Television is a showcase for the best and worst of program ideas and production - from popular dramas like The Dismissal to Alan Jones' and Channel Ten's failed venture into tabloid television. Its power over the product is unassailable partially due to television's ubiquitous reach into most homes around the globe providing a much wider audience than could be achieved through cinema release alone. And the small screen pays the bulk of the big screens' bills through video rentals and broadcast rights. But at the core of these industries are people creating stories about themselves and their world.

Australia, in this centenary year of film, can be proud of its history in developing a local film industry at the turn of the century making short and feature films before most other countries. We've also lived through a resurgence of Australian film in the seventies, when odd and idiosyncratic films like Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris and Jim Sharman's Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens - the latter currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival Australian retrospective - led the way for better-known work and made a lasting impression locally and internationally.

Since then, local films and television programs have become a force to be reckoned with internationally. And we're not adverse to tuning in to our home grown films and programs as the ratings will testify. Add to this the box office dollars for the more successful Australian films - a rare event for local, as much as for overseas, product - and you could argue that the local industry has almost come of age.

One challenge today is to keep at the forefront of the new kinds of "content creation", producing engaging programs for the multitude of cable channels and outlets like CD ROMs and computer-based on-line services. The other challenge in producing for such a small local market is whether to create films and programs with either local or international "appeal".

Today, the success of our soaps, dramas and films actually using their "Australian-ness" as a marketable feature has broadened the debate about the need to support the local industry - including the actors, technicians, writers, directors and many others involved - to the current ambitious idea of an export-driven "content-led" recovery.

So we seem more confident in the worth of Australian-ness in the nineties. Perhaps this means that a uniquely Australian audience has also been locally grown, one that appreciates the idea of Australia as a place worth writing and talking about. It was the development of this "seminal" audience, as film writer and critic John Hinde called it in his visionary 1980 book, Other People's Pictures, that he identified as the missing element for the long-term success of a truly home-grown industry.

Five years from now, when even local television will be 45 years old, the new century will give us another benchmark to test our film and television industry - and our image of ourselves - against. Where will our film and television - now part of the so-called creative cultural industries - be then?