AustLit

The inspirational boyhood story of Alan Marshall, born in rural Victoria in the early 1900s. As a young child, Marshall contracted poliomyelitis (polio), which left him crippled. He made it his goal to try to overcome his physical disability and live a normal life.

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

After a succession of msyterious sightings that frighten the people living along the coast of the Mornington Peninsula, two young girls, the daughters of a local fisherman, go missing while walking along the beach. Although they return unharmed eight hours later, they have no memory of the time in which they were absent, so their return raises more questions than it answers.

In a review for the Sydney Morning Herald published the day on which the first episode aired, Jacqueline Lee Lewes describes the program as 'A spine-tingling mystery set in a small Victorian seaside town':

'The series gets off to an unusual start with a dream sequence. It's a nightmare which Anna keeps having, a weird, frightening experience which seems to foreshadow evil.

'Despite the beautiful settings, this sense of evil is felt thoughout the first, and presumably the second and final episode [sic] of the trilogy.

'The tension, too, is almost unbearable at times, heightened by the expert use of background music, at times heartbeats, other times the distant sound of waves breaking, and clever camera shots.'

Source: Jacqueline Lee Lewes, 'First the laughs, then a mystery.' Sydney Morning Herald 13 April 1980, p.34.

Series of television plays based on the short stories of Henry Lawson, featuring a number of different, but intertwined, narratives.

Coming-of-age story of a young boy living in Melbourne in 1929.

'A Catholic country woman, Alice Fisher, comes to the city with her husband and children after the failure of their farm. Alice is confused and torn between Catholicism and contraception in a difficult economic situation. Another child is not welcome just now.'

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

Spanning the 1890s to the 1950s, Power Without Glory is the story of a man determined to make something of his life. Raised in a Melbourne slum area, John West later gains wealth and power, his influence extending into his business, his political ambitions, and his family life. The events of his life unfold against a backdrop of major historical events, including World War One and the beginnings of the Australian Labour Party.

The first television production of a play by an Aboriginal playwright, narrated by an Aboriginal storyteller, the 'Cake Man'. The story deals with an Aboriginal family facing emotional traumas, practical problems, and racism as they attempt to adjust to life in white society. The over-riding concern is that the white man's colonisation of Australia has been at the expense of the rights of the native Aboriginal people.

A sequel to A Taste for Blue Ribbons (1973), this children's period drama tells the story of the Byrne family (who run a horseriding school outside Melbourne) and the young daughter seeking to make the Olympic equestrian team.

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).

Based on Cliff Green's AWGIE Award-winning script, Marion follows the tribulations of a World War II-era schoolteacher working in the rural Gippsland area. As Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'she finds that the local townpeople resent her being single. She settles down to teach, putting up with insolence from one schoolboy, befriending another with a record of truancy, and trying to help an illiterate country girl. She becomes attracted to an Italian prisoner of war. The series highlights the different values of the country and the city and the difficulties Marion encounters because she is young, female and single.'