AustLit

Despite post-dating the third film in the series by some thirty years, this instalment is said to fit in the timeline somewhere between films one and two.

Max Rockatansky, trapped in the citadel of warlord Immortan Joe, crosses paths with Imperator Furiosa, who is on a mission to free Joe's enslaved 'brides' and take them to the Green Place, the Land of Many Mothers.

In this sequel to Happy Feet, Erik, son of the tap-dancing Mumble and his mate Gloria, struggles to find his own place in the penguin colony, just as his father did. In Erik's case, though, the situation is complicated when he meets a penguin who is able to fly ...

Mumble, a young penguin living in the Antarctic, is the only penguin in his colony who is unable to sing: all other penguins attract mates by singing their 'heartsong'. But Mumble can do something that no other penguin has ever been able to do: tap dance. And with this talent, he can not only attract his soulmate but also stop the over-fishing that is endangering the penguin population.

In this sequel to 1995's Babe, the sheep-pig Babe returns to Farmer Hoggett's farm after his victory in the sheep-dog trials. Farmer Hoggett resists any attempt to profit from Babe, but when the farmer is injured and unable to work, it is up to Mrs Hoggett and Babe to brave the big city in an attempt to save the farm.

Unlike its predecessor, this film is not based on a Dick King-Smith novel.

Based on the novel The Sheep-Pig by British writer Dick King-Smith, Babe follows the adventures of a plucky piglet who is separated from his mother, brought to Farmer Hoggett's farm, and adopted by Fly, a kindly sheep-dog. His desire to emulate her and her mate, Rex, leads to farmer Hoggett training him as a 'sheep-pig' and entering him in the local sheep-dog trails, despite the derision of the other farmers.

'Sydney film editor Robert Gibson's personal video diary of his own tangled love life, a camcorder true romance. At the outset he's in love with the spirited April, but two days after she goes to London, he meets Gianna the beauteous in a bar. She serves the drinks, he points the camera and is smitten. What to do? Video technology has given everybody the chance to be the star of their own life, and Gibson takes that idea to its obsessive conclusion.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 20/5/2014)

Set in 1965, Flirting is the sequel to The Year My Voice Broke. Danny Embling is now seventeen and a full-time boarder at St Alban's College. Although Danny's stutter and unsportsmanlike physique make him an object of derision to many of his fellow students, his life isn't all bad: he has a perfect view of Circester College, his college's sister school, from his dormitory window. The narrative follows his friendship with Thandiwe Adjewa, the daughter of an African Nationalist on an academic post in Canberra and a student at Circester. Danny and Thandiwe become kindred spirits, lovers, and problems for their teachers, whose methods of maintaining control are long detention sessions and a good thrashing with the cane. The only support they receive is from Nicola Radcliffe, Circhester's head prefect, who is sympathetic to their plight.

Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by American author Charles Williams, the narrative concerns an Australian husband and wife who take a yacht cruise after the death of their child. They rescue a man who is the only survivor aboard a schooner drifting in the ocean. Unknown to them, the man has murdered his crew mates.

'Following the death of her mother, Katrina Stanton leaves Australia in search of her father. She meets Arkie Regan who talks his way into her lonely life. A brief and romantic sojourn in Goa turns into an extended nightmare when a Thailand stopover reveals a quantity of heroin in Katrina's luggage. Regan vanishes and Katrina is facing execution if she is found guilty of drug trafficking. Only her elusive father, Hal Stanton, can save her.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 21/1/2014)

Family saga tracing fifty years of the Eastwick family, beginning when Richard Eastwick flees the industrial pressures of the late nineteenth-century English Midlands to pursue a life as a drover and land-owner in the Australian outback, only to face a succession of losses: the death of his first wife in childbirth, the death of his eldest son in World War I, the kidnapping of his daughter by her deranged maternal grandfather, the death of his second son in World War II, the accidental drowning of his third son and eldest grandson on the family property, his youngest grandson's (and son-in-law's) death as a prisoner of war in World War II, and the eventual destruction of his dynastic hopes when his only remaining grandchild becomes a nun and devotes herself to a life of celibacy and poverty.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes that

The Dirtwater Dynasty has been variously likened to a morality tale from the Bible, a western, an epic tragedy; an adventure story; and much else -- and certainly, as hybrid, The Dirtwater Dynasty is variously all or none of these things. In fact, The Dirtwater Dynasty, despite containing all kinds of richnesses in the shape of idea, characterisations, incidents and narrative subtexts, is finally much less than the sum of its parts. Indeed with The Cowra Breakout, it is finally the least interesting and rewarding of the Kennedy Miller mini-series.

