To Boldly Go

Creating A Future History

Decades later, the church building is still there, but the adjoining church hall, where Austrek held its first public meetings – forty-nine years ago today – has long since been demolished and replaced with shop fronts. The infrastructure may change, but its echo endures. In this busy street in a northern suburb of Melbourne, traces remain of past times, when a sanctuary for those seeking shelter in the past also offered shelter for those seeking consolation in the future. Of the six main public spaces where Austrek has met over the last five decades, four of them have been church halls, demonstrating the intersection between community spaces and collective belonging.

The World That Was

You may be old enough to remember a world before the digital age, when connection meant conversation, not clicks. This was a world without the Internet, mobile phones or streaming services. No instant communication or digital information. If you wanted social media, you went out and met others in real life. Instead of googling, you read a book, or headed to the library to consult encyclopaedias.

For news, you relied on the evening TV news bulletin or picked up a newspaper, knowing that the headlines were already at least a day old. I recall the Apollo 13 Moon mission, when the front page of a Melbourne newspaper was overprinted with a daily 3am “Stop Press” notice in red ink – an otherwise unthinkable notion for something as inviolate and sacrosanct as a newspaper. These were our closest to instant communication and worldly wisdom: many Star Trek fans collected scrap books full of news clippings like they were collecting holy relics.

These were the times before streaming and YouTube, before DVDs and videocassettes – even before modern marketing made copyright issues ubiquitous and inviolate. Fans of TV programs took recordings of their favourite programs on audio cassettes, for their own personal use, and replayed them endlessly until they were word perfect on the script. They photographed their favourite shows off the TV screen. Decades before mobile phones and their inbuilt cameras, photography was more of an effort and an art. Commercial photos and souvenirs were largely unavailable.

Phones of that era were firmly fixed on walls or situated on shelves. Wireless phones only existed in SF programs. Most homes had a single handset connected by wires, and long-distance calls meant booking ahead through an operator. If you were out and about, you found a TARDIS-shaped phone booth on a street corner and dialled home.

Phone booths were great places to shelter from the harsh weather as you made private calls to friends that you dared not make at home (on the family phone in the living room). They were also great places for Clark Kent to change into his Superman underwear – and those phone directories! In the days before modern privacy laws, these phone books comprised hundreds of pages containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of many thousands of people; I knew fans who had fun skimming through the directory pages to find the names of their favourite fictional characters – not to ring them, of course, but just because it was fun to see fictitious names in print in the “real” world.

This was the world a generation ago: awed by the space age and watching men walking on the Moon, but still stuck in an era before space age technology had trickled down to the everyday. It would take another twenty years before the Internet or mobile phones started making public appearances, another decade after that before home computers brought the Internet into our homes, and another two decades again before AI became commonplace.

Television in those days was a box in your living room, connected to small rabbit-ears antennae that sat on top of your TV set, or connected via wires to an antenna on your roof. Reception was limited to a handful of local TV stations that were accessible via your antenna; and if you wanted to watch a TV program, you were totally reliant upon the whims of the programmers at those local TV stations. In the days before streaming or DVDs or videotapes, when your favourite TV show was taken off the air, you had no guarantee that you would ever see it again. (And if you wanted to see a movie, go to a movie theatre).

And then, as if someone flipped a switch, the future began to arrive… not all at once, but in colour.

Future Echoes

On 1 March 1975, Australia officially turned on colour television – although colour test transmissions had commenced some months beforehand, hinting at a rainbow of multicoloured diversity in our formerly monotone black-and-white TV services. In those early days of colour TV, the colour palette was turned up high, so everything appeared almost fluorescent. This was especially breathtaking, for example, when seeing that cricket matches were played on the MCG grass field that was blindingly green.

It was not a smooth transition. The National Library of Australia notes:

“The [television] sets cost more than $1,000, the equivalent of approximately $8,800 in today’s money. The many who could not afford to upgrade their sets continued to watch in black and white.”

As a result of colour TV, local stations pulled many old programs out of their archives and repeated them – now in living colour. Star Trek was one of these programs, airing in a G-rated (suitable for children) timeslot for about three months on Saturday afternoons.. maybe fifteen episodes. For nerdy SF-starved teens, it was wondrous.

