AustLit

According to Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series, Holiday Island was something of an attempt to emulate the appeal of the American television series The Love Boat. Set on a tropical island holiday resort, the concept was, as Moran notes,

a good one with the potential for a continuous series of new characters in the guide of holiday guests, and the possibility of romance and other entanglements between them and the regular characters who worked at the resort. The opportunities for the intervention of nature in the shape of such happenings as cyclones and storms, and the appearance from time to time of more eccentric and enigmantic characters who had come to the island, offered promise.

But the program was broadcast without fanfare in the middle of the ratings season, to replace the poorly rating Bellamy, and only managed moderately good ratings. It was cancelled in 1982.

Set in early colonial Australia, Luke's Kingdom follows the various fortunes of Jason Firbeck, who emigrates to Australia with his three children, and his son Luke, who is far more suited to life in the new country.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program 'is not only a drama concerned with a man's settlement in a savage, hostile wilderness but is also a psychological drama wherein the son displaces the father. Jason is shown to be ineffective in the new land in contrast to Luke, who is a down-to-earth pragmatist who takes what he wants.'

A British and Australian co-production--both financially and in terms of cast and crew--the program did well when it aired on the Nine Network.

The Long Arm centres on an unidentified department of the Victoria Police headed by Inspector Dallas Buchanan. The cases involve all manner of crimes including those which would normally be handled by other specialist units.

Source: TV Eye Classic Australian Television

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.

Contrabandits was a fifty-minute procedural series following the Customs Special Branch, an elite group of law-enforcers intercepting contraband in Sydney.

Colin Free was script editor for the series (as well as scripting several episodes).

Source:

Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series

Storey, Don. Classic Australian Television http://www.classicaustraliantv.com/contrab.htm (Sighted 13/9/11)

See also:

Musgrove, Nan. 'Contrabandits'. Australian Women's Weekly 4 October 1967, p.17.

'Smuggling Theme of New Series'. Canberra Times 18 September 1967, p.15.

Set in the fictional Waratah National Park (NSW), the Skippy series focuses largely on the adventures of a young boy, Sonny Hammond, and his intelligent pet kangaroo, Skippy. Sonny is the youngest child of Head Ranger Matt Hammond. Matt was left a widower in his early forties when his wife Mary died not long after Sonny was born. Other principal characters are Sonny's older brother Mark, Flight Ranger Jerry King (the park's helicopter pilot), and Ranger Clancy Merrick, the teenage daughter of another park ranger.