LETTER: Inauguration of ICTV Channel 601 at Yuendumu

Sir – At 5pm CST on April 18 2013, Indigenous Community Television (ICTV) will officially commence full-time broadcasts on its own dedicated channel (601 on VAST).
The occasion marks over 30 years of broadcasting in remote Indigenous communities.
Yuendumu, 300 km NW of Alice Springs, is the home of Warlpiri Media (now PAW Media & Communications), who shares with Ernabella (home of EVTV), the historic foundation of Indigenous television in Australia.
ICTV provides a unique television service unlike any other in Australia or worldwide and brings an Indigenous community presence to the Australian broadcast landscape.
ICTV provides meaningful and appropriate content produced by and for Indigenous Australians – people living on country where original languages are spoken and traditional law and culture are alive.
ICTV supports Indigenous language and culture, with over half its program content broadcast in languages from across Australia.
Once the full direct-to-home rollout of digital television is complete in late 2013, ICTV will be accessible to over 1113 remote Indigenous communities as well as towns in regional Australia receiving Direct to Home Satellite TV.
ICTV was the first and only nationally regular broadcast of Indigenous television until 2007. Its first regularly scheduled broadcast commenced in 2002 with the assistance of Imparja Television.
Over the past ten years, ICTV has utilised a number of temporary platforms to reach its audiences in remote communities. In 2012, the Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy announced funding to provide ICTV with a dedicated service on the VAST platform for three years.
ICTV provides a broad range of programming to remote Indigenous communities across the continent. In these communities, ICTV has become a highly valued presence and a potentially powerful instrument of change.
Commitment, perseverance and hard work have helped the ICTV Board and management, supported by IRCA and the remote community media network including PAW Media & Communications, Pilbara and Kimberley Aboriginal Media (PAKAM), Ngaanyatjarra Media and Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Media (PY Media, formerly EVTV), to find outlets that helped sustain the broadcast service, and importantly the vision.
The vision has always been Indigenous people producing their own media, for their own television.
The old BRACS slogan in response to the coming of commercial Television across remote Australia was “Fighting Fire With Fire” – ICTV enables and embodies the fulfillment of this vision National Indigenous groups operate broadcast channels, local communities might provide content for local access but nowhere in the world do the two combine.
ICTV provides an important global model for a more inclusive, people based, broadcast environment.
With its enduring and growing recognition for excellent programming representing community, tradition, culture, and economy, ICTV has survived setbacks and disappointments and moves forward into the new digital landscape (digital channel 601 on VAST).
This new digital context will enable all people in the community: whether children, elders, athletes, musicians, health professionals, politicians or economic leaders to become content producers, empowered with accessible, affordable tools to produce broadcast quality programming with hands-on equipment.
This story of ICTV begins in the central Australian desert in the mid-1980s.
At about that same time, two remote communities separated by about 300 kilometres initiated their own “pirate” television service, providing narrowcasting local production to their immediate communities.
Warlpiri Media in the community of Yuendumu on the Warlpiri Lands northwest of Alice Springs and EVTV (Ernabella Video Televison) in the community of Pukatja on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands along the northern border of South Australia compiled and broadcast tapes of sports, meetings, and cultural events.
In 1996, EVTV, now Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Media (PY Media) began a rapid transition that led to the development of ICTV
one of the most extraordinary television services in the history of modern media.
Delivering the dream is the realization of a model of hope, aspiration and vision, ICTV charters a bold new path, a path that allows cultural diversity a larger platform to inform and inspire.
ICTV embodies many stories: of the people, of the ancestors, of the future.
Let the historians make their own judgments.
Rita Cattoni
Manager
Indigenous Community Television Limited