AustLit

'Lisa McCune stars as Dr Sam Stewart, the Sherlock Holmes of tropical medicine and the head doctor in the only medical clinic for the Great Barrier Reef Islands. Sam leads a handful of dedicated practitioners hoping to extract the hidden secrets from venom that have the power to cure some of the world's most fatal diseases. On a daily basis, her small team of medics deals with everything from deadly snakebites and jellyfish stings, to divers with the bends and tropical diseases that can spread like wildfire. But it's not all medical emergencies and dramas for the vendomdocs on Hope Island. Life's also an adventure — wind surfing, scuba diving, abseiling, and at night, kicking back at the Backpackers Hostel, and in the steamy, romantic tropical nights at the end of a long day, maybe even finding love.'

Source: Australian television Information Archive. (Sighted: 1/5/2014)

A co-Australian and German television series, Dance Academy revolves around Tara Webster, a young woman who has grown up on property in outback Australia all the while dreaming of becoming a dancer. When she makes it into the National Academy of Dance, Tara realises that her life is about to change forever. As the series progresses, she also comes to realise that she is not alone in this journey.

This British/Australian co-production comedy/adventure series spins off the character of the robotic dog K9 from the British television series Doctor Who. Because the programme is not a BBC production, it cannot make direct references to Doctor Who. Similarly, K9 was radically redesigned for this show, because although Bob Baker (creator of K9 and co-creator of the original character) owns the character rights to K9, the BBC owns the rights to the original character design.

The concept for K9 was developed by Australian writers Shane Krause and Shayne Armstrong, who also serve as primary writers for the programme. Other Australian writers involved in the show include Queensland-based writer Jim Noble and comedian Ian McFadyen.

The programme is filmed and produced in Brisbane, Australia, but set in near-future London.

'Enter the world of Medical Defence Australia, a medico-legal organisation that exists to defend doctors and where necessary compensate patients. All cases at MDA combine elements of law and medicine so each case is managed by a doctor and a lawyer who agree on how to proceed. It's a unique organisation that delves into morally complex and emotion filled relationships between doctors and patients.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive (http://www.australiantelevision.net/mda/mda.html). (Sighted: 22/2/2013)

A short-lived television series about idealistic young police officers in an inner-city Sydney area, Young Lions did not rate well, and was not renewed for a second season.

'The detectives of the Kingsway Major Crime Squad fight to preserve their Pacific Paradise. Crime knows no boundaries—from the Miami-like streets of Sylvania Waters, all dark glass and pontoons, to the towering cranes on the Container Wharves of Botany Bay, bordered by the white beaches and blue water between Monterey and Hungry Point. This is our world. It's tough. It's beautiful. Dangerous. A contradiction.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 12/6/2013)

'Murder is the ultimate crime. It touches the lives of ordinary people, casting its long shadow over the glossy cityscape and glamorous haunts of the sprawling metropolis. For homicide detectives Steve Hayden and Tessa Vance, solving a murder is a journey from darkness into light. An urgent, vicious confrontation with evil, a walk through the devil's own world.

'Tessa and Steve are the elite new face of homicide. She is young and brilliant, he is logical. She is instinctive, he goes by the book. She's complicated, he's down to earth. Together this powerful partnership must confront and overcome the intrigue, fear and shattered lives which murder leaves in its wake.'

Source: McElroy All Media (http://www.mcelroyallmedia.com.au/index.php?page=murder-call). (Sighted: 19/4/2013)

The authors above are those credited as script-writers for the series. A number of other authors were also credited with 'story': Jennifer Rowe is the most frequently credited, but other authors credited with 'story' are Leanne Williams, Duncan Ball, Kel Richards, Jenny Pausacker, Kerry Greenwood, Richard Hall, Peter Gawler, John Banas, Jean Bedford, Karen Petersen, and Helen Robinson.

'A fast-paced television drama set within the fascinating environment of a State Coroner's office complex. Each day a team of highly trained professionals deal with the questions of deaths, murders, accidents, suicides, fires, drownings and even the odd natural cause. We see their battles with grieving families, slow or meddling authorities and organized crime, from the initial inquiry through to the courtroom appearances and the Coroner's final verdict and recommendations for trial or reform.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive (http://www.australiantelevision.net/statecoroner/statecoroner.html). (Sighted: 8/3/2013)

An edgy and off-beat crime series that relies heavily on humour, contemporary music, and a touch of the bizarre, centring on the character of Elvis Maginnis. An ex-cop from the wrong side of the tracks, Maginnis now runs his own dry-cleaning business but still finds himself drawn into the shady side of life.

'Set in a newspaper, MERCURY looks at the lives of journalists and their relationships with the paper and each other.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'The film tells the story of a future where the environment has been ravaged, leaving the world desolate. Two surviving factions, the New Territories and the Federal Republics, have been at war for 40 years. Finally, they have agreed to peace terms thanks to the efforts of the Central Union (CU). One of the security experts for the CU, Anne (Bock), decodes the encrypted messages of her boss, only to discover that one of the security zones has suffered a deadly contamination. Mysteriously, she dies shortly thereafter, leaving her soldier husband Leo (Phelps) devastated. To recuperate, Leo is assigned to guard duty at the border outpost named Zone 39. The remainder of the film deals with Leo's struggle to cope with isolation and the death of his wife. She appears to him in hallucinations, perhaps brought on by the tranquillizers he has been taking'.

Source: Wikipedia. (Sighted: 31/5/2012)

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

An American/Australian co-production, this series was a revival of the original 1964 - 1967 series Flipper.

The show's production is sharply divided between seasons one and two on one side and seasons three and four on the other.

Seasons one and two aired in first-run syndication in the US, as American television networks turned away from funding comparatively expensive one-hour dramas in the late 1980s and 1990s. These two seasons were made in Australia and took advantage of local directors and other crew, but, notably, the script-writers were exclusively American (as far as they have been traced).

For seasons three and four, Flipper left first-run syndication and aired in the US on the new network PAX TV (now Ion Television). These two seasons were also made in Australia and directed by Australians, but for the first time, they also used Australian script-writers: of the writers who have been traced for seasons three and four, all of the season three writers and the majority of the season four writers are Australian.

For full information on the script-writers, see the list of episodes on the film details page of this record.

'It's a story about justice...and the corruption of justice. JANUS is about the lawyers, police, judges and magistrates who work with a very imperfect system. The focus of our story will be the new Director of Public Prosecutions Officer, taking over the handling of all Committals for trial - the first sweeping changes recommended by the Janus Taskforce Committee.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes.It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

'A hard-edged, gritty drama about the tense and claustrophobic world of a Major Crime Task Force set up to solve an urban terrorist bombing, a Task Force which brings together a crew of idiosyncratic, competitive characters over a knife edged maximum stressed two months. PHOENIX is no traditional cop shop or crime story. Its characters are not clean, super hero cops, just real police whose attitudes can be shocking and whose humour is grim and black.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)

A humorous anthology series comprising six self-contained live-action comedies, each dealing with one day in the lives of various children whose best-laid plans for the day go very wrong, putting them in situations they could never have imagined.