdon (2004), for example, has argued strongly that ‘While there is a way in which the banality and ubiquity of television are metaphorically suggestive in relation to the postmodern, the unacknowledged casualty of this metaphor is television’s historicity’ (p. 128). Brunsdon has been one of a number of scholars, including Lynn Spigel (1992, 2001), Jason Jacobs (2000), Derek Kompare (2005) and others who have produced persuasive accounts of television’s historicity in terms of production, formal and generic conventions and shifting cultural significance. We could say that, alongside television’s own ordinary iterations of its past (in the form of re-runs) and elegiac account of its history (in the forms of anniversary ‘specials’), historians have begun to delineate ‘what television was like before it became postmodern’ (Brunsdon, 2004: 129). A related account can be made in relation to the more recent scholarship around place. For example, in their recent book, Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, Anna Pertierra and Graeme Turner (2013) provide considerable evidence that television continues to be shaped both by transnational flows of people, programming and production and by national conditions. For them, rather than simply a homogenised and homogenising form, television consists of a variable ‘diversity of experience’ determined by the multiple zones in which television can be consumed. Similarly, in her recent, monograph-length consideration of television and memory, Amy Holdsworth (2011) begins by gently refusing to indict television on the common charge that ‘twentieth century technologies of representation and narration (most significantly, television) have increasingly collapsed the temporal distance between present, past, and future that structured our previously conceived notion of the temporal dimensions of what we call history’ (Sobchack, 1996: 4). She goes on to demonstrate in detail that

[c]ontrary to the notion of television as an amnesiac and moving on from the privileging of the news and media events in discussion of television memory, here, television is understood as part of both a material network of memory and a system of everyday memory-making within and in relation to the home and the family. (Holdsworth, 2011: 3)

Holdsworth’s is a valuable book not only because it is the first monograph that I know of to bring together television and memory studies but perhaps more so because the discussions and spirit of the book are always trying to open up possible lines of thought rather than lock in definitive interpretations. However, despite the strengths of the analysis, more often than not, Holdsworth’s concerns are with the formal characteristics of television programmes and programming. It is unsurprising then that her argument in relation to memory is that nostalgia is central to television. Holdsworth makes this case by considering deeply nostalgic British programmes; forms of repetition in television drama; patterns of remembering and forgetting in the British documentary format, Who Do You Think You Are? (2004); television’s memorialisation of itself in examples drawn from Doctor Who (1963–1989, 2005) and Life on Mars (2006–2007) and rerun television more broadly and the archiving and exhibition of television history at the UK National Media Museum. A provocative and challenging discussion of related issues can be found in Bill Schwarz’s (2004) essay ‘Media times/historical times’, which argues that the question ‘is less how one might situate the internal histories of … media forms than how one might conceptualize the history of the wider society after radio, cinema and television’ (p. 93). Holdsworth’s account is not a narrowly internal history of television, but it is an exploration of how memory operates inside television’s systems of scripting, shooting, programming, structuring and archiving. Hence, its focus is on television’s epistemological relationship to historical consciousness in contrast to Schwarz’s question, which directs us toward the ontology of television, what might the mnemonic experience of television be like or, even more grandly, what might being-in-historical-time be like after remembering with television?

There is no one way of approaching these questions, but I think that a fruitful starting point, and one deeply interested in the experiences of subjectivity, can draw from an analogous argument made by Alison Landsberg (2004) in her important book, Prosthetic Memory. Landsberg begins her Epilogue with a problem posed by her colleague, the late American historian Roy Rosenzweig. He was concerned that, although ‘popular history making’ is alive and well, ‘the particular ways in which many Americans remember the past has an atomising effect’ (Landsberg, 2004: 142). The problem for Rosenzweig was such that ‘private memory can be an obstacle to collective politics’ (Landsberg, 2004: 143). It is an anxiety that can be found throughout the literature on memory: that modernity, capitalism, commodity culture and modern technologies of communication have eviscerated collective memory. Landsberg (2004) confronts this paradigm head-on by arguing,

Prosthetic memories, memories made possible by commodification and the technologies of mass culture, enable people to feel … an engaged and experiential relationship to the past … Prosthetic memories are indeed ‘personal’ memories because they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with technologies of memory. (p. 143)

For me, Landsberg’s argument is persuasive. However, it cannot be applied directly to television because television, as a form of media, lacks precisely the cathartic intimacy and emotional intensity necessary for the production of prosthetic memories. We need another term to think about precisely how memories are ‘invoked and used’, both on and with television. The term I propose is ‘companion memory’.

