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.

'Staff in an emergency department of a large Australian hospital have become addicted to the adrenalin rush they experience while dealing with life and death emergencies.'

Source: Screen Australia.

An American/Australian co-production, this series was a revival of the original 1964 - 1967 series Flipper.

The show's production is sharply divided between seasons one and two on one side and seasons three and four on the other.

Seasons one and two aired in first-run syndication in the US, as American television networks turned away from funding comparatively expensive one-hour dramas in the late 1980s and 1990s. These two seasons were made in Australia and took advantage of local directors and other crew, but, notably, the script-writers were exclusively American (as far as they have been traced).

For seasons three and four, Flipper left first-run syndication and aired in the US on the new network PAX TV (now Ion Television). These two seasons were also made in Australia and directed by Australians, but for the first time, they also used Australian script-writers: of the writers who have been traced for seasons three and four, all of the season three writers and the majority of the season four writers are Australian.

For full information on the script-writers, see the list of episodes on the film details page of this record.

'GLAD RAGS is about a girl with a vivid imagination who lives with her mother above their costume hire shop. A crooked property developer tries to take over the building but is outwitted.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 11/4/2014)

'Detective Martin Bullet is in trouble. After killing a young kid in a drug bust, he comes to terms with his conscience by starting a new life in Australia. But life is not as he imagined 'downunder'. Assigned to a tough undercover cop, Jack Moran (described by his colleagues as a 'walking time bomb'), Martin Bullet gets caught up in the explosion of a major drug ring and the choice of walking away.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 6/2/2014)

A 'second-generation' Skippy, with Ranger Hammond's younger son Sonny grown up and running an animal-based theme park, Habitat, on Australia's Gold Coast, in company with his ten-year-old twins, Jerry and Lou. The theme park is adjacent to a national park, bringing in Ranger Dave as a character, along with Sonny Hammond's housekeeper Thelma and assistant Kate.

A period drama that focuses on the adventures of Davy Marriner, from being robbed in the desert to teaming up with cattle drover Bluey Dallas.

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.

'Damien Shard is going to rid the world of the demon rock 'n' roll and spread the word of the Lord. Catapulted into the future on his psychotronic alpha sampler, he sets his sights on Mickey La Grange, an unsuspecting sound engineer' (Source: Screen Australia).

A comedic fantasy made-for-television film in which a security company conjures up computer-generated 'ghosts', to scare people away from buying certain properties, allowing the company to snap them up at auction for a fraction of their worth. The system works until the appearance, apparently from nowhere, of a mysterious couple.

Set during the Depression, the story follows a Queensland family who uproot and move to the goldfields after the father hears of a strike.

An attempt to re-invoke the popularity that police procedurals had enjoyed a decade earlier, Special Squad was the most expensive program produced in Australia up to 1985 (at $150,000 per episode), yet received such lukewarm ratings that Channel Ten chose not to commission a second series.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

it was good to watch, with expert stunt work and special effects. With well-paced narratives, intelligently and nicely worked out situations and plenty of emphasis on the villains and victims, Special Squad was just as watchable and entertaining as Homicide had been in its last series.

According to Moran, the failure of Special Squad lay both in its difference from and its similarity to Homicide. The novelty (of Australian accents and Australian locations) that had helped make Homicide so successful was no longer in play, and 'the sight of tough men (on both sides of the law) made the program [Special Squad] seem very old-fashioned. In addition, the plethora of other Australian dramas on air at the time gave viewers more than enough alternatives.'

In 1937, on a small dairy farm at Nulla Nulla Creek (three hundred miles north of Sydney), an eleven-year-old boy, David Gordon Kirkpatrick, decided to change his name and become a country music star. The Slim Dusty Movie is 'the story of a man who believed in a dream that he had and the woman who stands by his side. The war years when a young boy's hopes of a recording contract are almost dashed forever, the courting days when he meets Joy McKean, the woman he will later marry, the radio shows of Sydney in the late 1940s, the travelling carnival sideshows of the 1950s - the good times, the bad times. For forty years he's been on the road.' (Source: The Slim Dusty Movie soundtrack liner notes)

Filmed over 20,000 kilometres in a variety of rural towns, truck stops, highways, bush tracks, Aboriginal tribal lands, rodeo arenas, and concert halls, the fim combines historical recreations, concert performances, and candid on-the-road footage of Slim Dusty, his family, musicians, and road crew. The biographical aspect celebrates fifty years in the life of a legendary Australian country music artist. The live performances include some of his greatest hits, including 'Where Country Is,' 'Walk a Country Mile,' 'When the Rain Tumbles Down in July,' 'How Will I Go with Him, Mate?,' 'Pushin' Time,' 'Cunnamulla Feller,' 'Lights on the Hill,' and the all-time classic 'The Pub with No Beer.'

Based on the novel by Marcus Clarke, this is a relatively faithful adaptation, though Moran (in his Guide to Australian TV Series), tracing the connections between this narrative and various other nineteenth-century works, suggests that

For the Term of His Natural Life ceases to have anything much to do with the convict cycle in the mini-series that extend from Against the Wind to The Fremantle Conspiracy. Instead it has a lot more to do with series such as Return to Eden. Indeed, in viewing the series, the viewer experiences a strong surge of pleasure not only in the narrative but in the handsomeness of the settings and costumes, and cinematography but most especially in the star/character recognitions.

The program used a number of international actors (largely, Moran suggests, to increase saleability to overseas markets), including Patrick McNee (The Avengers) and Anthony Perkins (Psycho). At a cost of $5.6 million, it was the most expensive mini-series so far produced for Australian television, but was comparatively well received in Australia and distributed overseas.

