Cirrus@Austlit

The second part of a two-part episode in which regular character Kate Ramsay is shot and killed.

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.'

'The story of three young people recruited to a secret Australian Government intelligence agency to deal with difficult and occasionally violent security matters.'

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

A television series ostensibly based on Arthur Upfield's series of detective novels, and stemming from a telemovie aired two years earlier.

After protests from Indigenous groups about the casting of a white actor as a descendant of Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, the production was altered to make the character a white man who had once lived with Indigenous Australians. As such, it bears little real connection to Upfield's novels.

The series was not a success, and was cancelled after the first thirteen episodes.

'An insight into the private and working lives of barristers.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'The story of a Melbourne house-wife who becomes a member of parliament.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Like previous Grundy production Waterloo Station, Richmond Hill was an attempt to replicate Crawford Productions' success with the police-drama/soap-opera fusion that was Cop Shop. But like Waterloo Station, it was unsuccessful, limping through a year's worth of poor ratings before being cancelled.

Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series that the program was

designed to fit on the other side of the main evening news, thus hopefully holding viewers already hooked by Neighbours. Although the program had its share of younger characters, it is chiefly remembered for its older players, including the monumental Maggie Kirkpatrick as the pretentious butt of much of the comedy, veteran Gwen Plumb as the caring owner of a boarding house, and Ross Higgins as the police sergeant trying to hold it all together.

Moran also notes that the serial cost $8 million to produce.

Like other Crawford's programs in the 1980s (such as The Flying Doctors), All The Way began as a six-part mini-series, and was spun off into an ongoing series (which began production before the mini-series was screened on Australian television).

Set in the 1960s, the program follows three families through key historical events both abroad (such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and in Australia (such as the Maralinga atomic tests and the Bogle-Chandler case).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program was 'a soap opera neither any worse nor any better than a host of others such as Cop Shop, The Box, The Restless Years or Neighbours', but it 'has an orientation towards the worlds of work and public affairs that, to the extent that one can generalise about the above-mentioned programs, tends to be present in Crawford soaps and missing from those produced at Grundy's.'

Moran is, however, critical of the program's setting, suggesting that the comparative lack of identifiable iconography in the early 1960s means the program 'looks and sounds little different from the present. Instead the viewer has the feeling that the costumes, props and sets were all found at the local Salvation Army depot.' The result, he argues, is that 'the serial just looks old-fashioned and therefore potentially of interest only to older viewers.'

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.

A family saga, following four generations of the Irish-Australian Quinn family (both working class and Catholic) and their intimate involvement in the Australian labour movement. Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, summarises the plot as follows:

Paddy Quinn is a shearer involved in the great shearers' strike of the 1890s that saw the formation of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Married to Maureen, he becomes the lover of Nesta Darling, a silvertail and suffragette. He dies young and his wife becomes both the custodian of his memory and also, in a way, custodian of the founding ideological vision of the ALP. Her children and their children receive the political torch, but somehow drop it. It is only in 1972-73 coinciding with the election of Gough Whitlam and the first federal ALP government for 23 years, that Maureen, now a very old woman, sees her aspirations fulfilled with the decision of her great-grandchildren to join the party and work for the ALP.

Moran notes that some critics dismissed the program as 'Land of Soap', since it concentrates as much on 'more personal and domestic matters such as adultery, divorce and religion, filial betrayal, ideological defection, alcoholism and suicide' as on 'great political events and actors such as the Great Depression, World War 2, Menzies and the Communist referendum'. He does note, however, that 'the series is feminist in its politics, seeing women as the guardians of the social and political equality while men are, for the most part, corrupt, cowardly, unfaithful and chauvinistic.'

The series cost, according to Moran, $4.6 million to produce, but achieved good ratings even when aired against Sixty Minutes.

Frequently described as an 'Australian western', Five Mile Creek was based on Louis L'Amour's 1982 novel The Cherokee Trail, with the action moved wholesale to Australia.

A co-production between the Seven Network and the Disney Channel, the program, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'revolved around two women, Kate Wallace and the American Maggie Scott, who ran a stage way station at Five Mile Creek in New South Wales.' Moran also notes that it 'was the most expensive series ever filmed in Australia up to that time, costing Disney $12 million for the first two series, although this was still thought to be about half of what it would have cost in Hollywood.'

The series did poorly on Australian television but extremely well on the Disney Channel in the United States. According to Moran,

Five Mile Creek was a kind of stunning confirmation that Lew Grade was right all those years earlier in thinking that the Australian outback could be adapted to the genre demands of the western. Indeed in Five Mile Creek the reciprocal parallels and symmetries between America and Australia are pushed in a deliberate and warmly calculating way. The Australian bush is, as it were, transfigured so that it seems intrisically like part of the Old West.

In contrast to this Australian/American fusion that Moran notes in the program's sensibility, he also notes that it had the Disney Channel's 'cultural/commercial values written all over it.'

