Apr 28, 2026 4:57am PT

Penny Chapman Uses Hector Crawford Lecture to Warn on AI, Celebrate Matchbox Legacy and Call for Bolder Australian Storytelling at Screen Forever Conference

Naman Ramachandran

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Naman Ramachandran

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Screen Producers Australia

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.