The full-page advertisement that the ABC took out in the Australian Women's Weekly positioned the series as follows:

The ABC is proud to present The Timeless Land, the saga of a tough and bloody fight for survival. Starring Michael Craig, Nicola Pagett, Angela Punch McGregor and Ray Barrett.

Meet our first settlers, and share their struggle to shape a nation. Ellen Prentice, convict saved from prostitution by Stephen Mannion, ruthless man of property ... Conor, Stephen's gentle Irish bride ... Arthur Phillip, hapless governor of an ungovernable colony ... Governor King, so despised he was lampooned in the streets ... Bligh, seen by so many as a tyrant.

Source: Australian Women's Weekly, Wed. 3 Sep. 1980: p.172S

An adventure series following the experiences of a naval patrol boat, Patrol Boat rated reasonably well on Australian television and sold well overseas. Made in co-operation with the Royal Australian Navy (which, Moran points out in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'had been trying to get something similar onto the screen for almost eight years'), the series made use of two naval patrol boats for open-sea shooting, including (for the second series) the Fremantle class patrol boat HMAS Defiance.

Moran notes that 'Guest stories included pursuing drug runners, helping a stranded refugee boat and destroying an old mine that had become dangerous to shipping. Each self-contained episode was constructed around two stories, one usually working around an individual sailor while the other concerned a larger group'.

Patrol Boat was the first program in which series creator James Davern's production company, JNP Film, had an active involvement, but Moran notes that JNP Film 'simply packaged scripts for the first series'. Their involvement was greater in the second series, which was made much later.

'Set in the Rocks, Sydney. Trevor and Marie are expecting their first child and are doing up Dad's house with the hope of eventually moving in. Chris and Eddie are two amateur criminals who steal a truck, forklift, boxes of salmon and a safe. They weave Trevor into their schemes as they go, with the result that it is Trevor who is eventually caught for the crimes.'

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

Sergeant McKellar is on the trail of a fugitive who is feared to be a kadaitcha man. A sub-plot involves lost children.

'A dying woman confesses that she perjured herself while testifying at her husband's trial. The woman is Mrs. Fielding and her husband was hung twenty years ago for the murder of Hilda Cunningham, a Fitzroy prostitute. He was convicted largely on his wife's evidence. She admits that she did it out of spite. Their son who is on remand for a violent assault feels victimised and bitter. He was eight years old at the time and blames a lot of his own personality problems on his disturbed past.

'Inspector Lawson decides to re-open the case but Mrs. Fielding dies before he can get a signed deposition. Sergeant White brings out the old file and they go about interviewing the surviving witnesses. Neither Dulci Jones (Hilda's flat mate at the time) nor Emma Perkins (a prominent brothel madame) seem to have changed their stories. A break through for the police comes when they discover that Emma is lying about her son, whom she claimed died. It comes to light that he was institutionalised after suffering some traumatic experience in his teen years - about the time of the trial.

'The Homicide police also discover evidence that Dulci had been blackmailing Emma. When they arrive at her house they find Dulci very willing to talk, after Emma had made an attempt on her life. It seems that she killed Hilda after finding her in bed with her son. Detective Redford goes to arrest Emma but she tries to run for it and is fatally injured when she runs in front of a car.'

Source: Synopsis held in the Crawford Collection in the AFI Research Collection (RMIT).

The script held in the Crawford Collection in the AFI Research Collection contains the following character notes (excluding regular characters):

'LAURIE FIELDING: Average height and build, longish hair, lower middle-class accent. Can look after himself in a fight. He's on remand for his first serious crime but already has a record of petty crimes like shoplifting, illegal use, common assault. Laurie is inured to the fact that his Dad was a killer and was hanged. Public reaction to the hanging gave him his start as "victim of society". He's worn the mantle well and developed an enormous chip of his shoulder [sic]. He is the victim of his own weakness.

'MRS. ANNE FIELDING: Close to 60, emaciated. Few scenes and little dialogue but a convincing dying woman.

'MRS. EMMA PERKINS: Fitzroy boarding -house [sic] keeper. Around 60, but physically big, a powerful woman in her time, a bland liar capable of portraying self-pity when required.

'DULCIE TRAVERS: Late 40's. Surprisingly well-spoken and a handsome woman. She has been a beauty but now tends towards butch. A one-time whore she got out out of the business after her friend Hilda was murdered. Like many of her kind she has developed a loathing for men in the sexual sense and seeks the company of lonely women. She convincingly withholds the truth to suit her own ends.

'BARNEY PERKINS: One scene. No dialogue. Late thirties. A vegetable.

'FR. COGHLAN: Mid-30's. Is known to Lawson from past association.

'SNATCHER BENNET: Around 50. Habitual crim but a small timer. Has spent most of his adult life in Pentridge. He's a crim because it's the only thing he can do and he's not much good at that. Small, lightly built, A likeable rogue. [sic]

'PRISON OFFICER (HORTON): About 40, tall and heavily built. Ideally a regional English accent.

'PRISON OFFICER (INTERVIEW ROOM): As above. No dialogue.

'SUSPECT: One scene.

'NURSE: A nun in the hospital where Mrs. Fielding breathes her last. Few scenes. Little dialogue.

'DR. SAYERS: A pompous psychiatrist in his mid 40's. Two heavy dialogue scenes.

'STARK: Average heavy crim. Thinks he's tough until Laurie Fielding starts handing it out.

'DRIVER: Middle-aged truckie. One scene. Some dialogue. Ideally Southern European.

'PLAINCLOTHES DETECTIVES: (TWO): No dialogue. Seen briefly in flashback to 1953.

'HILDA CUNNINGHAM: Dead on arrival in script. Seen in flashback to 1953.

'MEN IN REMAND YARD (FIVE): Seedy collection of petty crims.

'2 PRISONERS (DIGGERS)'.