I knew about television long before I saw it. It appeared in the homes of characters in contemporary  movies, and was talked about in newspaper articles from England and America. I tried to imagine what it would be like, but so momentous a change to normal life was far too vast to comprehend. As with the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri 3, the first thing I saw was the Olympic Games, in this case those twenty years later for in 1956 they were staged in Melbourne and therefore both necessitated and justified corporate and government expenditure on transmission stations.
        Now, having never been an energetic sort of person, this Olympic Games business ought not to have interested me in the least. All my life I have faked and fudged my way disdainfully through School Sports, gymnasiums, PT, Army Obstacle Courses and all other forms of athletics. Moreover, I have always assiduously kept my sporting interests confined within the bounds of footy and cricket, which I think adequate for any person. Yet even I was obliged to stand and gaze at these images in awe.
        Those pictures, of course, were not intended for us, but for America and Europe, and we only ever saw them through the plate-glass windows of radio appliance shops—small scratchy images on TV sets with astronomical price-tags, and it was impossible to believe they were coming from the MCG, just the other side of the river, and were being seen in New York and London.