AustLit

One of Australia's highest rating dramas, All Saints is a Logie Award-winning Australian medical drama set in the fictional All Saints Western General Hospital in suburban Sydney. The stories originally focused on the nursing staff of Ward 17 run by Nursing Unit Manager Terri Sullivan. It was sometimes referred to as the 'garbage ward' because it took the overflow of patients.

In 2004 Network Seven producers overhauled the series in an effort to increase the show's gradually dwindling audience. They achieved this by closing down Ward 17 and transferring some of the staff to the Emergency Department managed by Frank Campion. Several other new lead characters were also introduced. The changes also saw the storylines begin to focus more on the lives of the doctors and nurses.

Another significant change to the series came in early 2009 when the producers introduced the Medical Response Unit. Central to this development was the helicopter which took doctors to rescue situations outside the hopsital and which in turn brought patients to the All Saints Emergency Department. The show's name was also changed at this time to All Saints: Medical Response Unit. The increased production costs created by having scenes shot on location played a part, however, in the series being cancelled mid-year. The series ended with the Emergency Department and Medical Response Unit teams having a dinner to farewell the last remaining original character, Von Ryan on her final day at All Saints.

All Saints was popular in many countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium and Iran.

'Based on the classic children's novel by Gerry Glaskin about two children who are left as orphans after their mother dies. They discover they are to be placed in separate orphanages and decide to run away to England to join their grandparents, their only surviving relatives. On the way they are befriended by a young Indigenous Australian, Frank, who helps them reach their goal.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 20/5/2014)

Butterfly Island follows the travails of Charlie Wilson and his children, who are determined to retain the tropical beauties and charm of Butterfly Island, but face such difficulties as the competition from nearby resorts, unscrupulous land developers, and shipwrecked boys with mysterious pasts and unwittingly criminal tendencies.

Moran points out in his Guide to Australian TV Series that the program made use of the same locations as its predecessor, Fauna Productions' Barrier Reef, and 'promoted the kind of tourist image of Australia, so much a feature of Fauna's work'. Indeed, he argues,

Butterfly Island was conceived principally in terms of the formula of 'likeness and difference' so much a feature of Fauna Productions in the 1960s and 1970s, with likeness in the form of father, mother, kids, adventures, odd characters, comedy and adventure; and difference in the form of the Great Barrier Reef, the Whitsundays, Australian beaches, outdoor life, sun and sand.

As such, the program relied heavily on location shooting, and was comparatively expensive by Australian standards.

The program employed a local cast, but Moran points to such American actors as Ann B. Davis, Cameron Mitchell, and Susan Strasberg in cameo roles.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, summarises the program's concept as follows:

Fanny Crowe is a young woman brought to the colony as a governess by the Female Middle Class Emigration Society. They want her to establish a school in the town as required by a bequest set aside for that purpose. The only available building is what was formerly an old hotel, dilapidated and said to be haunted by the ghost of Maria Blackburn, a murdered mother of three. Not to be deterred, Fanny sets about establishing the school with the townspeople all against her. Her only allies are the blacksmith, Joseph McCormack, and the local clergyman, the Rev. Dalton.

As Moran notes, The Haunted School is in many ways a companion text to Golden Pennies: both co-productions between the ABC and Revcom, the two series used a number of the same crew members, and both starred British actress Carol Drinkwater.

Moran emphasises that although this production did not draw the ire of Actors Equity (which had objected to the casting of Drinkwater and fellow British actor Bryan Marshall in the lead roles in Golden Pennies), it did anger the Australian Writers' Guild: 'The producers claimed that they could not find an Australian writer for the series and so had to turn to English writer Helen Cresswell, a friend of Carol Drinkwater. The Guild disputed this but the production went ahead anyway. Cresswell later produced a novelisation of the series.'

Frequently described as an 'Australian western', Five Mile Creek was based on Louis L'Amour's 1982 novel The Cherokee Trail, with the action moved wholesale to Australia.

