Cirrus@Austlit

'Alec Costello has run out of options. His career as a high flying Melbourne corporate lawyer has come to a crashing halt after being caught with his fingers in the till. Word is out and no-one along the eastern seaboard will employ him. Where in the world will he find anyone crazy enough to hire someone like him?

'Welcome to Broome, nestled in Australia's remote North-West. Broome is home to the world's finest pearls, the most spectacular beaches and quite possibly, the strangest mix of people—many of whom are running away from something. It is here we also find Riggleton and Marsh, the only law firm in Australia who bothered to reply to Alec's job application.

'It seems Broome has given Alec a second chance after all. One Alec needed.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 10/5/2013)

When the Steadman brothers, familiar with life in the big city, are sent to live with their father in a small town, they can't decide what they dislike most: the local kids or the local environment. But when Trent hears a story from an old pearler about a mythical cluster of South Sea pearls, the Ocean Star, lost in a cyclone forty years earlier, he and his friends set out on a quest, the dangers of which they could never have forseen.

Farscape was an Australian/American co-production, a science-fiction television program combining puppetry and live actors to follow the trevails of American astronaut John Crichton, flung into the far reaches of the galaxy during the maiden flight of his experimental craft.

Farscape made use of puppetry to circumvent the problem of having to present alien life-forms as roughly humanoid in size and shape. However, despite the use of Jim Henson's puppet studios, the program was distinctly adult in tone and content.

Unlike other programs filmed in Australian studios (for example, Terra Nova), Farscape was very strongly a co-production, employing a high number of Australian actors and directors. Over a third of the scripts (thirty of the eighty-eight episodes in the original four seasons) were written by Australian script-writers (see below for details). In addition, two Australian script-writers (Lily Taylor and Grant McAloon) served as script/story editors and another (Justin Monjo) acted as creative consultant.

After its abrupt cancellation, Farscape was succeeded by a number of ancillary texts (including a mini-series, graphic novels, and a role-playing game), but these works were American productions rather than Australian/American co-productions.

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.

Set in a small coastal town against the turmoils of murder, mystery and romance, Heartland deals with the death of an Aboriginal girl and the doubts concerning the guilt of her boyfriend, who is arrested for her murder. Vincent Burunga, an Aboriginal police liaison officer working in the town, is an outsider to both the local Aboriginal people and the white justice system, and he finds himself constantly on the edge caught between two cultures trying to understand each other. It explores the developing relationship between Vincent and the newly arrived Elizabeth Ashton. Both are convinced of the young man's innocence but must endure hostility from both the white and black communities and get past the obstacles of their different backgrounds.

The narrative also follows the people from this seaside community and their battle to restructure their own way of life and their struggle to restore their belief in a positive future, despite the obstacles in their path.

Produced by the same television production company responsible for the successful medical drama G.P., Law of the Land moved away from the inner-city urbanity of G.P. Set in the fictional small town of Merringanee, series one involves the arrival in town of young magistrate Peter Lawrence, who (thanks to a stolen car and a long-buried body) learns that the locals have their own way of enforcing the law.

Series two involved a different character, Kate Chalmers, unravelling the truth behind Peter Lawrence's death.

The program ran to a total of four thirteen-episode series, yet it is obscure enough today that little information about it is readily available.

Cinematographer Brendan Lavelle did, however, contribute an article to Metro Magazine ('A Day in the Life: The Work of a Cinematographer', issue 99) while he was working on the series.

G.P. is an Australian television series that ran for eight seasons. Set in and around a fictional general medical practice in an inner-city suburb, the storylines explore the professional and personal lives of the doctors and staff who worked there.

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.