AustLit

'1964-65. Singapore is a city at a crossroads. Political and racial tensions are at fever pitch as the British pull out, and a new nation is about to be born. The lights of Bugis Street have never burned so bright: bootleg copies of Motown songs boom out from street stalls; the Rolling Stones are in town along with tourists and American sailors fresh from Vietnam. They join British and Australian soldiers checking out the prostitutes and gambling dens en route to their own war in Borneo.

This is the city of Sam Callaghan, Patricia Cheng, the CIA’s Conrad Harrison and the clients of the Cheng Detective Agency. The agency’s cases range from the usual (straying spouses and petty fraudsters) to events with international implications and complications. Sam’s contacts from his military days are useful - but they start to drag him back into a dark world that he would prefer to leave behind.'

Source: 'About [Serangoon Road]' http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/serangoon-road/ (Sighted 06/12/2013)

'Against a new and exciting backdrop of prehistoric beasts and shamanism, a clever and talented 12-year-old boy named Enyo, who is learning to understand the language of animals, reads hidden messages and 'sees' glimpses of the future, will take us on a spectacular journey of fantasy, fun and wild adventure.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 16/8/2012)

'Dr Kate McDonald (Rachel Ward) is married to the small farming community of Paringa, where she's been the vet for 15 years. For most of that time she's been hiding a secret, and as a result, refuses to allow anyone to get close to her. Needless to say, she has problems keeping an assistant, something she desperately needs.

'Kate's newest assistant, Dr Jill Blake (Victoria Thaine), is 24 and keen to widen her veterinary experience with farm animals. She's "by the book", enthusiastic, and ready to try new techniques. But it doesn't take her long to realise that she's made a huge mistake in leaving the city for Paringa. Her boss is the rudest person she's ever met and Paringa is not exactly the idyllic country town of her dreams.

'Somehow, these two opinionated women must find a way to come to terms with each other and the difficulties they encounter in supporting the failing district and Kate's overstretched veterinary practice. In the community, well established farmers face ruin as they gamble on re-stocking and re-development. The prolonged drought creates emotional and financial strain on families and people are leaving the land because of financial failure, or because they cannot take any more.'

Source: ABC Shop catalogue

'Young Australians battling the elements to defend Australia’s borders and enforce its economic zone, providing security, surveillance, protection, support and relief for the world’s longest coastline. Our heroes are the officers and crew of Australian Naval patrol boat, Hammersley. Together, they share in the adversity, self-sacrifice and rewards that come with Naval service. Explosive action and monumental stillness. Blue skies and throbbing motors. Mysterious events and deadly consequences. These are the things that characterise SEA PATROL. Everyday heroes doing an extraordinary job.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 7/6/2013)

'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 story of a former footballer and copper turned private eye.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 13/6/2013)

'The Metro is a funky inner city block where there are as many stories as there are apartments, where a cafe and a community police station make up the ground floor, and where the penthouse (and indeed most of the building) is owned by a corrupt businessman who enjoys the irony of living 'above the law'.

'Created by veteran Australian television writer Tony Morphett (Blue Heelers, Water Rats) and wife Inga Hunter, Above The Law invites the viewer into a 'vertical village' where a host of colourful characters form firm friendships and relationships based on humour, respect, love and lust.

'When 'Vegas' Pete Murray is sent to jail, his unsuspecting daughter Olivia (Alyssa-Jane Cook) is forced to move into The Metro. While she confronts her father's murky past, she finds herself struggling to control his empire, and learning to live with the other inhabitants of The Metro.'

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

Peter and Julie find their dream home: a terrace house in Sydney, run down but still mysteriously affordable. As they begin their renovations, the house reveals its secrets. The living-room wallpaper conceals iron plates attached to the walls, but when they remove these, a dark stain begins to grow on the wall: a stain that looks like a man climbing slowly up from beneath the house. They paint over it; it returns, every time. Will the events that took place in the house a century before cost Peter his sanity or both of them their lives?

A mini-series based on Mary Durack's biography of the same name.

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.

When fourteen-year-old Jo Tiegan is given an antique mirror by a mysterious antique-shop owner in 1995, she finds she can travel through the mirror's surface into her bedroom as it was in 1919. She and the house's previous occupant, Louise Iredale, become firm friends, but find themselves caught up in two interlocking mysteries: the presence of a container of toxic chemicals in Louise's neighbour's well (which seriously injures two of Jo's classmates during an archaeological excavation in 1995) and the entrapment of Nicholas Romanov (the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich) by Louise's neighbour, who has smuggled him out of Russia in the hopes of selling him to the highest bidder.

Mirror, Mirror was a co-production between Australian-based Millennium Pictures (founded five years earlier by show creator Posie- Graeme-Evans) and New Zealand-based Gibson Group.

The program was successful and highly awarded, and was followed two years later by a loose sequel, which shares nothing with the original series but the basic premise of time travel through a mirror.

Science fiction in a stricter (and less speculative) sense, Sky Trackers followed the adventures of a group of scientists' children living in a remote space-tracking station in the Australian outback. The program had the romantic component common to young-adult programming (with blossoming romance between thirteen-year-old Nikki and fourteen-year-old Mike), but also focused on such topics as ambition, future careers, and scholastic achievement.

'Fast-paced series spin-off of the hit feature film. Filmed at an abandoned school in Sydney's Maroubra, this program was about an ethnically diverse group of students attending Hartley High School.'

Source: National Film and Sound Archive record.

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.'

'Kate Roberts, a wealthy woman with a dark secret and a drinking problem, marries handsome property developer Sato Mitsuru. A series of weird disturbances in their seventh floor apartment intensifies into a frightening campaign that drives Kate towards insanity before she discovers a conspiracy against her life and fights back.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/7/2013)