In 1969, as a consequence of the 1969 election, my parents bought a television set.
Hitherto, my father, who thought all music penned after 1890 was unbearably romantic smultchz or impossibly tuneless cacophony, would not have a television in the house.
I was the reason for the change of mind.
In 1966, television first came to Beechworth. Those who could not afford a set sat on the footpath outside Garland’s Electrical store. Or those who got their early enough in the evening could park their EJ Holdens at the kerb in front of the store and honk the horn at anyone who blocked the view. There was no sound, but perhaps that was a blessing in the days of Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight.
Anyway, the television showed the Australian Electoral Commission’s coverage of the 1966 election from the Albert Hall in Canberra – as pictured at right. There were minions posting numbers on a tally board.
In 1969, as a first-year university student, I got a one-night stand with the commission (the university handbook had warned that this sort of thing might happen). It was for election night, and my job was to put the numbers, one-by-one, on the board which would be beamed by television to those loungerooms of the nation with television sets. Hence my father, who unburdened by yet another child to the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme had for the first time in decades a little extra cash, went to Garland’s Electrical store and bought a set in order to see his son walk upon the platform of national politics.
The marvels of modern technology.
In 1969, the tallyroom was moved from the Albert Hall to the more modern Lyneham High School and the electoral commission had devised a mechanical device on the tally board. Instead of the minions, such as me, walking on a platform in front of the board, each electorate had a swivel window so the minions, me included, walked on a platform behind the board, put the numbers on the swivelling window and turned it around for the television cameras to see.
So my parents wasted their money. Their son, had been enjoined by Electoral Commission staff from waving cheerios through the swivelling window. The event was slightly more mechanical; slightly less and event of people.
Nonetheless, the excitement of the tallyroom remained. Leaders declared victories in the tallyroom, and acknowledged defeats. It was a place for journalists, political scientists, diplomats and politicians to gather and pontificate, and wait, and hope and rejoice and despair.
It is a place of high drama because it has the great ingredients of high drama – players, audience and suspense. But it is more intense than high drama because – while we know it has an ending — it had no script and not even the players know how it will end.
Television has largely consumed the event, but most networks still draw on the background of the tallyroom board, even though the figures on it are – since the 1990 election – well behind the computer counts and projections that go to the television screens and this election most certainly behind the internet postings by the electoral commission.
At least with just five television networks – only two or three of which amount to anything – there is still enough commonality of experience to support election parties on the night and a reference point for discussion at work on Monday morning.
Now even that is threatened. The internet posting will enable individuals to create their own unique viewing experience.
Worse from a perspective of community event, electronic voting does not seem far away. It may well be faster in the getting the result out, but it will deprive us of the great experience of watching the democratic will slowly being extracted from the numbers.
Can it be far off before we get an instant result – just minutes after polls close. No pontifications; no Malcolm Mackerras telling us so; no Bob McMullan sifting the psephological tea-leaves; no emotional up and down, acceptance or exhilaration.
The public events that celebrate democracy — the cinemascope news of a smiling Mr Menzies backdropped by a very English Australian accent casting his vote, the television outside Garland’s Electrical store, the tallyroom, and the television blaring at all the Don’s parties in Australian loungerooms interrupted by puglististic dogmatists commentating under the influence of cask red wine – are now threatened by the ultimate in delivering an instant result in private: the computer.
I prefer to absorb the result slowly.
I hope tonight’s tallyroom is not the last. And win or lose, rejoice and celebrate the great exercise in democracy tonight.