Cirrus@Austlit

'Set in the homicide squad of a large metropolitan city, this is a punchy one hour drama series about murder mystery and a group of young committed cops, focused on justice for the deceased. Jennifer Mapplethorpe, ambitious and intelligent; Simon Joyner, keen, cool, self-assured; Duncan Freeman, living high, ready to fall; and Matt Ryan, intense and driven. In Homicide, it's not always crooks and low-lives, most murders are committed by ordinary people - a moment of madness, a failure of communication, a desperate act. These Detectives follow a profession that makes blood, grief and drama just part of their normal day. Their day begins when your day ends.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive.

An Australian-New Zealand co-production.

'When 14-year-old New Zealander Holly McKenzie arrives in the Australian seaside town of Woolich, her dreams of playing basketball with the RAMS, one of the best junior basketball teams in the district, are quickly shattered. Determined to prove her ability, Holly forms her own team—the OUTLAWS. With basketball as a backdrop, Holly's Heroes is a funny and light hearted exploration of being the new kid on the block, the importance of friendship, the value of teamwork, first love, and the rewards that come from participation and the simple love of sport. Holly learns that the feeling of belonging she achieves with her team is far more important than simply winning.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Seven 15 year-old surfers have been selected from around Australia and overseas to take part in an intensive 12-month residential school program at Blue Water High. At the beachside school they join other pupils in a normal year's academic work as well as receiving special coaching in surfing. At the end of the year, two of the seven will qualify to surf the pro-circuit and win a three-year sponsorship contract. The series is a race into the finals for the wild card, a race to get through the year, and a race to grow up. The seven teens, forced to live, study and train together—at the same time become best friends and greatest competitors.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 20/8/2013)

'Set in the picture-postcard community on Sydney's northern beaches, SNOBS is the story of unlikely friends - Abby, the daughter of a wealthy, middle class traditional family and Marian, a boy from a group of modern day nomads who have come to be known as Ferals - the arrival of whom upsets the peace of the community and is the catalyst for conflict, adventure and intrigue.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'In England a recently bereaved widow and her two children discover that they've inherited a property in Australia. With some reluctance they head to Australia to claim their inheritance only to discover that the profitable sheep station they've imagined is in fact a rather out of the way wildlife park full of Australian native animals. What's more it has human occupants as well - a distantly related trio of grandchildren who have been bequeathed lifelong rights to live on the property. As well, there's an Australian born Vietnamese animal handler who's somehow the only one who has real expertise in dealing with native Australian animals.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 23/5/2014)

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.

When twelve-year-old Jemma accidentally taps into a disused telecommunications satellite, she uses her new network to form a worldwide crime-fighting syndicate.

Mission Top Secret was another production by New Zealand-born television producer Roger Mirams, whose previous contributions to Australian children's television included The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten, The Magic Boomerang, Adventures of the Seaspray, The Lost Islands, Secret Valley, Professor Poopsnagle's Steam Zeppelin, and Runaway Island.

Typically for a Roger Mirams' production, Mission Top Secret focuses on the independence and capability of the child protagonists, with adults limited to the roles of either advisor (Sir Joshua Cranberry) or villain (Neville Savage).

Although the program is listed in certain places (e.g., the Internet Movie Database) as an Australia/Spain/United Kingdom/New Zealand/The Netherlands co-production, the scripts were all by Australian writers, with the exception of the four episodes scripted by French television script-writers Jean-Jacques Gaffie and Benjamin Legrand.

Children's adventure television series about children who live on fictional Circe Island, a fishing community and communications base off the coast of Western Australia. The first series featured episodes in which the children outwitted adults, particularly the character Hermes Endakis. The series later emphasised environmental issues, particularly in the second series, where the children try to stop a big corporation from destroying their island.

Inspired by A. B. Paterson's classic poem and set in a fictional Snowy Mountains township called Paterson's Ridge, this turn-of-the-nineteenth-century adventure concerns wealthy cattle-station owner and widower Matt McGregor and his three children, Colin (the town preacher), Rob (played by Guy Pearce), and Danni (the tomboyish youngest daughter). Unresolved sexual tension comes in the shape of Matt's independent, free-spirited childhood friend, the recently widowed Kathleen O'Neil, who returns to Paterson's Ridge with her son after having spent many years in England.

