AustLit

'A shy immigrant from Wales takes a post in a one-teacher bush school. Despite trouble from the children he forms a competition-winning school choir and decides to stay in Kookaburra Springs.'

Source: Screen Australia.

John Grant, a young Englishman, teaches in Tiboonda, a tiny railway junction on the far western plains of New South Wales. He sets off to spend his summer vacation in Sydney but doesn't make it beyond Bundanyabba, a nearby mining town known as 'the Yabba'. Stranded in town after losing all his money in a two-up game, he finds himself engulfed by the Yabba's claustrophobic, nightmarish, beer-fuelled stupor, an atmosphere compounded of repressed sexuality, squalid violence, and the sinister mateship of the locals. After being sexually assaulted by the town's alcoholic doctor, he attempts to hitchhike out of the town but is brought back by a truckie. In anger, he tries to shoot the doctor but ends up only shooting himself. After discharging himself from the hospital, Grant takes the train back to Tiboonda, resigned to another year of teaching.

Like The Adventures of the Seaspray and Barrier Reef, The Rovers was an adventure series based around a ship (in this case, an island schooner called the Pacific Lady). The concept allowed for a great degree of mobility, so that, in Moran's words (in his Guide to Australian TV Series), they 'drop anchor, go ashore and "have adventures".'

The crew consisted of Captain Sam McGill (called 'Cap'), Cap's ten-year-old grandson Mike, freelance wildlife photographer Bob Wild, and journalist for Wildlife magazine Rusty Collins, 'whose editor agreed to her accompanying the party on the boat as long as it doesn't cost him anything' (according to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television).

Moran says of The Rovers that it 'was a bargain basement variation of the Barrier Reef formula' (despite the fact that Barrier Reef didn't air until nearly two years later, in February 1971). But Don Storey similarly notes that

To be fair, The Rovers could not be considered a ground-breaking pinnacle of artistic achievement, following as it does the well-trodden path taken by Seaspray, Skippy and Woobinda. However, for all its predicability and happy ending, The Rovers is a slick, well-produced and entertaining product, with a balance between the dramatic and the light-hearted that appealed to adults and children alike.

The central character in Woobinda is John Stevens, a veterinarian with a practice in the fictitious New South Wales country town of Gattens Creek. A widower, he has a teenage daughter, Tiggie, and an adopted Aboriginal son, Kevin. Stevens is assisted in his practice by Peter Fischer, a German vet, and his friend Jack Johnson, a local bushman. Called 'Woobinda' by local Aboriginals, Stevens has strong compassion for animals and is constantly striving to preserve fauna from what he calls 'senseless slaughter.'

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, describes The Unloved as 'a kind of follow-up to Divorce Court'; like the latter program, it was based on an American format. In The Unloved, however, the focus was on children who (for various reasons) had been brought before a social worker. According to Moran, 'The emphasis was on verbal exposition and voice-over, with movement and scene changes kept to a minimum. Robert Peach served as on-screen anchor for the series, which maintained a strong documentary/realist tone'.

The idea that this was based on an American series is not upheld in contemporary newspaper, which instead describe it as a fictional account of cases heard by A.E. Debenham, a Sydney magistrate who had retired in 1963. According to contemporary reports, 'Marien Dreyer (Mrs. Rodney Cooper in private life) originally sold the idea of "The Unloved" to NUT, who are producing it for TCN9.' (Nan Musgrove, 'Like a Bird in a Golden Cage', Australian Women's Weekly, 24 January 1968, p.17). Dreyer had been involved in preparing Debenham's memoirs for publication, 'was struck with the potential of the material in Mr. Debenham's files and successfully sold the idea to NLT and TCN9' (Nan Musgrove, 'TCN9 Seeks Young Talent', Australian Women's Weekly, 10 January 1968, p.17).

Divorce Court was based on a long-running American documentary series, which, though it marketed itself as presenting real-life divorce cases to audiences, actually presented re-enactments of real-life divorces using actors. Though Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, doesn't specify and information on the program is scarce, the Australian version presumably followed the same model.

According to Moran,

Each episode was hosted by a narrator and fully scripted, with speed and efficiency vital to producers working to network deadlines. Shot in sequence at TCN-9 studios, Divorce Court was tightly scripted in order to avoid reshoots and video editing. This was due in part to the lack of video sophistication at the time. The series was produced on average at a rate of around five episodes per week, which were usually shot in one day. At one stage producers even managed to come up with twenty fully scripted episodes in eight working days.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, The Private World of Miss Prim arose from the successful NLT production Here's Dawn, which, he argues,

lay somewhere between extended sketches and a full narrative. After two seasons, NLT decided to star Dawn Lake in a fully narrativised comedy. The unfortunate vehicle concerned a kind of Walter Mitty situation revolving around a shy, mousy secretary who dreams of romance with a handsome, famous writer.

Set in a children's court, the program was low budget and designed for a daytime audience: as such, it was located inside the courts and adjoining rooms, and emphasised, as Moran notes, 'dialogue and discussion' not 'physical movement and action'.