Cirrus@Austlit

'The series is based on a national park ranger, her two children, their friends and how they form the Bush Patrol to help protect the park and its native inhabitants. There's plenty of adventure and fun featuring Australia's unique flora and fauna and modern family relationships.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/12/2013)

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

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.'

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.

Two expert BMX riders and their friend Judy become entangled with a group of bank robbers.

'Set a century ago, it starts with some of the marauding rebels (the Tyrones) bailing up an Australian bush town. Palmer (Gerard Kennedy) and Ben (Gus Mercurio) team up to outwit the bandits.

'The news of their bravado soon reaches high-ranking members of the Administration who offer the two the deadly mission (well-paid, of course) of killing the Tyrones' leader and destroying his camp.

'Needing more men. Palmer blows Ned (Hu Pryce) and Dick (Christopher Pate) out of jail, and Alex (Rod Mullinar) joins them after a dawn duel over a lady.

'They seize the local undertaker's best hearse, raid a police stockade for dynamite and set out for the Tyrones' camp.

'They return victorious only to find they've been done out of half of their promised payment. However, they think nothing of arriving, bloodied and dirty, at the relevant official's mansion in the middle of a ball to collect their dues.

'This is a hilarious scene with the grimy crew wooing the ladies at the ball while Palmer goes to collect the money. But they have walked into a trap'.

Source:

Deidre Nolan, 'Raw Deal', Australian Women's Weekly, 9 February 1977, p.43.

The success of Cash and Company was such to warrant a continuation of the series, but Serge Lazaroff (Sam Cash), considering that his character had developed as far as it plausibly could, quit the series, and Homestead Productions decided instead on a quasi spin-off, Tandarra (named for character Jessica Johnson's homestead).

The tension in Tandarra was generated by the character of Ryler, a bounty hunter who entered Cash and Company in the final episode. Ryler was played by Gerard Kennedy, capitalising on his success in Crawford Production's Hunter and Division 4. According to Don Storey in Classic Australian Television,

Tough, resourceful and professional, Ryler poses a far greater threat to Cash and Company than the incompetent Keogh, to the extent that they must question their future together. As Ryler traces Sam and Joe to Jessica's homestead, the trio decide to split up and the final scene shows Sam and Joe parting company and riding away in different directions.

Tandarra picks up from this point, with Ryler tracking Brady to Jessica's homestead, Tandarra. However, when Ryler manages to cross Lieutenant Keogh (who makes his last appearance here), he becomes convinced of Brady's innocence, and remains at Tandarra. Thus, this program mirrors Cash and Company in its positioning of a central trio against the corrupt forces of law and order, but with Sam Cash negated not only in ongoing storylines but also in the occasional flashbacks to Brady's earlier adventures.

Albert Moran says of the series in his Guide to Australian TV Series that 'this Australian western had thieves, soldiers, gamblers and a medley of other familiar types. Its episodes were equally familiar but reaosnable viewing all the same.' Like its predecessor, the series also sold well overseas.

A bushranging adventure series, conceived by Patrick Edgeworth (a British-born script-writer who had arrived in Australia in 1969 and begun working for Crawford Productions) and Russell Hagg (then script editor for Crawford's Matlock Police) to counteract the comparative absence of historical programs on Australian television. Though the ABC did begin airing Rush shortly before Cash and Company aired, Don Storey notes in Classic Australian Television that 'Unlike Rush, Cash & Company was conceived purely as an escapist adventure series. Although the stories are based on fact, they make no attempt to recreate any authentic events. However, much research was done to ensure the settings, costumes and props faithfully recreated the period'.

The series follows bushrangers Sam Cash and (American) Joe Brady, the sympathetic widow Jessica Johnson, and their nemesis, Lieutenant Keogh. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, Cash and Brady (who have a 'cavalier attitude towards mining licences and other people's sheep') are 'rough diamonds from the wrong side of the track but more masculine and attractive to the horeseriding quasi aristocrat Jessica Johnson than is Keogh'.

However, Storey counters that the 'Contrary to the entry in Moran's Guide To Australian TV Series, Cash & Company is not about their "cavalier attitude to mining licences and other people's sheep".' Instead, he argues, 'Cash & Compan reflects the view that not all outlaws were necessarily bad, but were sometimes reasonable men who were persecuted and driven outside the law by the law itself -- as administered by ruthless officials'.

Storey also notes (in support of this claim) that critics, who were positive about the series, didn't compare it to Rush, but to prior positive depictions of outlaws, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) or the long-running Richard Greene series The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1959).

Cash and Company was sold to the United Kingdom, Sweden, Holland, Yugoslavia, Ireland, Norway, and Nigeria, and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It was successful enough to warrant a second 13-episode series, but Serge Lazaroff's decision to quit the series prompted instead the production of the quasi spin-off Tandarra.