Cirrus@Austlit

According to a review in the Times

A good Hitchcock title that. In fact. Fixation, Miles Tripp's story of a young man's fixation for an older woman and the older woman's fixation with the young man and her husband's various fixations might even make a Hitchcock thriller, with a few more corpses added in.

[...]

We were supposed to keep wondering if the youth really did have an unhealthy fixation or if his love for the attractive older woman was only normal. And was the husband himself all that normal? Had not he devoted his youth to caring for his widowed mother and married only later in life? Did he not feel guilty that his father drowned trying to save him? Did he now have a fixation about the permissive society and sex? The husband was a barrel of neuroses. But for some reason, perhaps a very good one, McKenna played him as if he were constantly stifling a yawn.

In the end, which did finally come, although for a while I held little hope for it, the husband threw the kid into the sea (they were on a boat), and the wife then had a fixation that they boy killed himself for love of her while the husband had two drowned men to have flashbacks about.'

Source:

Reynolds, Stanley. 'Fixation', The Times, 18 December 1973, p.9.

'A young and talented research worker's past as a member of the Communist Party begins to affect his career and marriage.'

Source: BFI (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/262021). (Sighted: 9/10/2013)

A review in The Times notes:

The setting–big business in Australia–is exotic enough to inspire immediate interest. The situation–an electronics expert up against it because his employers have found out his background and want his resignation or a guarantee that he will be 'sensible'–should give rise to some gripping drama, especially in the inevitable board room confrontations.

And so it did, despite too many awful lines (cliché and whimsy) which an efficient editorial blue pencil would have removed. The character of the chairman of the board was credibly ruthless and practical, and the hero, cussed, always ready (even eager) to stick his neck out, but basically weak, an obvious case of a martyr complex, was maddening but believable.

Source: 'A Case of Martyr Complex', The Times, 27 June 1962, p.15.

An adaptation of Ralph Peterson's play The Square Ring.

Described by Valda Marshall in the Sydney Morning Herald as 'The story of two sisters living in a remote house on the edge of a swamp'.

Source:

Marshall, Valda. 'TV Merry-go-round', Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 1960, p.45.

The ABC's second live television play (after Leslie Rees's Sub-editors' Room, broadcast in late 1956).

According to contemporary newspaper reports:

The play co-stars Don Crosby as Dr. Arthur Ross, a nuclear physicist convicted of treason, and Bruce Beeby as Manning, a ruthless secret service man. The play tells of Dr. Ross' attempt to rehabilitate himself as a citizen after serving a prison term.

The Australian Women's Weekly also notes that the play 'has been specially adapted for TV in words and camera shots', but the author responsible for the adaptation has not been traced.

Source:

Musgrove, Nan. 'Television Parade', Australian Women's Weekly, 12 June 1957, p.12.