A television film in which a senior police officer heading up a new anti-corruption squad discovers that the corruption runs all the way to the top of the ranks.

Source: MemorableTV.com (http://www.memorabletv.com/australia/tvac2.htm). Sighted 4/11/2011

A fictionalised account of the crash of a light plane in the dense foliage of the Great Dividing Range in 1937, and the location of the crash and rescue of the survivors by a local bushman.

'Biographical film of Damien Parer, newsman at the front in New Guinea during World War II.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 20/5/2014)

Historical mini-series following a single family through eight years of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War: Douglas Goddard, a senior public servant working in Canberra; his dillusioned wife Evelyn; his son Phil, who is first conscripted to Vietnam and then returns as a regular soldier; and his daughter Megan, whose love for the son of a migrant worker leads her to Sydney and the anti-Vietnam movement.

Moran argues, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'Vietnam has a wonderful complexity, majesty and sweep in its treatment of the years 1964-72'. While praising the compexity and elegiac nature of the program's treatment of inter-personal relationships, he adds,

The sweep of Vietnam is equally impressive -- the ability to narratively marshall a long series of events into a chain that connects history and the personal, a chain that begins in 1964 behind closed doors but increasingly could not be contained there, bursting out into the public arena of the media, the streets, the judges and finally the ballot box. And equally, Vietnam is a majestic document that fills an important space in the Laborist view of Australian politics created by the mini-series in the 1980s.

The mini series enjoyed enormous popularity when it was screened on Australian television.

A coming-of-age story, The Year My Voice Broke is set in a New South Wales country town in 1963. Fifteen-year-old Danny Embling's life is complex. Not only does he have to deal with teenage development, death, and departure, but his evolving relationship with a girl called Freya also begins to reveal the town's deepest secrets.

Mini-series dramatising the breakout of Japanese prisoners of war from a camp in the New South Wales town of Cowra, which led to the deaths of 231 Japanese prisoners. Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that it 'became a Bridge on the River Kwai in reverse, with the strategy of the mini-series being to stress heroism, as well as stupidity and cowardice, both on the Japanese and the Australian side.'

Moran notes that this mini-series employed the same approach as previous Kennedy Miller productions (including 'intensive workshops for actors, directors and parts of the crew'), but was 'the least dramatically successful of the Kennedy Miller series'. Nevertheless, it was sold to both Great Britain and Japan.

Some fifteen years after the events of Mad Max 2, when civilisation has been all but destroyed by the nuclear war, former policeman Max continues to roam the Australian desert, this time in a camel-drawn vehicle. When father-and-son thieves Jebediah Senior and Junior use their jury-rigged airplane to steal his possessions and his means of transportation, Max makes his way to Bartertown. A cesspool of post-apocalyptic capitalism powered by methane-rich pig manure, Bartertown is ruled by two competing overlords: Aunty Entity and Master (who rides around on the back of his hulking underling, Blaster). Seeking to re-equip himself, Max strikes a deal with the haughty Aunty to kill Blaster in ritualised combat inside Thunderdome, a giant jungle gym where Bartertown's conflicts are played out in a postmodern update of bread and circuses. Although Max manages to fell the mighty Blaster, he refuses to kill him after realising Blaster has a developmental disability. Aunty's henchmen murder Blaster anyway, and then punish Max for violating the law of Thunderdome: 'two men enter, one man leaves.' Lashed to the back of a hapless pack animal and sent out into a sandstorm to die, Max is rescued by a band of tribal children and teens. The descendants of the victims of an airplane crash, the kids inhabit a lush valley and wait for the day when Captain Walker, the plane's pilot, will return to lead them back to civilisation. Some of the children refuse to believe that the glorious cities of their mythology no longer exist, and set off in search of civilisation on their own. Max and three tribe members subsequently set out to rescue them from Bartertown and Aunty Entity.

Dramatisation of the 1932-1933 Ashes tour of Australia, otherwise known as the 'bodyline' series, after the controversial fast leg theory bowling ('bodyline') practised by the English cricket team in an attempt to counter Don Bradman's skill as a batsman.

Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, links the mini-series to the earlier Kennedy Miller production The Dismissal, arguing that 'Although ostensibly a change in subject matter (from politics to sport)', Bodyline is 'a further fascinating portrait in tyranny'. Moran also argues that the use of archival footage 'authenticated the series, augmenting its claims to truth, while the material shot for the series narrativised and dramatised the original footage'.

The series was shown over four successive weeks, and produced excellent ratings for Channel Ten.

Dramatisation of the political events leading up to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on November 11th 1975.

In this sequel to the original Mad Max, Max finds himself involved with a small group of settlers who live around a small working oil refinery, producing that most precious of products in a post-apocalyptic society: petrol.