So what is companion memory? My use of this term departs significantly from contemporary traditions (if it is not too soon to speak in such terms) of work on memory and television. Much scholarly work on contemporary media and memory has developed around an interest in specifying the extent to which, how and with what consequences media create ‘new’ memories. Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory is itself a version of this in that prosthetic memories are actual memories produced by powerful experiences of representations. Another example would be Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s (2005) thoughtful and subtle account of the media and the production of memory through a rich range of case studies. Moving in an almost antithetical direction is scholarship concerned not with the creation of memories but the ways in which contemporary media is replacing, outsourcing and/or destroying memories. Andreas Huyssen’s (1995) canonical formation of this perspective is regularly reproduced in concerns about ‘Television and the Collapse of Memory’ (Hoskins, 2004). What both these traditions share is a focus on the creation or destruction of actual memories. The notion of companion memory is agnostic about actual memories but is deeply interested in the processes through which remembering (and forgetting) takes place. Its focus is on the dynamics of remembering made possible by the socio-technical assemblage that is television: a distinctive form of remembering that enables people to feel a co-present relationship between themselves, television and being-in-history. Thus, companion memory directs us toward television as an everyday and ordinary actor that brings places, experiences, individuals, events, sounds and images, emotions and collectives (of many different scales) into relationship with each other. At the same time, company memory calls for a focus on the processes of remembering in which television and television viewers collaborate, memorially, in particular historical circumstances.

Elsewhere (Healy, 2012), I have explored how television as companion memory can be a useful way of considering how television remembers itself and, in the process, makes claims as to its own significance as a ‘symbolic, autobiographical and generational reference’ (O’Sullivan, 1998: 202). I suggested that television’s ‘self-memorialisation’ celebrates television as a technology of witness and presence, and claims that television was and will be there, whenever history is made. However, such self-memorialisation also claims, much more powerfully, that television is co-present with us not only at historical moments in our experience of being in history, it is our companion in the work of remembering.

Thus, for anyone who has grown up with television, companion memory is imagined as stretching back to time immemorial; it is repeated as flow and replayed as archive, and it anticipates a future in which television will always be there. Television as a companion to cultural memory does not mean that television remembers for us, or that television produces a prosthetic memory, but rather that it produces a series of articulations between the viewer and television:

Television was there;

You were there, I was there;

Television was there with us;

We can still be there and here with television.

Here, I want to consider travelling television in Australia as producing a particular experience of companion memory that connects such wildly different things as maps, crocodiles, roads, deserts, cars and uranium mines.

Australian Walkabout: remembering, repetition and television

With television still in our sitting rooms on 21 inch screens, and the necessary squeezing tight of action and dialogue, the motion picture has been given another great opportunity to move to the outdoors for God-made settings – so grand one moment as to almost frighten by size and splendid opulence, or so dramatically simple the next with a far-flung landscape which is so silent that just one world of dialogue can come to the ear charged with the fullest expression of meaning or emotion. In Australia we can play our cameras upon an immense stage frighteningly powerful in simplicity and beautiful in colour. (Chauvel, 1959: 20)

In recent scholarly work, travelling television usually refers to television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are or any number of lifestyle formats that as franchises are both strongly globalising/homogenising and, as specifically local productions, are reasserting the specific and the national in shifting television landscapes (see, for example, Holdsworth (2011: 88–93) or Moran (2009)). The travelling television with which I am concerned here is of a different kind; it is programming being structured around journeys. The journeying will often be made through televisual spaces that are produced for the viewer as we follow a narrator or a guide who is actually travelling to remote Australian locations. These spaces may be known or novel, and they may evince non-human or human wonders and characters. The spaces may be indigenous and/or non-indigenous, and they may be of historic, agricultural, industrial, spectacular, narrative or merely passing interest. The first example of this genre on Australian television was Australian Walkabout, a BBC production made by Charles and Elsa Chauvel, screened in the United Kingdom by the BBC and in Australia by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1958–1959. Produced over 3 years, the 13-part series followed the journey made by the Chauvels from Sydney to Broken Hill, on to Port Augusta, and through Central Australia to Darwin and back again by car, horse and train.

