AustLit

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.

'Every day is an adventure for the pilots at Big Sky Aviation. A high spirited bunch to start with, they can't help but relish the kind of job that sees them one day flying to a medical emergency on a remote property deep in the outback, the next on a tricky city mission and another soaring over some of the most beautiful tropical coastline in the world. BIG SKY is an action adventure series with heart, humour and nerves of steel.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 9/4/2014)

'Jane Halifax, forensic psychiatrist, aids in the grief counselling of pupils at Blenheim House, a prestigious boys' school, after the death of a teacher. When a pupil is murdered, Jane suspects that the deaths are related.'

'Life in the suburbs as seen through the eyes of the family dog.'

Source: Screen Australia

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.'

Children's adventure television series about children who live on fictional Circe Island, a fishing community and communications base off the coast of Western Australia. The first series featured episodes in which the children outwitted adults, particularly the character Hermes Endakis. The series later emphasised environmental issues, particularly in the second series, where the children try to stop a big corporation from destroying their island.

'An intrepid young entrepreneur takes on the bureaucracy in an ecological detective hunt.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 22/5/2014)

The first television program from prolific children's television producer Jonathan M. Shiff, Kelly follows the adventures of a police dog who, after being injured at work, is sent to recuperate in the country; here, Kelly becomes the constant companion of Jo Patterson and her friend Danny Foster, and manages to ferret out some criminals even in the country.

A rocker whose glory days were twenty years earlier in the 1970s unexpectedly finds that he has twin children when their mother dies in a plane crash and they and their carer move in with him.

'Three children against all odds rebuild a run-down animal park on the central Queensland coast.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 21/5/2014)

An Australian television series which deals with the New South Wales Police Rescue Squad and its work attending to various incidents from road accidents to train crashes.

G.P. is an Australian television series that ran for eight seasons. Set in and around a fictional general medical practice in an inner-city suburb, the storylines explore the professional and personal lives of the doctors and staff who worked there.

Three sisters find their fortunes suddenly and dramatically changed. By agreement with their father, if the three manage living together and running a hotel in the Bondi region of Sydney for a year, the hotel will be theirs.

The series was not a success with reviewers or viewers, and the Canberra Times later described it as 'acclaimed almost universally as a disaster of epic proportions' (David Vine, 'Fact, Fantasy, and the TV Hype-artist', Canberra Times, 22 August 1988, p.6).

Set in a small, fictional, New South Wales country town called Wandin Valley, A Country Practice focused on the staffs of the town's medical practice and local hospital and on the families of the doctors, nurses, and patients. Many of the episodes also featured guest characters (frequently patients served by the practice) through whom various social and medical problems were explored. Although often considered a soap opera, the series was not built around an open-ended narrative; instead, the two one-hour episodes screened per week formed a self-contained narrative block, though many of the storylines were developed as sub-plots for several episodes before becoming the focus of a particular week's storyline. While the focus was on topical issues such as youth unemployment, suicide, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and terminal illness, the program did sometimes explore culturally sensitive issues, including, for example, the Aboriginal community and their place in modern Australian society.

Among the show's principal characters were Dr Terence Elliott, local policeman Sergeant Frank Gilroy, Esme Watson, Shirley Dean Gilroy, Bob Hatfield, Vernon 'Cookie' Locke, and Matron Margaret 'Maggie' Sloan. In addition to its regularly rotating cast of characters, A Country Practice also had a cast of semi-regulars who would make appearances as the storylines permitted. Interestingly, while the series initially targeted the adult and older youth demographic, it became increasingly popular with children over the years.