Penny Chapman, co-founder of Matchbox Pictures and former head of drama at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), used the 2026 Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture at the Screen Forever Conference on the Gold Coast on Tuesday to issue a sharp challenge to Australian screen producers: resist the pull of the algorithm, rediscover the courage of genuine storytelling, and engage urgently with the policy debates surrounding artificial intelligence.
Delivering the annual address to an assembly of producers, commissioners, and writers, Chapman reflected on the cultural conditions that she argued had made story itself “a rickety thing” – politically, socially, and industrially. Drawing on Naomi Klein’s book “Doppelganger,” she described how right-wing operatives had exploited a widespread public sense of narrative dispossession, and suggested parallels in the failure of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum. “The story couldn’t find its people,” she said.
On AI, Chapman was measured but pointed. She cited computer scientist Virginia Dignum’s book “The AI Paradox” for its argument that human imagination is not replicable by machine iteration, while also voicing concern at Ezra Klein’s characterisation of the technology. Klein, she noted, had described AI on Andy Harris’ “The Last Invention” podcast as offering an escape from “the friction of other human beings” – a shift in human experience that she said the industry cannot afford to ignore.
Screenwriter Craig Mazin, she added, had offered a counterpoint on his “Script Notes” podcast, arguing that the influence of mentally ill artists on culture was precisely the kind of irreducible human variable that AI cannot accommodate.
Chapman spent a substantial portion of the lecture tracing the founding and evolution of Matchbox Pictures, which she established with Tony Ayres, Michael McMahon, Helen Panckhurst, and Helen Bowden following a conversation at the 2007 SPA Conference – also held on the Gold Coast. She described the company’s founding principles: writers at the centre of the enterprise, a pipeline for emerging talent, “make programs we were really proud of” and what she called creative honesty with each other.
When NBCUniversal made an acquisition approach in 2009, Chapman recalled the team’s reaction as immediate alarm. The two non-negotiables they secured were the right to choose their own projects and the right to take rejected material elsewhere – a provision that allowed Ayres and McMahon to pre-sell “Nowhere Boys” to the BBC after NBCU passed, sending the show to three series and a feature film.
Over 18 years, Matchbox generated AUD$1.4 billion ($1 billion) in production across 81 titles, with credits including “My Place,” “The Straits,” “The Slap,” and “Blue Murder.” Chapman named a long roster of alumni – among them Sophie Miller, Hannah Carroll Chapman, Warren Clarke, and Amanda Higgs – who had gone on to careers as commissioning editors, screenwriters, and producers.
She credited the company’s team dynamic with much of its longevity. Ayres, she said, had instilled the guiding hiring principle that shaped Matchbox’s culture. “‘Never employ anyone you don’t want to have a meal with,’” she quoted him as saying, “and it worked.”
The company’s run came to an end earlier this year when Universal International Studios announced in February that it would close Matchbox, citing shifts in the broader production landscape, with Tony Ayres Productions also folding as part of the wind-down.
The lecture’s closing movement turned to the relationship between creators and commissioners, which Chapman argued had become too transactional and too deferential to platform metrics. She singled out the so-called “second screen rule” – the practice of having dialogue repeat plot points for viewers assumed to be distracted by their phones – as both creatively corrosive and self-defeating. She held up “Bluey” and “Heated Rivalry” as examples of storytelling that treats audiences as active, intelligent participants rather than passive consumers.
“Prosecuting our right to tell Australian stories also comes with responsibility – to make stories that matter,” Chapman said. She invoked the Chinese translator Yang Xianyi’s prediction, made in the 1990s, that Australia would one day wake to its natural and spiritual potential. “It’s 2026 and folks,” she told the conference, “we’re awake.”
Chapman’s lecture was one of several sessions making up the first day of Screen Forever 40, the three-day industry conference marking the 40th edition of the Screen Producers Australia gathering. SPA CEO Matthew Deaner opened proceedings with a survey of the sector’s policy landscape, citing the introduction of Australia’s new streaming regulation framework among the year’s landmark developments.
A series of State of Play panels examined theatrical exhibition, broadcast and streaming commissioning, and international sales – the latter drawing executives from Fifth Season, DCD, All3 Media, Boat Rocker Studios and Bankside Films for a candid assessment of what is and isn’t traveling in the global market. The day closed with “Second Act: Reimagining Australia’s Screen Future,” a forward-looking session featuring ABC managing director Hugh Marks alongside producer Tony Ayres, Rachel Perkins and others, moderated by Virginia Trioli.
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