I remember sitting around the dining table for our family’s traditional Saturday evening dinner, and at my pleading they allowed me to have the television turned on so I could watch while we ate. Upon hearing the opening narration: “Space: The Final Frontier…” my father laughed and commented that space was the infinite frontier. Having been suitably chastened for the gall to watch television during family tea-time, I was allowed to watch the rest of the episode without critical commentary, although I was compelled to ignore my mother and sisters rolling their eyes in patronising amusement. Within my 14 year-old brain, I felt the thrill of space-age adventure mixed with deference to a nostalgic program that dated from the Apollo space era. I was hooked. Over subsequent weeks, in between the TV episodes on Saturday afternoons, I turned to reading Star Trek books, especially when the series was withdrawn from that timeslot, and later appeared in erratic late night “graveyard shift” timeslots.

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This was an era when Australian Star Trek viewers were totally dependent upon the whims of Channel 9 programmers – who took the show on and off, often late at night. I even recall late night viewing of one episode, “Amok Time”, containing a scene in which Kirk and Spock face off against each other, ready to fight to the death. Snip! A Channel 9 film editor suddenly cuts out the subsequent five minutes of action – and Kirk went from standing courageously to lying apparently dead in front of Spock. As I sat there stupefied and puzzled, the reason for this edit suddenly became clear: the scene was ended quickly, in order to make way for another five minutes of advertising Saba and Franco Cozzo furniture.

Fans became frantic for more Star Trek, a hunger which Channel 9 seemed reluctant to satiate, despite our phone calls, letters and petitions (I recall being told by one Channel Nine Programming Manager that they had enough problems in their workplace without having to worry about giving fans what they wanted). Into this vacuum stepped a local film theatre manager.

Bob Johnston was a local film enthusiast who had collected many films and ran a small theatre – the Ritz – in a hired theatrette in Errol Street, North Melbourne (his Sydney operations were likewise run out of ANZAC House). Out of curiosity, he threw a couple Star Trek episodes into a theatre night, and the audience response was so positive that he decided to run a Star Trek Marathon featuring Star Trek episodes running “from dusk ’til dawn”, and for the first time ever, he had to open the theatrette balcony in order to accommodate the audience. Naturally, this meant that the Marathons became a regular feature in both his Melbourne and Sydney theatres.

My teenager friends and I were already running an amateur student science club, the Melbourne Amateur Science Club (MASC), and we excitedly attended this first Star Trek Marathon. We even took some photocopied flyers advertising Austrek (a subsection of MASC), and these were snapped up by Marathon audience members and caused us to be overwhelmed with immediate sign-ups for new memberships (an annual membership initially costing $1, although postage costs for our newsletter forced us to quickly increase that to $2.50). We quickly concluded that we did not have the resources to run both our school children’s science club and the fledgling Austrek (which in one night had received more enthusiastic memberships than MASC had received in its years of operation), so we closed down MASC and dedicated our limited teenage time and efforts to Austrek. That first Star Trek Marathon on 27 November 1976 was retrospectively assigned as being the date of our club’s public launch. We even met a lovely young lady, a school teacher named Diane, who encouraged us to run our new club.

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Science fiction fans have traditionally been voracious readers, and local fans were no exception. Concurrent to the aforementioned media activities, we had previously sought Star Trek-related material via a scarce number of books. British author James Blish had novelised the Star Trek episodes, and US author Alan Dean Foster had done the same for the Star Trek animated series. Beyond that, such books were rare. We started watching Star Trek on TV, fell in love with its magic, and scoured bookshops for more.

There were two books that particularly made a difference in the early club. Star Trek Lives! introduced us to the concept of fan clubs and fandom. We learned that there were others like us: keen and enthusiastic for Star Trek and space age excitement; running fan clubs and conventions; writing fan fiction and publishing fanzines. This book had probably helped inspire us to start Austrek as a sub-section of our humble little schoolkids science club, MASC, and begin to consider expanding that subsection into something more (the Star Trek Marathons helped that option take off like a rocket).

