AustLit logo
form y separately published work icon Whose Baby? series - publisher   film/TV  
Adaptation of Whose Baby? Martin Thomas , Colin Duck , 1984 single work non-fiction
Issue Details: First known date: 1986... 1986 Whose Baby?
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Described by Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, as 'a curious, even an eccentric mini-series in terms of the narrative threads it works in the course of its four hours', Whose Baby? recounts a real-life legal struggle in the 1940s, in which Gwen and Bill Morrison became convinced, largely at the urging of Gwen's mother, that their baby daughter had been accidentally swapped at birth with the daughter of Jess and Noel Jenkins. The case dragged on for several years through several appeals, but the appellate court ultimately upheld the Jenkins' insistence that the daughter they had brought home from the hospital was their biological child.

According to Moran,

the viewer still has the distinct impression that there is one narrative too many in Whose Baby?. The producer was aware of this problem of coherence and thus the mini-series has a flat, off-screen voiceover whose commentary guides much of the overall narrative. While this commentator knows more than any of the characters, my knowledge still does not extend to the heart of other events in the hospital when the two girls were born within minutes of each other. Were they switched? Whose Baby? parades its bafflement with this question from beginning to end.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 20 Dec 2013 14:33:00
X