AustLit

'David Homer, AATE Life member, has been keeping a diary for nearly 70 years. He recently 'bequeathed' ten of his diaries (1994-2004) to the AATE archives. This selection covers the years when David served on AATE Council and was successively president of SAETA, AATE and IFTE. During David's time on Council he was heavily involved in many curriculum initiatives, including the implementation of the NPDP (particularly in South Australia), the development of the STELLA standards project, and the creation and delivery of the IFTE 2003 conference in Melbourne. The diaries are an engaging example of hypertext, a rich collage of descriptions, anecdotes, reflections, mementoes and 'things to do' of an insider's take on the organisational life of professional teaching associations (and the personalities and politicking involved), as well as the wider political and educational contexts in which they work. It is a narrative interwoven with two others. One, that of David's 'day job', first in teacher education, then professional writing. And two, that of his vibrant personal and social life. The sustaining sociability of community is a key subtext informing all aspects of the diaries.' (Publication abstract)

'Luke Truman is a junior officer on board the USS Leviathan, the most advanced and powerful warship ever built. It is an eight-hundred-foot-long submarine which, among its vast array of weaponry and secret systems, boasts a top secret “cloaking technology.” Bending light around objects to render them invisible, it is the hottest military research innovation not just in the US, but throughout the world. Now the time has come for the first large-scale trial of its effectiveness. But neither Luke nor the United States government realizes the astonishing forces this experiment will unleash. What Luke discovers on board the Leviathan is that the future of our world is at a deadly tipping point and that only he will be able to stop the cascade of events which are leading them all inexorably towards doom.

'A breakneck story of nonstop suspense, The Year of the Locust is a high-concept thriller unlike any you’ve read before.'

Source: publisher's blurb

Can you commit the perfect crime? Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation. But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book. What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

Source: Publisher's Blurb

Based on an incident in the western suburbs of Sydney in 1968, in which ex-criminal Wally Melish was mistakenly believed to be holding his girlfriend hostage: the siege ended with NSW Commissioner of Police Norm Allen acting as witness to the wedding of Melish and his 'hostage'.

Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by American author Charles Williams, the narrative concerns an Australian husband and wife who take a yacht cruise after the death of their child. They rescue a man who is the only survivor aboard a schooner drifting in the ocean. Unknown to them, the man has murdered his crew mates.

'Following the death of her mother, Katrina Stanton leaves Australia in search of her father. She meets Arkie Regan who talks his way into her lonely life. A brief and romantic sojourn in Goa turns into an extended nightmare when a Thailand stopover reveals a quantity of heroin in Katrina's luggage. Regan vanishes and Katrina is facing execution if she is found guilty of drug trafficking. Only her elusive father, Hal Stanton, can save her.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 21/1/2014)

Family saga tracing fifty years of the Eastwick family, beginning when Richard Eastwick flees the industrial pressures of the late nineteenth-century English Midlands to pursue a life as a drover and land-owner in the Australian outback, only to face a succession of losses: the death of his first wife in childbirth, the death of his eldest son in World War I, the kidnapping of his daughter by her deranged maternal grandfather, the death of his second son in World War II, the accidental drowning of his third son and eldest grandson on the family property, his youngest grandson's (and son-in-law's) death as a prisoner of war in World War II, and the eventual destruction of his dynastic hopes when his only remaining grandchild becomes a nun and devotes herself to a life of celibacy and poverty.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes that

The Dirtwater Dynasty has been variously likened to a morality tale from the Bible, a western, an epic tragedy; an adventure story; and much else -- and certainly, as hybrid, The Dirtwater Dynasty is variously all or none of these things. In fact, The Dirtwater Dynasty, despite containing all kinds of richnesses in the shape of idea, characterisations, incidents and narrative subtexts, is finally much less than the sum of its parts. Indeed with The Cowra Breakout, it is finally the least interesting and rewarding of the Kennedy Miller mini-series.

A television film in which a senior police officer heading up a new anti-corruption squad discovers that the corruption runs all the way to the top of the ranks.

Source: MemorableTV.com (http://www.memorabletv.com/australia/tvac2.htm). Sighted 4/11/2011

Historical mini-series following a single family through eight years of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War: Douglas Goddard, a senior public servant working in Canberra; his dillusioned wife Evelyn; his son Phil, who is first conscripted to Vietnam and then returns as a regular soldier; and his daughter Megan, whose love for the son of a migrant worker leads her to Sydney and the anti-Vietnam movement.

Moran argues, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'Vietnam has a wonderful complexity, majesty and sweep in its treatment of the years 1964-72'. While praising the compexity and elegiac nature of the program's treatment of inter-personal relationships, he adds,

The sweep of Vietnam is equally impressive -- the ability to narratively marshall a long series of events into a chain that connects history and the personal, a chain that begins in 1964 behind closed doors but increasingly could not be contained there, bursting out into the public arena of the media, the streets, the judges and finally the ballot box. And equally, Vietnam is a majestic document that fills an important space in the Laborist view of Australian politics created by the mini-series in the 1980s.

The mini series enjoyed enormous popularity when it was screened on Australian television.

Some fifteen years after the events of Mad Max 2, when civilisation has been all but destroyed by the nuclear war, former policeman Max continues to roam the Australian desert, this time in a camel-drawn vehicle. When father-and-son thieves Jebediah Senior and Junior use their jury-rigged airplane to steal his possessions and his means of transportation, Max makes his way to Bartertown. A cesspool of post-apocalyptic capitalism powered by methane-rich pig manure, Bartertown is ruled by two competing overlords: Aunty Entity and Master (who rides around on the back of his hulking underling, Blaster). Seeking to re-equip himself, Max strikes a deal with the haughty Aunty to kill Blaster in ritualised combat inside Thunderdome, a giant jungle gym where Bartertown's conflicts are played out in a postmodern update of bread and circuses. Although Max manages to fell the mighty Blaster, he refuses to kill him after realising Blaster has a developmental disability. Aunty's henchmen murder Blaster anyway, and then punish Max for violating the law of Thunderdome: 'two men enter, one man leaves.' Lashed to the back of a hapless pack animal and sent out into a sandstorm to die, Max is rescued by a band of tribal children and teens. The descendants of the victims of an airplane crash, the kids inhabit a lush valley and wait for the day when Captain Walker, the plane's pilot, will return to lead them back to civilisation. Some of the children refuse to believe that the glorious cities of their mythology no longer exist, and set off in search of civilisation on their own. Max and three tribe members subsequently set out to rescue them from Bartertown and Aunty Entity.

Dramatisation of the 1932-1933 Ashes tour of Australia, otherwise known as the 'bodyline' series, after the controversial fast leg theory bowling ('bodyline') practised by the English cricket team in an attempt to counter Don Bradman's skill as a batsman.

Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, links the mini-series to the earlier Kennedy Miller production The Dismissal, arguing that 'Although ostensibly a change in subject matter (from politics to sport)', Bodyline is 'a further fascinating portrait in tyranny'. Moran also argues that the use of archival footage 'authenticated the series, augmenting its claims to truth, while the material shot for the series narrativised and dramatised the original footage'.

The series was shown over four successive weeks, and produced excellent ratings for Channel Ten.

Dramatisation of the political events leading up to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on November 11th 1975.

In this sequel to the original Mad Max, Max finds himself involved with a small group of settlers who live around a small working oil refinery, producing that most precious of products in a post-apocalyptic society: petrol.