Australian Dictionary of Biography

Clement William Semmler (1914–2000), author and broadcasting executive, was born on 23 December 1914 at Eastern Well, South Australia, eldest of six children of Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Semmler, blacksmith, and his wife Marie Hulda, née Kleinig, both South Australian-born. Clem was raised in a strict Lutheran household which, following the failure of his father’s farm, moved to Murray Bridge. He attended the local primary school before completing the Leaving certificate at Murray Bridge High School. One of his high school teachers, Eric Pfitzner, mentored him while his family sank into poverty during the Depression, and another, Gilbert Dutton, educated him in pacificism.

In 1932 Semmler obtained a cadetship at the Barr Smith Library of the University of Adelaide, which subsidised his studies in English literature (BA, 1936). He edited the Adelaide Teachers’ College magazine, The Torch, and undertook further studies in English (MA, 1938), including writing a thesis about Thomas Hardy; he was also an accomplished sportsman. As an English master at Unley High School he helped to financially support his parents and siblings. On 30 December 1940 he married South Australian-born Ella Amanda Dorothea Janzow, a civil servant, at Flinders Street Lutheran Church, Adelaide.

Semmler also gave educational talks on ABC local radio and, after a childhood deprived of music, in 1939 began presenting a jazz program. In 1941 he wrote a national award-winning educational radio play for young people, as well as columns for Radio Call. The following year he secured the new ABC role of education officer in Adelaide, one referee describing him as ‘something out of the box,’ and ‘a brilliant scholar with plenty of commonsense, a sense of humour, remarkable versatility and the ability to do as well as think’ (ABC Document Archives FN3).

A protégé of the ABC’s director of youth education Rudolph Bronner, Semmler transferred to the ABC’s Sydney headquarters in 1946 as editor and producer of school broadcasts. During 1947 he acted as Federal director of variety, and was appointed assistant to the controller of programmes, Keith Barry, later that year. He was responsible for a successful nationwide ABC concert tour during 1948 by Graeme Bell’s Australian Jazz Band. Semmler relished learning the managerial, political, and artistic skills required of a program administrator. In 1950 he reorganised the ABC’s interstate program schedule to better match the light entertainment offered by commercial competitors, despite his desire to avoid compromising the higher ideals of public broadcasting.

In 1955 Semmler sent the commission, via the general manager (Sir) Charles Moses, his manuscript ‘Broadcasting and the Australian Community,’ that Oxford University Press had accepted ‘for publication as an objective account of broadcasting in this country from its beginnings to the onset of television’ (Semmler 1991, 88). While overseas on a British Broadcasting Corporation television training course, Semmler received a letter revoking permission to publish, the ABC commissioners having decided that public inability to distinguish between the official position and his own risked damaging the ABC’s relations with other organisations. After his return to Australia, he was instructed to report directly to Moses, bypassing the older Barry, on planning program schedules for the ABC television service that would commence in 1956. He helped to educate staff and ABC Weekly readers on the ‘opportunity and a challenge’ posed by ‘this powerful medium’ which ‘properly used, can contribute towards raising and improving the culture of the common man’ (Semmler 1956, 4).

As president of the ABC Senior Officers’ Association, Semmler in 1958 was one of the managers subjected to pitiless cross-examination by Moses himself during a five-month public salary hearing before the assistant public service arbitrator. In late 1960 Semmler became assistant general manager (programmes), covering both radio and television. This gave him an integral role in launching the current affairs show Four Corners in 1961, and the rearrangement of the radio networks in the early 1960s to increase what he considered serious broadcasting. He travelled increasingly to the ABC’s interstate offices and for overseas conferences.

A small, dapper man, with features of ‘somewhat aquiline severity’ (Buckridge 2000, 12), Semmler was headstrong, impatient of bureaucracy, and was simultaneously ‘highbrow and lowbrow in tastes’ (Inglis 1983, 254) that ranged from James Joyce to racing guides. His speech was laced with both classical allusions and slang. When Moses retired in 1965 Semmler was overlooked as general manager in favour of Talbot Duckmanton, instead being promoted to deputy general manager. Their subsequent working relationship was not close, with Semmler once being rebuked by Duckmanton for his pacifism and public opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War ‘as portentously as if he were reading out a death warrant’ (Semmler 1991, 22). Semmler found satisfaction writing and editing books on Australian and other literature, including about A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Kenneth Slessor, the latter becoming a close friend.

In April 1968 Semmler nearly died when he was thrown from the burning fuselage of an aeroplane that had crash-landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. With injuries that included a crushed vertebra, he was flown back to Sydney on a stretcher. The following year he was conferred with a DLitt from the University of New England ‘for his original and distinguished contributions to literature as a biographer, essayist and critic.’ There was some criticism from colleagues concerning the time he spent on literary pursuits at the expense of ABC work, perhaps not helped by his being appointed OBE in 1972 for services to literature. On 20 December 1974, after divorcing Ella, he married Catherine Helena Wilson, a secretary, at Saint Peter Chanel Church, Woolwich, New South Wales.

Although Semmler took part in anti-Vietnam War marches, and publicly advocated voting for Labor at the 1972 Federal election, the new permissiveness in society and a perceived obsession with ratings at the ABC dismayed him. He retired in November 1977, complaining that the organisation ‘distrusts academics, thinkers and writers’ (Frizzel 1977, 7), and moved to Burradoo, New South Wales, where he enjoyed gardening, golf, and squash. Defying Patrick White’s warning that ‘he would die of bush ballads’ (Coleman 2000, 32), Semmler produced several major books and acquired his own fortnightly television column in the Sydney Morning Herald, for which he had also been reviewing books since the 1950s. His partial and caustic The ABC: Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow (1981) angered some former colleagues. Moses responded to the portrait of him, which included an inaccurate claim that he had served with the notorious Black and Tans in Ireland, by threatening legal action, resulting in a public apology. Semmler’s memoir Pictures on the Margin was published in 1991.

Appointed AM in 1989, Semmler served various cultural organisations, including the Library Council of New South Wales and the Sydney City Art Institute, and delivered the 1997 Bell Jazz Lecture. He died on 10 August 2000 of cardiac arrest at Bowral, survived by the two children of his first marriage, Jacqueline and Peter, and by his second wife and their daughter Imogen. He was cremated. The library of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales is named after him.