Petition to the ABC: Replace Doctor Who with Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy television.

Dear Aunty,

So, you’ve lost Doctor Who. 

Frankly, it’s enough to make anyone pound the console and yell “No, no, no, No, NO!”.

But you know what they say – when life gives you lemons, it’s time to change your supplier. 

And frankly, for the last few decades, as Brexit ravaged the British national psyche, the Doctor has been getting ever more Union-Jack-waving, Sheffield-steel-smelting, history-of-this-sceptred-isle-delving Anglocentric.

How about some Australian science fiction and fantasy on the screen for a change?

Because Australia has a LOT of great science fiction and fantasy. 

We had some of the first. The first ‘Alien invasion’ novel (The Germ Growers, 1892, six years before War of the Worlds). Some of the first Steampunk (A Bertram Chandler’s Kelly Country, 1976 – Ned Kelly conquers Australia with Zeppelins!), the first feminist dystopia (M Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, written 1943 and suppressed by the WWII censor), the first Climate Change fiction (George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, 1987, set in 2041 Melbourne where the hereditary unemployed boat among drowned skyscrapers) and the first Solarpunk fiction (Sean McMullen’s Greatwinter series first appeared in 1992-4 – fight me). And Victor Kelleher and Gillian Rubenstein were writing Young Adult science fiction before any publisher on the planet thought to put the letters Y and A together.

We have some of the best. Claire G Coleman, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Sam Watson’s razor-sharp Indigenous science fiction. Greg Egan’s hypermathematical psychoses. Terry Dowling’s New Wave psychic outback deserts. Lucy Sussex’s wry feminist slipstream. Damien Broderick’s relativistic blasphemies. Jack Dann’s medieval flying machines. Isobelle Carmody and Garth Nix’s dark fantastical visions. And More!

What they all have in common, apart from being Australian, and being great, is that they’ve never made it to the TV screen.

Oh, a couple of years ago we had the fantastic Cleverman (and a Monkey remake). Then you have to go back twenty years to when Farscape put a few Strine accents in space. Then, apart from the odd kid’s show, you have to jump back another twenty years to find Timelapse and Phoenix Five, the first TV sci-fi franchise in 1970 - remember that Aunty, you beat Star Trek to it! And then we’re back to The Stranger in the 60s. That’s a long time between drinks!

Aunty, you’ve now got five year funding certainty. You’ve got revenue from Google and Facebook, and hopefully the BBC have returned your licencing fee, or at least your deposit on the TARDIS - those scratches were there when they loaned it! You say you want to attract a younger audience – well, the yoof like stories about the future, since they have to live there. Australia has heaps of up and coming sci-fi and fantasy filmmakers, who’ve cut their teeth on Hollywood productions down under, and are already producing the good stuff. Surely you can hire some of them, and rent a gravel quarry?

So Aunty, never mind the blue box – isn’t it time we had some Australian science fiction and fantasy, on the Australian national broadcaster? There’s now a timeslot waiting to be filled, and it could have our stories in it.