A co-production between the Seven Network and the Disney Channel, the program, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'revolved around two women, Kate Wallace and the American Maggie Scott, who ran a stage way station at Five Mile Creek in New South Wales.' Moran also notes that it 'was the most expensive series ever filmed in Australia up to that time, costing Disney $12 million for the first two series, although this was still thought to be about half of what it would have cost in Hollywood.'

The series did poorly on Australian television but extremely well on the Disney Channel in the United States. According to Moran,

Five Mile Creek was a kind of stunning confirmation that Lew Grade was right all those years earlier in thinking that the Australian outback could be adapted to the genre demands of the western. Indeed in Five Mile Creek the reciprocal parallels and symmetries between America and Australia are pushed in a deliberate and warmly calculating way. The Australian bush is, as it were, transfigured so that it seems intrisically like part of the Old West.

In contrast to this Australian/American fusion that Moran notes in the program's sensibility, he also notes that it had the Disney Channel's 'cultural/commercial values written all over it.'

Series following the role of a priest in an inner-city Sydney suburb.

Now an extremely obscure text, Timelapse, aired in 1980, followed the struggle for revenge of computer genius Douglas Hardy: cryogenically frozen in the late 1970s after a failed assassination attempt by corrupt politicians, Hardy is accidentally awoken in 1991, to find that the politicians of his own time have only increased their power. In this new fascist future, Hardy seeks revenge against those who tried to kill him.

In a 1981 interview with star Robert Coleby, Greg Flynn notes that 'Although a rocketing success with sci-fi enthusiasts, Timelapse received few critical bouquets' ('Robert Coleby: Levkas Man is Everyone's Cup of Tea', Australian Women's Weekly, Wed. 25 Feb. 1981, pp.170-71).

For example, one particularly scathing contemporary review (by Cul Cullen) notes:

'There is a whisper abroad that Colin Free wrote the script. I can't believe it. I hope he sues those responsible for this vile slander. ... Cleverly, the ABC has slotted Timelapse against very popular shows on the commercial channels. That way, you see, it might slip by unwatched by anybody.

'And no awkward questions will be asked as to why public money is wasted on such inept nonsense.'

Source: 'Culled Out', Australian Women's Weekly, Wed. 14 May 1980, p.213.

However, Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, says instead that

'Timelapse was a surprisingly good thriller cum piece of adult science fiction much in the manner of the excellent British cult series Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan. However, where Prisoner was ultimately metaphysical in suggesting the impossibility of either escape by the central figure or his capacity to overcome his captors, Timelapse chose to be more pragmatic in having Hardy finally defeat his enemies.'

An adventure series following the experiences of a naval patrol boat, Patrol Boat rated reasonably well on Australian television and sold well overseas. Made in co-operation with the Royal Australian Navy (which, Moran points out in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'had been trying to get something similar onto the screen for almost eight years'), the series made use of two naval patrol boats for open-sea shooting, including (for the second series) the Fremantle class patrol boat HMAS Defiance.

Moran notes that 'Guest stories included pursuing drug runners, helping a stranded refugee boat and destroying an old mine that had become dangerous to shipping. Each self-contained episode was constructed around two stories, one usually working around an individual sailor while the other concerned a larger group'.

Patrol Boat was the first program in which series creator James Davern's production company, JNP Film, had an active involvement, but Moran notes that JNP Film 'simply packaged scripts for the first series'. Their involvement was greater in the second series, which was made much later.

'An industrial chemist, involved in high security research, suspects his wife of infidelity. But she also has her suspicions. In devious attempts to outwit each other, and gain the upper hand, they discover the shocking and unexpected truth–leading them into a nightmare that changes their lives.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 5/2/2014)

'In 'Going Home' Miles Newton, a happily married successful businessman, leaving the office on this 40th birthday, catches a hint from his secretary that his wife may have plans for a surprise celebration. He drives home, but outside the brightly lit house, where the familiar circle of friends and family are concealed, waiting to explode with the inevitable greetings and happy jibes, he impulsively turns the car around.

