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I don't know exactly what the story is behind Australia getting color, but considering we got B&W in 56, 75 for color doesn't seem that late. My guess without actually looking anything up is that we were following England, but then they got color in what? 67? I don't know if an NTSC system was ever tried here.
I know that some of the earliest color sets here were essentially English sets with VHF tuners. Those hybrid Decca sets are almost the only color sets I've seen here with tubes in them. They used tubes in the horizontal output and possibly in the vertical section (it's been a long long time since I've seen one). I say almost as I've seen at least one set brought over from England that had been fitted with a tube VHF tuner salvaged from a B&W set.
At any rate I'm glad we went with PAL. I've seen both and while NTSC can look good I prefer PAL. It just seems to do some things better. I haven't really looked into why, but while NTSC from Laserdisc or DVD can look very good (I've haven't seen over the air NTSC) NTSC from VHS or a game console looks noticably worse than PAL (though wherever possible I use RGB).
Maybe if things worked out differently we could have ended up with the worst of all worlds, 405 line, 50Hz, NTSC.
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