AustLit

Based on the real events surrounding the lives of Jessica 'Chubbie' Miller and ex-RAF pilot/adventurer Bill Lancaster, the screenplay follows Miller's departure for England in the early 1920s in search of adventure. There she meets and falls in love with the already-married Lancaster and becomes involved in his unsuccessful attempt to be the first person to fly from Britain to Australia. It also focuses on the murder of Haden Clarke, Miller's American biographer and the man she was also having an affair with. Although Lancaster was charged with Clarke's murder, Miller stood by him and he was eventually acquitted. The series ends with Lancaster's ill-fated attempt to beat Amy Johnson's new record flight from London to Capetown. After his plane disappears in the Sahara Desert, Lancaster's wife and mother prevent Miller from mounting a search and he is eventually presumed dead. An epilogue details the discovery twenty-nine years later of Lancaster's remains and his diary.

The telemovie that, two years later, spawned a television series.

The telemovie is ostensibly based on Arthur Upfield's character, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. The protagonist is initially presented as a descendant of the original Upfield character but, following protests from Indigenous Australian groups, the role was modified and he became simply a white man who once lived with Indigenous Australians.

Neither the telemovie nor the series have any strong connection to Upfield's novels.

'Young Anna and her mother arrive in New Zealand after her father is killed in a tragic accident in Australia. Anna dreams of owning a horse but her mother is afraid to let her as it was a horse that killed her father. A wild brumby terrorises the mean-minded landholder, Garrett, and despite all his attempts to kill the horse, it continually outsmarts him. The horse, declared untameable and possessed, meets young Anna and together they make Garrett realise he cannot be the ruler of everything.'

Source: Screen Australia.

In this futuristic drama (set only a few years in the future), a journalist sets up a politician to take a fall, but things do not turn out quite as planned.

Mini-series based on the best-selling autobiography by A.B. Facey, tracing his life from the late nineteenth century through Gallipoli and into marriage, fatherhood, and later life.

The mini-series was successful on Australian television, but Moran is unflattering in his appraisal: 'The mini-series was in effect a lovingly authentic visual and aural recreation of the novel. The trouble was that what was a pleasure to read on the printed page was pretty much insufferably boring to watch on screen. The narrative was far too anecdotal and the performances of brothers Dominic and Benedict Sweeney as Facey were dull.'

'It is about a precocious 13-year-old's passion for his doll-like and daffy sister-in-law.

'Rose [...] is a child-like creature who is more attuned to the adolescent wave-length of her brother-in-law than the neurotic tensions of her husband.

'Poor husband Michael (David Downer) is a dentist only because he flunked medical school, a taboo never to be mentioned in his parents' liberal Jewish home but when it is, Michael is sent spinning into gloom and Rose is sent spinning off with Norman (Tony Owen).

'Dad (Warren Mitchell) is a successful dress manufacturer and Mum (Myra de Groot) is a successful Jewish mother for whom chicken soup can cure every form of over-indulgence including sex to every form of under-achievement including sex.

'Michael is Mum's special target because after a couple of years' marriage he and Rose are still childless – a topic that is the subject for discussion with friends and relatives throughout their community.

'In the background we have Charles (Barry Otto), a faded wolf in garish clothing who has left his gin-swilling and nagging wife (Sandy Gore) to live with a strikingly glamorous model.'

Source:

'John Michael Howson', Australian Women's Weekly, 22 September 1982, p.184.

After getting into trouble back home in England, mining engineer Alec Hamilton journeys to Australia to try to start a new life, and quickly becomes involved in the fortunes of an abandoned goldmine.

For detailed episode-by-episode synopses, see Film Details.

'A young boy befriends an Aboriginal man and a pelican. One day he is forced to choose between his beloved companions and the often cruel outside world.'

Source: Screen Australia.

A co-production between the ABC and television companies in both Scotland and Germany, the series followed the adventures of the survivors of the Mary Jane, wrecked in her passage across the Pacific with a mixed group of passengers, including convicts, militia, and settlers. The survivors, finding themselves on what Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, calls 'a nondescript Pacific island', accustom themselves to their new surroundings, including interacting with the island's native occupants and with the survivor of an earlier shipwreck.

As a co-production, the series used British, German, and Australian actors, and a mixed British and Australian crew. According to Moran, 'The series was not the first ABC drama series shot on film but it was to be a sign of things to come at the newly acquired Atransa Studios at Frenchs Forest. There the trend was towards coloured film productions with fairly high production values, often historical in setting, in familiar genres such as action adventure and in conjunction with overseas investors'.

An Australian, German, and Scottish co-production filmed on location in Sri Lanka, Elephant Boy was an adaptation of 'Toomai of the Elephants', a story from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). 'Toomai of the Elephants' had already been made into a successful 1937 film (also called Elephant Boy), starring Sabu, and the earlier film largely overshadows the later re-make.

The program has no discernable Australian content, but did include some Australian actors, notably Kevin Miles (who played Prince Paddam) and Ric Hutton (who played Colonel Shannon). It also employed Australian script-writers, including Tony Morphett. Post-production took place at the Artransa Park studios in Sydney.

The first episode of Elephant Boy, 'The Tyrant', is available on YouTube:

Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrxYbVh_z2A&feature=related

Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbecrbNuLPM&feature=related

(Sighted 27/10/2011)

Recreates the fraught relationship between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine at the end of the nineteenth century.

The world of a turbulent but brilliant concert pianist.