AustLit

'Jack Flange takes a job as an oyster farmer on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. To help his sister, who's recuperating after a car accident, he robs an armoured van at the Sydney Fish Markets and immediately mails the money to himself. The money never arrives and he begins to suspect the close-knit community on the river, even Pearl, the girl he's falling in love with. Meanwhile his boss, Brownie, believes his oysters are going bad because his wife has left him. Brownie's Irish father plots a strategy to solve all their troubles.'

(Source: Australian Screen website)

A trilogy of short stories in which characters are haunted by memories, spirits and ghosts, and bewitched by the past. 'BeDevil captures the allusive quality of parochial, local, familial ghost stories, the sort of stories that are passed down through generations, that are repeated and embroidered upon so that eventually they are woven into quotidian discourse and a passing reference can evoke a complex texture of ghostliness' (Lesley Stern, Photofile).

Adapted from Ruth Park's novel of the same name, The Harp in the South is a six-part mini-series that follows the lives of an impoverished Irish-Australian family during the late 1940s. The Darcy family have moved from the bush to a housing-commission enclave in inner-city Sydney: a world of sly grog shops, prostitutes, pimps, and boarding houses. The father, Hughie, was a shearer's cook who lost his job through alcoholism. Although he is now able to hold down a job, his pay is often docked because he's recovering from a hangover. The family is held together by Mumma Darcy, a kindly but uneducated woman who still cannot get over the loss of her son, who disappeared as a child many years ago. The Darcys' two remaining children are Dolour (who is still at school) and Rowena (who works in a local factory). In order to make ends meet, the family take in boarders, some of whom are quite strange.

Based on the autobiography of a woman (otherwise unidentified in the text) who worked as a housekeeper for the writers Dymphna Cusack and Florence James, Caddie is set in Sydney between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s. The narrative concerns a respectable woman from the suburbs who walks out on her unfaithful husband. With no money and two children to feed, she takes a job as a barmaid. Having never been in a pub in her life, Caddie is confronted with the horrors of the 'six o'clock swill', as desperate men cling to the bar, vomiting and urinating where they stand, rather than lose their place. She eventually learns the trade with help from fellow barmaid Josie (Jacki Weaver), while learning also about the people and lifestyles of those who inhabit the inner-city districts. Following a brief and disastrous affair with Ted, an SP bookmaker, she falls in love with Peter, a charming and sophisticated Greek immigrant, who is also still married. When Peter is called back to Greece as the effects of the Depression increase, he promises to return as soon as he can. Caddie, in the meantime, finds herself alone, without a job or the money to feed her children.