AustLit

In the 1930s, Australian woman Lucinda Smith and Englishman Edward Spencer Grant move to a South Pacific island to run a copra plantation. Then World War II rears its ugly head.

A period drama that focuses on the adventures of Davy Marriner, from being robbed in the desert to teaming up with cattle drover Bluey Dallas.

Spit MacPhee comes to the riverside town of St Helen to live with his grandfather, Fyfe MacPhee. Because Fyfe, who has a steel plate in his head as a result of an old war injury, is subject to violent fits, the townspeople fear for Spit's future. When Fyfe dies in one of his fits, a fierce legal battle is initiated, as the Catholic Tree family and the Protestant Arbuckle family bicker over which of them will adopt Spit.

According to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program is 'very aware of different social levels in the town and especially of some of the divisions brought about by religion.' Moran also notes that the series rated well in Australia and sold well overseas.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, c/o The Bartons was based on a sixteen-minute student film written and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse while she was studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

Says Moran, 'Entitled The Siege of the Bartons' Bathroom, the film was in effect a kind of pilot for the series and became the basis of the first episode'. Moorhouse also contributed nearly half the scripts for the series. To quote Moran, 'The various episodes both comic and serious dealt with their family life and that of their community'.

A British and Australian co-production (one of several collaborations between the ABC and Revcom) that cost $6 million to produce, Act of Betrayal was a project over which, according to Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series, 'the ABC had very little creative control and input. Indeed part of the action of the series seems beside the point. It might have been Canada, New Zealand or almost anywhere else.'

Moran offers the following synopsis of the narrative:

A bomb explodes in a London shopping centre and an IRA man, Michael Maguire [McGurk], turns police informer. IRA leaders in Balfast are taken into custody as the police then arrange for Maguire, his wife Eileen and their son Sean to settle with new identities in Australia. The IRA hires an American, Callaghan, a professional killer, to find and kill Maguire. By then Maguire is settled in Sydney, where he has a brief affair with an artist, Cathy. Callaghan arrives in Sydney where he sets about the manhunt. Coincidentally he meets Cathy and she realises he is empty, lonely and, in effect, dying on the inside. Callaghan finds Maguire and lets him go. By which time a second Irish hit team has arrived to finish the job. Callaghan and Maguire are both killed in the melee, but Cathy and Eileen survive.

Although Moran describes the program as 'an interesting blend of the thriller form interwoven with political issues', he emphasises that the focus is on interpersonal relationships: neither the political background to the bombing nor the McGurks' personal backgrounds are explored in any detail. He also criticises the program's failure to capitalise on Elliott Gould, calling the role of Callaghan 'a milestone on the way to oblivion.'

Children's television anthology drama series in which each episode presents a complete story. As with fellow Australian Children's Television Foundation anthology program Winners, each episode was a separate production, with its own writer, director, cast, and crew.

A made-for-television film, scripted by Louis Nowra. According to Veronica Kelly, it is 'a story of a mother's obsessive search for her son lost in the desert. This beautiful-looking film with its red expanses of landscape was screened in February 1988, and interestingly contains a brief theatrical travesty of Nowra's favourite image of perfect but impermanent love--Watteau's eighteenth-century pastoral canvas L'îsle de Cythère. The author as bit player can be glimpsed in the background of this scene'.

Source: Veronica Kelly, The Theatre of Louis Nowra. Sydney: Currency, 1998, p.30.

This four-part mini-series examines the life of explorer Captain James Cook from his beginnings in Yorkshire, England, his mapping of New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia, and his eventual death in Hawaii.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, summarises the program's concept as follows:

Fanny Crowe is a young woman brought to the colony as a governess by the Female Middle Class Emigration Society. They want her to establish a school in the town as required by a bequest set aside for that purpose. The only available building is what was formerly an old hotel, dilapidated and said to be haunted by the ghost of Maria Blackburn, a murdered mother of three. Not to be deterred, Fanny sets about establishing the school with the townspeople all against her. Her only allies are the blacksmith, Joseph McCormack, and the local clergyman, the Rev. Dalton.

As Moran notes, The Haunted School is in many ways a companion text to Golden Pennies: both co-productions between the ABC and Revcom, the two series used a number of the same crew members, and both starred British actress Carol Drinkwater.

Moran emphasises that although this production did not draw the ire of Actors Equity (which had objected to the casting of Drinkwater and fellow British actor Bryan Marshall in the lead roles in Golden Pennies), it did anger the Australian Writers' Guild: 'The producers claimed that they could not find an Australian writer for the series and so had to turn to English writer Helen Cresswell, a friend of Carol Drinkwater. The Guild disputed this but the production went ahead anyway. Cresswell later produced a novelisation of the series.'

Based on a novel by Norman Lindsay, Saturdee is a fictionalised account of Lindsay's childhood, set in the equally fictional Victorian town of Redheap. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, Lindsay

invented the central character, twelve-year-old Peter Gimble, as a projection of everything he would have liked to have been and he also included a friend of Peter's, Conkey Menders, as a representation of his real boyhood. Saturday was the day the boys and their friends lived for, a time of escape and adventures, after the chores of the week and the coming sabbatical gloom of Sundays.

Moran notes that since the writers and the director/producer had previously been involved with the ABC, it is surprising that this was not an ABC production. Instead, it was commissioned by the Seven Network. Shot over eleven weeks on location in Creswick, Victoria, the program cost $1.3 million to produce, but rated well with its target audience.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, summarises the plot of Flight into Hell as follows:

A German pilot, Hans Bertram, and his mechanic, Adolph Klausmann, left the Dutch East Indies in May that year [1932] to fly to Darwin but a violent storm forced them off course and they landed in the Kimberley Ranges. It was six days before they were discovered to be missing. A search commenced, but unfortunately in the wrong area. After almost a month, the Australian authorities realised that the flyers were not where they were looking and began a new search. The two were eventually found but only after suffering tremendous hardships and deprivations.

The mini-series was based not only on the real story of Hans Bertram and Adolph Klausmann but also on Bertram's subsequent published account of their tribulations. The book sold well and the mini-series had the input of some of the ABC's most experienced professionals but, according to Moran, 'the series as presented on the screen fell fairly flat, perhaps because of the prolonged scenes of privation.'