In some respects, this kind of travelling television is memorial from the beginning in that it recalls its immediate literary precursors – works such as William Hatfield’s (1936) Australia through the Windscreen and Ernestine Hill’s (1937), The Great Australian Loneliness. And like this popular literature, Australian Walkabout was not a simple remembering or reiteration of colonial ‘exploration’. As Margriet Bonnin (1980) has argued in relation to Ernestine Hill, the Chauvels were trying to foster ‘a new civilization based on modern technology’ (p. 392), that is, they were both touristic and imperial. Therefore, rather than regard travel television as re-enacting an original (literary) form of exploration, we might consider it as modernising Australian space as it makes it available for new kinds of consumption by media literate consuming/travelling viewers who might re-occupy country in new ways. There are clearly some similarities between viewers of Australian Walkabout and new forms of tourism and travel that were emerging globally at this same time (see Davin, 2005). Both are forms of mass culture: those who watch travel television and those who travel ‘go places’ – in one case virtually, in the other, literally. Both are invested in ‘seeing’, and being in, place as ways of knowing, and both derive pleasure from the experience of occupying place and experiencing it emotionally. Both watching television and travelling promise leisure and a temporary escape from everyday life (though of course such escapes tend to be rapidly incorporated into the rhythms of the everyday). However, Australian Walkabout, as the first example of the genre of travel television, does not simply reframe the travel narrative tradition using the medium of television for a new kind of lounge room–bound audience. Rather, it produces and distributes travel and television on the same cultural plane, as populist and participatory modes of recreation. Australian Walkabout is, in this sense, very different from the newsreel, theatre-exhibited shots of cars racing across the outback in the Redex Motor Car trials of the early 1950s. In Georgina Clarsen’s (2010) account of these films, ‘[c]ars were represented as steel capsules, technological prostheses for attacking expanses of territory, often called “horror stretches” or “calamity trails”, notorious for their resistance to travel’ (p. 361). In Australian Walkabout, the Chauvels are both leaving their home (as they depart from Sydney) and home-making all along their route. This is largely Elsa’s work, and it establishes a strong relationship between the remote home on the screen being consumed in a domestic environment. In David Carter’s (1998) analysis of similar television, such programmes make a ‘wide brown land’ appear for viewers as miniaturised, domesticated and knowable on television. The contrast seems clear when the ‘real places’ are massive, natural/wild and mysterious. Perhaps for both the Chauvels and for viewers of Australian Walkabout, such oppositions were not so fixed. We know that Charles Chauvel made both domesticated television and majestic cinema. We know, from the quote at the beginning of this section, that he thought of cameras, television and the Australian landscape as offering exciting possibilities, not depressing constraints. The cameras that ‘accompanied’ them enabled the Chauvels to make television in which viewers became their companions on a journey that was remembered for all in broadcast episodes.

Art + Soul: intimacy, dwelling and travelling

Travel television, like television itself, diversified considerably between 1950s and the early twenty-first century. It is probably more accurate to say that in Australia where there was once, plausibly, one genre of travel television produced for a national broadcast audience, today there are a number of more specialised forms of television in which travel is central across national and transnational, broadcast and niche television. There are programmes organised around celebrity and holiday travel, some focused more exclusively on wildlife, or fishing or four-wheel drive vehicles, and others focused on environmental change, food or wine. There are even comedy programmes that satirise travel television by drawing on popular memory of older forms of travelling television. While, in some respects, this makes travel television a category primarily of historical significance and while some contemporary travel television is little more than advertorials, I think that some contemporary travel programmes actually locate themselves within a tradition of television that, as one of its major roles, aims to move people around and to teach them about unfamiliar and special places, people and things. One such programme is Art + Soul (Thornton, 2011) written by Hetti Perkins, and directed by Warwick Thornton, the writer/director of Samson and Delilah ((2009), which won the Caméra d’Or (‘Gold Camera Award’ for best first feature film) at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Thornton is one of the most creative, energetic and prolific film-makers working in Australia. When the programme was produced, Perkins was already a long-time, institutionally powerful curator of indigenous art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (NSW) with a string of major and significant exhibitions to her credit. This programme consolidated her place not only as an eminent curator but also as a charismatic, authoritative and popular commentator on indigenous art.

The preview for the show (most of which is drawn from subsequent episodes) is a snappy montage that begins with Perkins fuelling up the Toyota and filling up a jerry can, ‘Just in case’. It cuts to an aerial shot of the Toyota heading down a long, straight dirt road in the desert as the theme music of the series quietly kicks in. Perkins begins the voiceover as we see her greeting and shaking hands with a series of indigenous people, who we later learn are all artists:

My work as an art curator has given me the incredible privilege of meeting some amazing people and visiting some places that most Australians don’t even know exist … Many of our artists lived lives as young men and women completely separated from the rest of Australia …

So, come with me on a journey into the world of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture … We’re going somewhere very special. (Thornton, 2011)

The journey that we, as viewers, undertake is not linear in the sense of following a journey from start to finish but one that jumps around, Tardis-style, from Sydney, to extremely remote Gija country, from Brisbane to New York, from the State Library of New South Wales to an art co-operative in the Western Desert. And, from the beginning, actual travel is central to the series. Even in the trailer, after Perkins heads off west from Alice Springs, we see another half dozen shots of cars, a number of aerial shots and two shots of helicopters. All this travel is so that the viewer can be brought to Aboriginal art and join in a journey with Hetti Perkins into another world.

