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.

'Murder is the ultimate crime. It touches the lives of ordinary people, casting its long shadow over the glossy cityscape and glamorous haunts of the sprawling metropolis. For homicide detectives Steve Hayden and Tessa Vance, solving a murder is a journey from darkness into light. An urgent, vicious confrontation with evil, a walk through the devil's own world.

'Tessa and Steve are the elite new face of homicide. She is young and brilliant, he is logical. She is instinctive, he goes by the book. She's complicated, he's down to earth. Together this powerful partnership must confront and overcome the intrigue, fear and shattered lives which murder leaves in its wake.'

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

The authors above are those credited as script-writers for the series. A number of other authors were also credited with 'story': Jennifer Rowe is the most frequently credited, but other authors credited with 'story' are Leanne Williams, Duncan Ball, Kel Richards, Jenny Pausacker, Kerry Greenwood, Richard Hall, Peter Gawler, John Banas, Jean Bedford, Karen Petersen, and Helen Robinson.

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 Constable Tom Daly (Aaron Pedersen) of the Territory Police is thrown into the position of local man-in-charge, he fears the worst when he learns he is to be teamed up with Detective Sergeant Robert McCabe (Steven Vidler), a no-nonsense city cop with fixed ideas on how proceedings should be conducted. While Tom is a laid back Aboriginal Australian who relies on intuition when assessing situations, Robert is hard-nosed, meticulous and a man who goes strictly by the book. The spate of unexplained murders finds the two men sharing the dangers of the vast open desert space and rugged escarpments as they race against time in a painstaking hunt for a psychotic killer. Their forced time together also finds them combining their individual talents to become a formidable, investigative team.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 28/6/2013)

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.'

Inspired by A. B. Paterson's classic poem and set in a fictional Snowy Mountains township called Paterson's Ridge, this turn-of-the-nineteenth-century adventure concerns wealthy cattle-station owner and widower Matt McGregor and his three children, Colin (the town preacher), Rob (played by Guy Pearce), and Danni (the tomboyish youngest daughter). Unresolved sexual tension comes in the shape of Matt's independent, free-spirited childhood friend, the recently widowed Kathleen O'Neil, who returns to Paterson's Ridge with her son after having spent many years in England.

'Drama series set in and around an Australian embassy in the fictional Islamic country of Ragaan, where day to day diplomacy is the stuff of danger and news headlines rather than privilege and cocktails.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 10/4/2014)

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.

American revival of the 1966 television program, but filmed in Australia (largely in Queensland), and making extensive use of Australian directors and script-writers: eight of the twenty-two writers and five of the nine directors are Australian. As with the earlier version (and the later film incarnations), the program made extensive use of high-tech gadgetry that often crossed the line from science into science fiction.

A comedic adventure series that follows two men (Abel Moore and Charles Willing) living and working on a houseboat on Sydney Harbour, particularly their attempts to keep up payments on the boat. Also living on the house boat are aspiring actress Angela and the young, streetwise Parramatta.

Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that while the series reprised the ABC's The Fast Lane, it was nowhere near as successful a production:

there was little difference between the principal characters, both looking for the main chance. In addition the playing-off of Shane Withington and Grant Dodwell against each other (mildly tolerable in A Country Practice where the two had become fictional bachelors and odd-couple house companions after the departure from the series of their fictional wives) was decidedly threadbare.

Moran notes that this was the first series that Lynn Bayonas produced after leaving A Country Practice, and she had brought with her to the production not only the two main actors but also a number of writers.

Mini series tracing the devastation wreaked on Darwin by Cyclone Tracy during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1974.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the mini-series fall roughly into three sections: the period immediately before the cyclone (in which the main characters are introduced), the night on which the cyclone hit, and the aftermath. As with so many disaster films and mini-series, Moran notes, Cyclone Tracy 'focuses on ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary event. The action is mostly documentary in tone and feeling, though one strand concerned with an American adventurer and a cargo of drugs is melodramatically quite out of keeping with the other stories.'

Moran notes that, American drug-runners aside, the mini-series works because of 'the low-key realism of the stories and the performances, the excellent special effects and sets, and the skilful integration of actual footage'. The program cost $4.5 million to produce.

Mini-series tracing the struggle between two sisters for control of an international fashion house.

According to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series:

Body Business was shot in Sydney at the relatively low cost of $3 million. The series was overseen by current PBL head, Jane Deknatel, following the departure of Ian Bradley. Like Kings, The Great Bookie Robbery and Glass Babies, Body Business continued PBL's stress on contemporary genre series, in this case offering viewers a solid piece of melodrama. However, unlike the great 1980s exercise in the genre, McElroy's Return to Eden, Body Business only achieved moderate viewing figures and has not attracted any permanent admirers.

Adapted from Gabrielle Carey's book Just Us, the story of her relationship with Terry Haley, a long-term prisoner convicted of abduction, armed robbery, escape, and rape. The pair met while Carey, then working as a journalist, was conducting research into prison reform.

Two rovers set tongues wagging in a small town when they happily set up house with an ostracised member of the community (and former part-time prostitute).

'Drama based on a bizarre murder trial which scandalized the people of Sydney in 1865. Louis Bertrand a society dentist, mesmerist, frustrated actor and womaniser, was determined to have Mrs Kinder, a woman of dubious morals, to himself. He openly plotted to murder her hapless multi-cuckolded husband, Mr Kinder. But did he actually commit the crime? In court a strange tale unfolded, recalled by his young dental assistant/part-time magician.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 21/9/2012)

A crime drama devised for Grundy's by Ron McLean (Don Storey suggests, on Classic Australian Television, that it evolved from an earlier concept called The Killer Stalks), Bellamy was not successful when it aired on Australian television.

According to Albert Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the problem was that Bellamy was, by the time it aired, an archaic concept:

Police series production had effectively come to an end in 1975 and women had become a more important part of Australian television, both on screen and in the audience. Yet the Network went against the tide by commissioning this police series starring ex-Homicide star John Stanton in the title role. As conceived and executed by Grundy's, Bellamy and underling Mitch had little or nothing in the way of a personal life and were pitted against monstrous villains, almost invariably murderers who lacked social backgrounds and psychological complexity. As a result many of the episodes had strong similarities, with a two-dimensional Batman and Robin duo pursuing such villains in the threadbare chase narratives.

The program was cancelled even before the first set of episodes had been completed.