AustLit

In the days of our old news blog, we ran an intermittent series on 'Australian firsts', in which we drew out of the database such moments as the first Australian to be nominated for an Oscar, to hold a life membership in the Directors' Guild, to work as a professional script-writer. (The original series can still be read here.)

For this new instalment, we're asking "Who was the first Australian writer to have a television play produced?"

One thing is certain: Australians wrote for television long before television made it to Australian in September 1956. The most prominent example is perhaps Sumner Locke Elliott, who left Australia in the late 1940s with a view to writing for television in America: he felt (quite rightly) that television was the coming medium, that it would outstrip both radio and the stage, for both of which he had been writing. His first television script was broadcast in 1949.

But Elliott is not the first Australian to have a television play produced and broadcast. That honour, it seems, goes to much more obscure figure: Henry James.

No, not that Henry James: Henry Colburn James, sometimes called Harry James, an Australian writer who, while working in the UK in the mid-1940s, had two television plays produced back-to-back on the BBC: The Bunyip (broadcast 8 December 1947) and Crock of Gold (broadcast 19 February 1948).

We know very little about either of these television plays, save that both were set in Australia–and that The Bunyip bids fair to be the very first Australian-written television play to be produced and broadcast.

A series of blog posts dredging up Australian firsts from the AustLit archives.

Film came early to Australia. The Lumière brothers showed the first film to ever be publically screened in Paris in December 1895: Australians began their own public screening of films in October 1896, and starting making their own films within a matter of weeks after that.

But these early films were not dramatic films: they were sporting documentaries such as The Melbourne Cup or slice-of-life documentaries such as Passengers Alighting from Ferry Brighton at Manly (both 1896). Indeed, feature films were thin on the ground in Australia until the release of The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906 (after which you couldn't stop Australians from making films–at least until the 1930s).

But The Story of the Kelly Gang isn't the earliest dramatic film script written in Australia. That honour might just go to Henry Lawson instead.

Yes, that Henry Lawson.

In 1898, Lawson published a piece called 'The Australian Cinematograph', and, to quote The National Film and Sound Archive, 'Anticipating the development of dramatic cinema, Lawson wrote his story, "The Australian Cinematograph", with clear directions for the camera.'

The script wasn't filmed until a full fifty years after Lawson's death (when, just to add to significant moments in Australian film history, it became the first film on which Australian great Dean Semler worked as cinematographer) but that doesn't make it any less of a contender for the first dramatic film script written in Australia.

(If you have a Flash plug-in, you can watch the film here, via the ABC.)

For other posts in this series, click here.