Cirrus@Austlit

'Betrayal cannot be buried forever

'In the tiny Tasmanian town of Mole Creek, retired Australian cop and Vietnam veteran Pete McAuslan has retreated to his fishing cabin to write his memoirs. In Sydney, his grandson, journalist and trashy true crime author Xander, learns that Pete has taken his own life, begging forgiveness in a suicide note.

'Arriving in Mole Creek in the aftermath of Pete's death, Xander discovers that his grandfather's laptop is missing. He begins to suspect that something is wrong, refusing to accept the facts as presented. With the local police not interested in investigating an apparently open-and-shut suicide, Xander sets about uncovering the truth of what happened to his grandfather.

'In the process, he discovers long-buried secrets from Pete's time serving in the Vietnam war: secrets that Pete has withheld from him and everyone else for fifty years; secrets that powerful people would prefer to stay buried. Ensnared in a web of betrayals that began a generation before, Xander finds himself on the hitlist of a clinically violent assassin. Now he must race to identify the connection between the seemingly unremarkable death of an old Australian soldier and the imminent reactivation of the most powerful and potentially destructive 'sleeper' in the history of espionage - before the truth catches up with him.'(Publication summary)

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.'