'A widowed police surgeon tries to save the world at the same time as maintaining a bond with his teenage son.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 28/1/2014)

After Molly suffers a fall at the farm, her and Brendan's son is born prematurely and dies a few days after birth.

Ernie is a fourteen year old who lives with his alcoholic father in the harsh and lawless opal fields of inland Australia. When his precious cache of opals is stolen, Ernie determinedly sets out with a friend to find the thief.

Designed as an antipodean counterpart to glossy American soap operas Dallas and Dynasty, Taurus Rising (which traced the rivalry of two affluent families, the Drysdales and the Brents) cost $4.5 million to produce, but did so poorly on air that it was rapidly shifted to a weekend timeslot (according to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series) and ultimately ran to only nineteen episodes. It did, however, later sell to overseas markets, where it was marketed as an extended mini-series.

A television mini-series based on the best-selling 1955 novel by Catherine Gaskin and produced by the South Australian Film Corporation, Sara Dane is set in the days of early colonial Australia. It portrays the rags-to-riches story of a woman with a driving ambition to achieve independence, power, and wealth, despite having been sent to a New South Wales penal colony for a crime she did not commit.

While Sara is being transported by ship to Australia, officials discover that she is educated. She subsequently becomes a governess for a free couple. She later accepts a marriage proposal from an officer, Andrew Maclay, and together they establish a small property and homestead for their family. When Andrew is killed during the Irish rebellion at Castle Hill, she mourns for a period of time before remarrying, this time to French aristocrat Louis de Bourget. They too have children before de Bourget is killed by a fall from a horse. Vowing to never marry again, despite a close friendship with her Irish overseer Jeremy Hogan (himself a former convict), Sara returns to London with her children. There she meets Richard Barwell, the long-ago sweetheart who gave her the gold necklace that led to her conviction for theft. While they are now free to marry, Sara decides not to stay in England. Instead, she returns to Australia, so as to be among the first to establish farming and grazing land in the newly opened region west of the Blue Mountains.

Set in a small, fictional, New South Wales country town called Wandin Valley, A Country Practice focused on the staffs of the town's medical practice and local hospital and on the families of the doctors, nurses, and patients. Many of the episodes also featured guest characters (frequently patients served by the practice) through whom various social and medical problems were explored. Although often considered a soap opera, the series was not built around an open-ended narrative; instead, the two one-hour episodes screened per week formed a self-contained narrative block, though many of the storylines were developed as sub-plots for several episodes before becoming the focus of a particular week's storyline. While the focus was on topical issues such as youth unemployment, suicide, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and terminal illness, the program did sometimes explore culturally sensitive issues, including, for example, the Aboriginal community and their place in modern Australian society.

Among the show's principal characters were Dr Terence Elliott, local policeman Sergeant Frank Gilroy, Esme Watson, Shirley Dean Gilroy, Bob Hatfield, Vernon 'Cookie' Locke, and Matron Margaret 'Maggie' Sloan. In addition to its regularly rotating cast of characters, A Country Practice also had a cast of semi-regulars who would make appearances as the storylines permitted. Interestingly, while the series initially targeted the adult and older youth demographic, it became increasingly popular with children over the years.

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.

'When Bluey cannot get the co-operation he wants from the Assistant Commissioner, he sets up an elaborate ruse using Truscott, and nearly loses him a close friend. [sic]

'Department B has been given the job of investigating Lonely Hearts Clubs which are somehow involved in burglary of houses whilst women are out on dates set up through the clubs.

'Things start to go wrong when Truscott, in the process of investigating an office, is caught red handed and it appears that he will have to serve time for breaking and entering unless Bluey can come up with a plan to get him off. Bluey's plan, however, gets Truscott into more trouble.'

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):

'BERNIE FIELD Around 35, fair looks, but nothing special. He runs a small chain of lonely hearts clubs which he uses to his criminal advantage.

'GEORGE BURROUGHS 40, a grotty little man, who runs a grotty little club. He works for Field, but runs a prostitution racket on the side.

'ARTHUR RICE 30. works [sic] for Burroughs, knows the ins and outs of the business but is more interested in the prostitution side of the job.

'WALLY WATERS 35/6, a good thief who has the respect of the police as a square shooter. It is only by accident that anyone gets hurts when he works, but that's no excuse.

'JUNE PETERS 40 odd, a lonely woman, looking for companionship. Victim of the racket.

'JOHN LEACH Not at all good looking, inthe [sic] same age group as June. He isa [sic] male equivalent of her.

'FAT SALLY Wow. Around 35. Very large but a delightful person. Sense of humour and happy.

'FORENSIC MAN Happy in his work.

'DETECTIVE Knows how to tap a phone.

'UNIFORM P/c [sic] Seen once.

'GIRL Bash victim.

'BEAUTY Young, ravishing -'.