Miles heads through the night to the country town in which he grew up, seeking to renew contact with those who were part of his youth — and perhaps, through them, with his youth itself.

A chance encounter with a young girl, hitchiking [sic], threatens to wreck not only his nostalgic homegoing, but also his relationship with his wife and children.'

Source:

'Wagstaff Playhouse', Canberra Times, 29 April 1977, p.19. View via Trove.

A co-production between the ABC and the BBC, 'in association with 20th Century Fox', Ben Hall was a thirteen-part historical drama series about bushranger Ben Hall (1837–1865). Famous as a bushranger who never killed anyone but was nevertheless shot dead by police under the Felons Apprehension Act 1865, Hall was the ideal candidate for a drama series in an era in which Australian television was becoming increasingly fascinated with the dramatic possibilities of its colonial past.

Quoted in 1974, Andrew Osborn (BBC's Head of Drama series) summed up the possibilities as followed:

'The thing that makes Hall so interesting is, he tried to make a go of the land. He married a local landowner's daughter and settled down. But through persistent police persecution, beginning when he was falsely arrested for highway robbery, he was forced into a life of crime. He was a very handsome man, had many sympathisers in the districts where he operated, and was a magnificent horseman. What better story could you have? It's wonderful.' (Australian Women's Weekly, Wed. 27 February 1974, p.10).

The full-page advertisements with which the program was marketed also summed up this approach to the narrative, reading:

'This gang is going to capture a dozen or more police, rob 10 mail coaches and raid 21 towns and homesteads. BEN HALL: From law abiding cattleman of the Weddin Mountains to embittered outlaw. This is the saga of Ben Hall. Tough. Colourful. A desperate period of Australian History.' (See, for example, Australian Women's Weekly, 10 September 1975, p.8).

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

One of Australia's earliest television dramatisations of its gold-rush era, Rush is, as Don Storey points out in his Classic Australian Television, in many ways two entirely separate programs: between series one and series two, the setting shifts from the Victorian goldfields to a New South Wales mining town, and jumps forward from the 1850s to the early 1860s. However, both series take place in the same universe, use the same chronology, and have a clear internal coherence, centred on the continuing character of Sergeant Robert McKellar. Therefore, they are generally treated as two separate series of a single program.

(The differences in cast, crew, writers, and directors between the two series are given in detail in the film details section below.)

With its enormous, intricate, expensive, and accurate sets, costumes, and props, Rush proved extremely popular with viewers, despite series one airing in an awkward weeknight 8pm slot (which, as Storey notes, put it against the second half of the highly successful Homicide in Melbourne). Series one did, however, attract some criticism for being filmed in black-and-white when colour programming was only a matter of months away in Australia.

Series two (which drew on foreign financing to cover its cost, an extremely high--for a domestically produced program--$24,000 an episode) was made in colour. Following Sergeant McKellar (the only character to carry over from series one), series two pushed the character forward through two disillusioning events (the Eureka Stockade, which prompted McKellar's resignation from the Victoria Police, and the death of his wife Sarah) and dropped him into the conflicts of a small New South Wales mining town.

Series two was also extremely popular but, according to Storey, plans for series three were shelved when the new Fraser government instituted (among other things) a hefty budget cut to the ABC.

Series one gained renewed prominence in the 1990s when, like police procedural Bluey, it was re-dubbed and sent up on The Late Show (as The Olden Days).

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'.

'World War II soldier Jim Lindsay tries to restore family rapport with his resentful motherless son, Kevin.'

Source:

[Television guide], The Canberra Times, 4 July 1974, p.13

'Jack Thompson [...] stars as Dave Morgan, an experienced driver with a company called Macleod's.

'After a personal tragedy he deliberately risks his job by breaking one of the company's strictest rules.

'The situation flares at management level, with the company owner, John Macleod, needing a good driver in a hurry to avert a disaster for an American mining magnate, Phillip Mather.'

Source:

'All about Truck-driving', Australian Women's Weekly, 9 May 1973, p.10.