Art + Soul is, in part, hooking viewers into a commodified and globalised world of art practice and consumption, at the same time as it is providing a number of compelling examples of memory work in indigenous art. We see, for example, painterly renderings of indigenous relationships to place in the journeys of creator spirits, we see artistic records of massacres, of family, of politics and of ‘historical time’ as well as Perkins recalling her own encounters with art, time, people and place. It is also, in important respects, remembering earlier examples of travel as it offers a knowledgeable host for a journey to remote places by car and aircraft. This is travelling television that has ‘travelled’ a long way from the 1950s when over a sequence shot in Katherine in the late 1950s, Elsa Chauvel exclaimed, ‘Oh and look, there’s a native prisoner going past handcuffed to the local policeman’. The indigenous artists to whom the viewer is introduced in Art + Soul are named, they are eloquent and they are venerated as great artists. However, rather than disconnecting them from settler colonialism, Perkins has the confidence to talk about indigenous art in terms of autonomy and transcultural transformation and dreamings, in terms of distinctive technical artistic practices, cycles of plant growth, the inheritance of knowledge and the bodies of her ancestors. What memories could be closer? In Art + Soul, exploration has been supplemented by touring. A standard journey from and back to metropolitan centres has been replaced by a quiet search for ways of being at home with both travel television and travel. Unlike the colonial ‘explorer’ who fantasised about discoveries that brought places into existence, travelling television is about ‘difference, incoherence, mixity and trans-formation’ (Morris, 1993: 33).

Code: pride, place and culture

And it’s about us celebrating what we have and what’s closest to our hearts and what makes us feel Australian which is when we look at pictures of Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu. These are the postcards we send overseas. We don’t send big holes in the ground overseas to people on a postcard. No. We’re proud of our land. We’re proud of our culture. (John Butler, John Butler Trio, ‘Concert for the Kimberley’, Federation Square, Melbourne 5 October 2012)

These claims – ‘We’re proud of our land. We’re proud of our culture’ – were made at a concert in my home town in support of a political campaign to halt the development of a gas processing facility by Woodside Petroleum at Walmadan (James Price Point) near Broome in the far north-west of Australia (www.savethekimberley.com). Like Melissa Lucashenko’s assertion that I discussed at the beginning of this article, Butler’s claims are somewhat complicated. In the first place, the sequence – proud of land, proud of culture – is, in Australia, much more usually one that is enunciated by indigenous people. However, what might be seen as echoing or perhaps honouring, indigenous relationships to country and culture (complicated as that can be) is, in this instance, doubly difficult because of the significant divisions between indigenous groups about the development of Walmadan. To simplify things considerably, of the two groups of indigenous people that have claimed significant custodial relationships to the site, one supports the deal to process gas on-shore and the other opposes it. Effectively, Butler is siding with the Goolarabooloo people against other Traditional Owners. Perhaps he is saying that some indigenous people are not proud of their land and their culture, but more likely, he is using a strategy adopted by many environmentalists in Australia over the last few decades, of speaking on behalf of perceived indigenous values. Like Lucashenko, Butler’s posture is not without its ironies. The market for postcards, although it is in decline, is overwhelmingly built on the purchases of those who are travelling and send postcards ‘home’; few of us ‘at home’ are in search of postcards. While ‘we’ (let’s take that to be Australians) ‘don’t send big holes in the ground overseas to people on a postcard’, the relative prosperity of Australia over at least the last decade has depended significantly on sending stuff dug from ‘big holes in the ground overseas’ in the form of iron ore, copper, coal and much else besides. The State Government support for the on-shore gas processing plant aims to extend the current mining boom that has insulated Australia’s national economy from recent global downturns. Butler is not talking about transnational flows of commodities and capital but of his affective relations to a place nearly 2500 km from where he lives. And like all but a tiny minority of Australians, Butler lives thousands of kilometres from Uluru, Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef, and therefore, he looks at pictures of these places. The most culturally significant of those pictures have not been in the form of postcards but has been part of suburban television experience, not only for Butler but for many Australian television viewers since the later 1950s. Through both the experience of travelling television and of remembering travelling television, they have formed intimate connections to places remote and up close, to animals and landscapes, to the roads and the four-wheel drive vehicles that have, over time, made those places available to the suburban traveller who remembered having first seen them on travel television. In recalling travelling television here, I want to acknowledge that television has been a companion to and with Australians shaping and reshaping their intimate and distant relationships to being in place for more than 50 years.