AustLit

'The gaiety of St Kilda's famous Esplanade is marred by the violence of gang warfare and the police who struggle to control it. When a gang leader is found dead outside a travelling boxing tent, Phryne's investigation leads her into the dangerous but thrilling world of fight rigging and tribal payback.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 26/2/2014)

'When the fresh corpse of Professor Katz turns up in place of a cadaver in Dr Mac's anatomy lecture she demands that Phryne and Jack, now estranged, work together in her interest. As the pair step around each other to investigate the murder — and the disappearance of a valuable manuscript — a web of college pranking, politics, and eugenics theory looks set to unravel.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 26/2/2014)

'Inspired by a Kerry Greenwood short story and set amidst the passion and fanaticism of 1929 Australian Rules football. When Phryne is duped into investigating the coach's missing 'lucky cap', she discovers a gruesome murder instead. The local team captain is found hanging by a rival team's scarf and it seems at first a clear-cut case of murderous sabotage.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 26/2/2014)

'Phryne heads off for a quiet holiday at the seaside holiday town of Queenscliff, confident she will not be disturbed by an investigation. However, buried treasure and pirate legends bubble to the surface in the seaside holiday town. When Aunt Prudence insists Phryne help an old school chum whose holiday mansion has been burgled, Phryne and Jack discover the summer paradise is not so perfect — and Phryne finds herself at the pointy end of a Spanish dagger.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 26/2/2014)

'13 episode series about a family that runs a debt collection business.

Warm, funny and moving, Tricky Business looks at the lengths people go to get themselves out of trouble - financial trouble, emotional trouble, growing up trouble, relationship trouble... things we all have to deal with at some time or other. Nine's exciting new Aussie family drama looks at the lengths people go to get themselves out of trouble.'

(Source: Channel Nine website)

'Based on the novels of Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Our lady sleuth sashays through the back lanes and jazz clubs of late 1920s Melbourne, fighting injustice with her pearl handled pistol and her dagger-sharp wit. Leaving a trail of admirers in her wake, our thoroughly modern heroine makes sure she enjoys every moment of her lucky life.'

Source: Inside Film and Television website

The first Underbelly series to be produced outside Australia, Underbelly NZ was scripted entirely by Australian-based (New Zealand-born) script-writer John Banas.

It covers the activities of 'Mr Asia' (Marty Johnstone) in the mid to late 1970s.

'Set in the homicide squad of a large metropolitan city, this is a punchy one hour drama series about murder mystery and a group of young committed cops, focused on justice for the deceased. Jennifer Mapplethorpe, ambitious and intelligent; Simon Joyner, keen, cool, self-assured; Duncan Freeman, living high, ready to fall; and Matt Ryan, intense and driven. In Homicide, it's not always crooks and low-lives, most murders are committed by ordinary people - a moment of madness, a failure of communication, a desperate act. These Detectives follow a profession that makes blood, grief and drama just part of their normal day. Their day begins when your day ends.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive.

A short-lived television series about idealistic young police officers in an inner-city Sydney area, Young Lions did not rate well, and was not renewed for a second season.

'There's soul searching all round when Senior Sergeant Lance Rorke dies in a freak accident during a Water Police operation. What was supposed to be a simple surveillance of suspected drug importers, turned into a high-stakes, high-energy shoot out with gun runners. Everyone feels they could have done something to save their friend.

'Alex, whose informant led them to the container wharf where the shootout took place, blames herself for pushing for Water Police involvement hoping to get one over the drug squad. Reilly's car broke down on the way to the scene causing him to abandon it and continue on foot, leaving behind his two-way radio. From a distance he could see the impending danger, but without a radio he couldn't warn his colleagues. Quinn who'd had a big night out was caught short by nausea and the vital seconds he took to vomit saw him arrive on the scene too late.

'Perhaps the heaviest weight is on Hawker's shoulders. He's the man responsible for everyone and their actions. Keeping the group together as ever is Jack Christey. He mourns a good friend but know they cannot blame themselves for the actions of a scumbag. But all the self-examination doesn't stop.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 12/6/2013)

'The Metro is a funky inner city block where there are as many stories as there are apartments, where a cafe and a community police station make up the ground floor, and where the penthouse (and indeed most of the building) is owned by a corrupt businessman who enjoys the irony of living 'above the law'.

'Created by veteran Australian television writer Tony Morphett (Blue Heelers, Water Rats) and wife Inga Hunter, Above The Law invites the viewer into a 'vertical village' where a host of colourful characters form firm friendships and relationships based on humour, respect, love and lust.

'When 'Vegas' Pete Murray is sent to jail, his unsuspecting daughter Olivia (Alyssa-Jane Cook) is forced to move into The Metro. While she confronts her father's murky past, she finds herself struggling to control his empire, and learning to live with the other inhabitants of The Metro.'

Source: McElroy All Media (http://www.mcelroyallmedia.com.au/index.php?page=above-the-law). (Sighted: 19/4/2013)

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.

'Inspired by true events, Stingers reveals the shadowy and ambiguous world of undercover cops — people with covert lives and constantly changing identities. They are police who defeat crime from within the criminal world — always without a badge and frequently without protection. The series follows the lives of the operatives as they befriend and betray those on the other side of the law. For these select few, it is a deadly way of life.The undercover cops of Stingers are a unique breed. They must juggle their own lives — love, laughter, family and humanity — with the tension of the criminal personas they adopt in their passion for justice.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 7/6/2013)

Mirror, Mirror II was a sequel to Mirror, Mirror, but only in so far as both programs involved travel between two time periods through the agency of a magic mirror, allowing people who live in the same house at different times to interact with one another. The two programs were closely linked aesthetically, including identical title sequences. However, the programs had very little overlap in script-writers.

In this series, Daniel and Fergus McFarlane (from the late 1990s) and Constance de Lutrelle (fom the 1860s) travel between each others' time periods, experiencing culture shock from such events as sealing (in the 1860s) and school discos (in the 1990s). As with the original series, there is also a significant object over which the protagonists struggle: in this case, a mysterious crown.

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

When fourteen-year-old Jo Tiegan is given an antique mirror by a mysterious antique-shop owner in 1995, she finds she can travel through the mirror's surface into her bedroom as it was in 1919. She and the house's previous occupant, Louise Iredale, become firm friends, but find themselves caught up in two interlocking mysteries: the presence of a container of toxic chemicals in Louise's neighbour's well (which seriously injures two of Jo's classmates during an archaeological excavation in 1995) and the entrapment of Nicholas Romanov (the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich) by Louise's neighbour, who has smuggled him out of Russia in the hopes of selling him to the highest bidder.

Mirror, Mirror was a co-production between Australian-based Millennium Pictures (founded five years earlier by show creator Posie- Graeme-Evans) and New Zealand-based Gibson Group.

The program was successful and highly awarded, and was followed two years later by a loose sequel, which shares nothing with the original series but the basic premise of time travel through a mirror.

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes.It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

A one-hour soap opera focusing on life in a gritty inner-city suburb.