Cirrus@Austlit

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.

A 'second-generation' Skippy, with Ranger Hammond's younger son Sonny grown up and running an animal-based theme park, Habitat, on Australia's Gold Coast, in company with his ten-year-old twins, Jerry and Lou. The theme park is adjacent to a national park, bringing in Ranger Dave as a character, along with Sonny Hammond's housekeeper Thelma and assistant Kate.

Home and Away is a television serial created by Alan Bateman and produced by the Seven Network. The idea for the series came to Bateman (then head of drama at Seven) after he stopped to buy ice-creams in a small country town in southern NSW. While chatting to some locals, he learned that the town was unhappy about plans to build a home for foster kids from the city. At that time, Channel Seven was still smarting from its decision to let Neighbours go to the Ten Network, where it had become hugely popular, and was looking to create another series to rival its success. Bateman saw in the idea that became Home and Away the potential for plenty of storylines and conflict by having streetwise city kids being relocated to a small regional environment,

In the beginning, the series focused on Pippa and Tom Fletcher, who, being unable to have children of their own, decide to become foster parents. When Tom is retrenched from his city job, the couple buy the rundown Summer Bay Caravan Park and move there with their five foster children. Soon after arriving, they also take in troublesome Bobby Simpson.

The series debuted in January 1988 with an hour-long telemovie. Although this rated well, the series itself took some while to develop an audience. Having learned their lesson from the Neighbours debacle, Network Seven gave its new show time, and its ratings gradually increased. As with Neighbours, the Home and Away series and performers became very popular in the United Kingdom.

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.'

Set in the fictional Riverside Police Station, Cop Shop combined self-contained stories focusing on specific police investigations with the type of open-ended serial storylines familiar from soap operas. This allowed Crawford Productions to make use of the expertise gained from their highly successful police procedurals (all recently cancelled) and serials such as The Sullivans (then still airing).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series,

Although the format may sound predictable and routine, in fact it was pioneering. In putting women police on the screen, Crawford's were moving Australian crime drama away from being an all-male domain. In addition, by choosing a suburban police station populated both by uniformed police and plainclothes detectives, Cop Shop introduced an upstairs and a downstairs world. The latter, in particular, began to exert its own attractions with handsome young men and women in the roles of the new constables.