Nineteen thirty-two was a bleak year. Hitler's Brownshirts terrorised German citizens, mimicking and soon surpassing Mussolini's Blackshirts in Italy. The Great Depression - "great" because of its unprecedented accumulation of poverty and misery across the world - seemed unremitting. In Australia, 1932 marks the peak of joblessness: 32 per cent of the workforce unemployed. Hard Times.

Into this slough of despondency comes the voice of the Australian Prime Minister, Mr Joseph Lyons. On 1 July 1932, he announced the inauguration of the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Taking pride of place in homes across the country were brown or black Bakelite wirelesses. Speaking into a microphone that could be heard in all these homes, Mr Lyons - acknowledged as a man of "pulsating sincerity" - declared that the ABC was established for a momentous national purpose; to nourish "the culture as well as the gaiety of the nation ... to serve all sections and to satisfy the diversified tastes of the public".

The bells of Sydney's General Post Office chimed 8pm. The ABC, a slender sapling in the care of a conservative Government, was planted with all due ceremony, just six years after the establishment of the mother tree, the BBC.

The past cannot be cloned, but there are recognisable, repetitive patterns. The historian Ken Inglis' description of the political and media environment of the 1920's and beyond in This is the ABC includes episodes painfully familiar to citizens of the 1990s. We are reminded that greedy and warring media proprietors are a feature of our history. So are governments that collude, willingly or reluctantly, with these proprietors.

In 1930, when he was a barrister and member of the Victorian Parliament, R.G. Menzies joined a deputation of prominent Melburnians to lobby the Lyons Government. They urged that broadcasting "be organised upon an independent basis and that cultural potentialities of the broadcasting service be considered a matter of primary importance".

The deputation - ultimately successful - was organised by the Victorian Radio Association, representing retailers of wireless equipment. The ABC was created by the efforts of those who valued its cultural and intellectual potential and those who wished to sell more wirelesses.

A few years later, the ABC's growing popularity threatened the interests of commercial press and broadcasting. The owners of these profitable enterprises were not amused. They alone provided the national broadcaster with its news services - at a price and under stringent conditions. Despite growing protests, they allowed the ABC only a miniscule quantity of news: no more than 200 words a day of overseas news, taken from the newspaper-owned cable service. Presentation was confined to a five-minute evening bulletin broadcast no earlier than 7.50pm - so as not to interfere with people's reading of the evening paper.

The proprietors' leader was Sir Keith Murdoch, powerful and influential, with interests in both newspapers and radio. Concentration of media ownership was already an issue of public and political concern. Labor and conservative politicians alike feared what the Labor leader, Mr John Curtin, in 1935 called "this alliance of great newspapers and broadcasting stations" which might "so inflame public opinion as to make ordered government almost impossible".

In 1936, Mr Menzies, then Attorney-General, confided to the head of the BBC, Sir John Reith, his Government's concerns about the power of the media owners. Sir John asked if the Government "was ever going to put things right". According to Sir John, Mr Menzies replied: "No, we haven't the guts."

Not until 1947 was the ABC Act amended to ensure a compulsorily independent news service for the national broadcaster.

The ABC was founded as a public corporation - a well-established tradition in a country with publicly owned railways, roads, water, electricity and later, banking. Mr Menzies and his fellow conservatives found no difficulty in supporting such a proposal for broadcasting. The public interest required public utilities.

Initially the ABC was funded by the payment of licence fees, but by 1948 this system was already floundering. From then on the national broadcaster depended almost entirely on central budget funding, although licence fees were not abolished until 1974.

In the 1975-76 Budget, the ABC received 0.75 per cent of the Government's overall outlays. The funding was less than it expected, but in retrospect it appears positively generous. The proportion of taxpayers' money that goes to support the ABC has steadily declined since then. In 1997-98 it is half the 1975-76 figure - 0.37 per cent.

Sixty-five years on, the ABC is massive, omnipresent, a central pillar of Australia's political democracy and cultural diversity. It has, for all its manifest inadequacies, consistently and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled Mr Lyons' directions: to nourish "the culture as well as the gaiety of the nation ... to serve all sections and to satisfy the diversified tastes of the Public".

It is also in great danger. Years of inadequate funding, the ever-increasing animosity of government, the contempt for public institutions - the ABC is being ringbarked, and those who wield the axes hope the tree dies slowly so that they will not be called to account.

The ABC nourishes us all. It is time we turned the axes into watering cans.