Coralie Condon recently turned 96 years of age on May 16th, but that has not slowed her down, still attending theatrical performances and regularly entertaining friends and family, even though her eye sight is fading. On Monday 23rd of May, Coralie played hostess to a gathering of colleagues when two former senior executives Max Bostock and Kevin Campbell met with Professor Mark Belnaves, and fellow television veterans, to record an oral history of the early days at TVW Channel 7 in Perth, Western Australia. Professor Mark Belnaves is the Senior Research Fellow in New Media at the Curtin University of Technology. Also present were Audrey Long (formally Barnaby) and Betty Bostock, with Richard Ashton, Gordon McColl and Ken McKay recording the event.

Kevin Campbell

We hope that some of this recording will prove useful to the WA Media History exhibition that the State Library of WA will be hosting from August through to November this year. Professor Mark Belnaves and Dr. Sarah McQuade of the Battye Library are part of the team preparing this exhibit. Mark is also writing a book on TVW’s first managing director Sir James Cruthers and TVW.

Max Bostock talks about The Good Oil

WA TV History
The first video from this gathering features Max Bostock talking about ‘The Good Oil’.

Coralie Condon wrote The Good Oil, a musical comedy which was first performed at The Playhouse in 1958, then in 1964 was delighted to produce it for television with Jill Perryman in the lead. It was broadcast the following year. The production was directed by Max Bostock with the choreography and male lead performed by Jill’s husband Kevan Johnston.

Coralie Condon was inspired by the discovery of oil in Western Australia in 1953. This encouraged Coralie to wrote a musical based on the resulting stock market boom, which led politicians and newspapers to claim it could be Australia’s most significant development of the 20th century. However, the euphoria that resulted from the discovery soon faded and the price of shares fell sharply, when successive wells drilled proved to be dry.

Max Bostock directed this musical comedy in 1964 after joining TVW in 1960 as the station’s Musical Director, but soon rose through the ranks to become Chief Executive Officer of TVW Enterprises.