'In 1902 Australia was staging the richest cycling events in the world. When black American athlete, 'Major' Taylor, arrives to compete he has to confront not only the White Australia Policy but the prejudices of the other competitors - his own countrymen.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'An air race from London to Melbourne is announced. The prizes are rich but the risks are high. From Europe, Australia and the United States fliers battle to find a plane and to raise the cash to compete. Those who win through this first test gather on a cold October dawn in England to race to Australia - half a world away.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 16/4/2014)

'Drama series set in and around an Australian embassy in the fictional Islamic country of Ragaan, where day to day diplomacy is the stuff of danger and news headlines rather than privilege and cocktails.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 10/4/2014)

'While attempting a hologram experiment on a multi-national computer, a computer whiz inadvertantly creates Billy, a tough-talking highroller from the future. Billy creates havoc and the only solution is to blast him back to the future...'.

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 1/6/2012)

Spit MacPhee comes to the riverside town of St Helen to live with his grandfather, Fyfe MacPhee. Because Fyfe, who has a steel plate in his head as a result of an old war injury, is subject to violent fits, the townspeople fear for Spit's future. When Fyfe dies in one of his fits, a fierce legal battle is initiated, as the Catholic Tree family and the Protestant Arbuckle family bicker over which of them will adopt Spit.

According to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program is 'very aware of different social levels in the town and especially of some of the divisions brought about by religion.' Moran also notes that the series rated well in Australia and sold well overseas.

Butterfly Island follows the travails of Charlie Wilson and his children, who are determined to retain the tropical beauties and charm of Butterfly Island, but face such difficulties as the competition from nearby resorts, unscrupulous land developers, and shipwrecked boys with mysterious pasts and unwittingly criminal tendencies.

Moran points out in his Guide to Australian TV Series that the program made use of the same locations as its predecessor, Fauna Productions' Barrier Reef, and 'promoted the kind of tourist image of Australia, so much a feature of Fauna's work'. Indeed, he argues,

Butterfly Island was conceived principally in terms of the formula of 'likeness and difference' so much a feature of Fauna Productions in the 1960s and 1970s, with likeness in the form of father, mother, kids, adventures, odd characters, comedy and adventure; and difference in the form of the Great Barrier Reef, the Whitsundays, Australian beaches, outdoor life, sun and sand.

As such, the program relied heavily on location shooting, and was comparatively expensive by Australian standards.

The program employed a local cast, but Moran points to such American actors as Ann B. Davis, Cameron Mitchell, and Susan Strasberg in cameo roles.

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 fantasy made-for-television film in which a security company conjures up computer-generated 'ghosts', to scare people away from buying certain properties, allowing the company to snap them up at auction for a fraction of their worth. The system works until the appearance, apparently from nowhere, of a mysterious couple.

A fictionalised version of the theft of somewhere between $6 million and $12 million from the Victoria Club on 21 April 1976. Although technically an unsolved crime (since the only man charged, Norman Lee, was acquitted), the details were revealed in the mid-1990s by Lee's lawyer, after all the men involved had either died or disappeared.

Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, describes the program as 'a tough action mini-series that had a drive, grittiness and ferocity seldom seen in an Australian series':

The Melbourne landscape of wet suburban streets, city skyscrapers, flyovers, passing trams, cobbled laneways and sleazy shopfronts has never looked better, and the impression of a mean, tough, merciless universe is more than reinforced by the driving complex narrative and the excellent playing of the principals.

The program aired on the Nine Network to positive reviews and strong audience figures.

Mini-series based on the best-selling autobiography by A.B. Facey, tracing his life from the late nineteenth century through Gallipoli and into marriage, fatherhood, and later life.

The mini-series was successful on Australian television, but Moran is unflattering in his appraisal: 'The mini-series was in effect a lovingly authentic visual and aural recreation of the novel. The trouble was that what was a pleasure to read on the printed page was pretty much insufferably boring to watch on screen. The narrative was far too anecdotal and the performances of brothers Dominic and Benedict Sweeney as Facey were dull.'