The second book to impact our lives was I Am Not Spock, an autobiographical account by actor Leonard Nimoy. He complained that any time anyone wrote a letter and addressed the envelope to “Mr Spock, Hollywood, California”, the Post Office delivered it to him. Encouraged by this, we did something that I would now recommend that nobody ever do: we wrote to him using that very method. Dozens of us signed a letter asking if we could officially start a Star Trek fan club, and we posted it with teenaged-sized bravery, wondering if we would ever get a reply. To our surprise, we did – but not from the man himself.

It turns out that there was an organisation called the Star Trek Welcommittee (STW) – a Star Trek volunteer-based information exchange network, based in the USA. In the days before the digital communications, they wrote a snail mail reply to us, recommending that we contact a mysterious “D. Marchant” who lived in Melbourne (but in far-away Mordialloc, a southern suburb – too far for us to visit in the days before we were old enough to own or drive our own cars). With some fear and trembling, I dialled my home phone’s rotary dial and called this mysterious “D. Marchant”. To my astonishment, my new friend – Diane from the Star Trek Marathons – answered the phone. It turned out that she was the world STW representative for every country outside the USA.

Diane mentored, encouraged and assisted us with everything from contacting local fans, to posting out our first real newsletter (she donated the stamps for us to afford the postage costs). It was full-steam ahead.

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The following months were a mix of frantic and exciting, especially balancing schoolwork and homework against building Austrek infrastructure. We published our first Austrek newsletter, titled Trekkie Talk, and then changed the name after Diane gently explained how the word “trekkie” was seen as a negative by many Star Trek fans at that time; leading to the newsletter being relaunched as The Captain’s Log.

Our first public meeting took place in the abovementioned church hall in Fairfield on 27 February 1977. The pastor was annoyed when I asked for a receipt for the hall hire cost: the princely sum of five dollars. He hand-wrote a receipt, making sure to exaggerate the receipt number as #1 (the 1 being preceded by a ridiculous number of zeroes) as his gentle protest.

The meeting was attended by Diane and her mother Jessie, by many of the teenage club members, and a mix of new members who had joined since the first Marathon. One teenage boy dressed as Darth Vader, managing to go to the milk bar next to the church and trying to buy a Star Wars icy pole, getting flustered, and tripping over the Twisties stand. But our youth and enthusiasm were infectious: our club sped ahead into new activities over the coming months, not being held back by wisdom or caution. We had never tried anything before, and we had no idea what was possible or impossible, so we generally went ahead and did it anyway. Any time we had an idea, we anticipated the later Star Trek mantra of Make It So, and we did. Our human adventure was just beginning.

Austrek has organised many activities: including club meetings, car rallies, birthday parties, weddings, Christmas events, weekend events at private homes, New Year’s Day events, trivial pursuit nights, camps, fan fiction, fanzines, newsletters, collating parties, conventions, fan films, art displays, costume competitions,’courts martial’ and ‘ambassadors’ banquets’ and other cosplay events, formal debates, letter campaigns to help NASA or medical causes, charities, banquets, movie nights, sold out theatre bookings for virtually every Star Trek movie premiere, museum displays, filk songs, radio programs, Moomba floats, media interviews, medical and personal interventions, picnics to Hanging Rock, merchandise including T-shirts and cups and stickers and playing cards and lanyards, contributions to books and magazines, assisting the start of many other SF media clubs, assisting fan authors and fan artists to become professionals, providing a welcoming sanctuary for many people facing issues of diversity, isolation and difference, introducing women to science fiction and science fiction to women… the sky was our limit. Whether creative activities borne of need in the early days to find more Star Trek inspiration amidst the cultural desert; or more recent consumerist activities to accommodate the wide range of franchise material now available, the club has learnt and adapted to suit changing commercial and copyright and cultural interests.

As for me, I will never forget the many people who have told me (over the last five decades) how Austrek literally saved their lives by providing supportive social networks.

We may not have changed the world overnight, but we have changed it one life at a time. After half a century, our journey – our legacy – continues.

And the rest is history.

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This blog ©2025 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial and layout assistance from CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.