"Doctor Who" was first broadcast in Australia by the ABC's Perth station, ABW-2, on Tuesday 12 January 1965. Individual episodes were sent to Australia by the BBC in the form of one 16mm black and white film print. If simultaneous broadcast was required (i.e. the same episode scheduled in two different cities on the same date) the ABC had to make copies and send them to the relevant stations for local transmission (until the late 1960s the national broadcaster wasn't networked and regional variations – both between metropolitan areas as well as between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas – remained commonplace until as late as the mid-1980s. However, for much of Doctor Who's first decade on Australian television, each episode's film or video print was physically transported from city to city, for broadcast in each on a different date and generally according to an entirely different schedule. For example, after being screened in Perth on Tuesday 12 January 1965, the first episode "An Unearthly Child" was screened by ABN-2 Sydney on Friday 15 January, then by ABQ-2 Brisbane on Friday 22 January, by ABV-2 Melbourne on Saturday 20 February and by ABS-2 Adelaide on Monday 15 March. As a result, different broadcast regions saw different episodes on different days, sometimes weeks or even months after the same episode had been screened elsewhere in the country. Later improvements in the capacity of cable or microwave and other links enabled the ABC to broadcast on an increasingly national basis, although even into the 1970s the debut screenings of some episodes were still weeks apart from one city to the next.