A pioneering experiment at the Menzies Hotel

Taken around the 1870s, this image shows the Menzies Hotel at the corner of William and Bourke streets.

The image here makes it look rather grand in spite of the dusty, unpaved roads flanking it, and it would only become grander when two extra floors were added in the late 1890s.

The hotel was owned by Scottish migrants Archibald and Catharine Menzies, who initially started their business at La Trobe St in 1853 (where Melbourne Central now sits), before using their earned wealth to build a new hotel at the William St corner in 1867. Built by David Mitchell (Dame Nellie Melba’s father), the hotel in its time hosted many guests, from Mark Twain, to Alexander Graham Bell, Herbert Hoover (decades before he sat in the Oval Office), Anna Pavlova and General Douglas Macarthur.

Then on September 30, 1929, it hosted a peculiar demonstration.

The London-based Major J.M. MacLulich, the foreign director of an emerging company, hosted the event before an audience of leading citizens and journalists to show off what they’d been developing. Before them was a device resembling a cabinet that had recently been tested in England. Months prior, similar devices had been imported from England and had gone through some experimental tests at the 3UZ and 3DB radio stations in Melbourne.

MacLulich discussed the various components of the device, before using a phone to request an operator to bring an artist in. Then before everyone’s awe-struck eyes, a woman’s face appeared within the cabinet! Her visage flickered, threatening to fade into ether, until McLulich adjusted a knob to focus on the image. Through a loudspeaker the woman, singer Miss Molly Mackay, asked, “would anyone like to hear me sing?” (Daily Standard (Queensland), October 16, 1929).

The audience was then treated to some singing from Molly, while a Miss Coral Tranberry was also present, playing violin (even if her face reportedly wasn’t as clear as she played her instrument), and Katie Liddie also performed on piano.

A puppy (reportedly from the Eastern Market) was also featured. This technological miracle was all thanks to a transmitter located on the top floor of the hotel, with MacLulich using telephone lines to help with the transmission. During the luncheon, MacLulich would state that he’d received news that with recent advancements, broadcasting stage groups would soon be possible.

When the audience left the hotel after the demonstration, they had borne witness to a sight they’d never seen before: the first performance of live television in Australia, courtesy of the Baird International Television Company.

Television experiments continued in Australia into the 1930s but due to the war, economic concerns and the government sorting out the logistics and laws, it took another 27 years for television to become available domestically in Victoria. The initial transmission tests in Melbourne were made in July 1956, then on November 4, 1956 the Herald Sun and Weekly Times-owned channel, HSV-7 (or Channel 7) would officially open from its studio at Dorcas St, South Melbourne (while it’s now demolished, it would’ve sat opposite the Fox Footy studios). Unlike the first Sydney broadcast from a couple of months prior there was no Bruce Gyngell to welcome people, but Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies was among the first people to be widely broadcast around Victoria.

70 years after that momentous day, television has produced many cherished memories of huddling around the lounge after dinner, providing water cooler moments for the next day, or (for better or worse) keeping the country in awe at news both at home and beyond our shores.

While it has evolved to the point anything can be watched on your phone or tablet, it would also outlive the Menzies Hotel. The building was acquired by BHP in the 1960s and demolished by 1969, with the BHP House skyscraper taking its spot on the corner. •