Cirrus@Austlit

Script-writer.

Deborah Parsons graduated from the Swinburne Film and TV School in Melbourne. She began work as a script-writer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the mid-1980s on comedy series The Gillies Republic (1986) and The Gerry Connolly Show (1988). She followed these with her first film script, the musical thriller In Too Deep (1990), which was the directorial debut of both Colin South and John Tatoulis.

Parsons wrote widely throughout the 1990s. She scripted episodes of children's adventure series Adventures on Kythera (1991) and American-produced but Australian-made remake Flipper (1995), but most of her work was for adult dramas, with a particular focus on crime dramas: she wrote for Phoenix (1993), G.P. (1993-1994), Janus (1994-1995), Mercury (1996), Police Rescue (1996), Good Guys Bad Guys (1997), State Coroner (1997), and Murder Call (1998-2000), as well as scripting the post-apocalyptic film Zone 39 (1996), which reunited her with director John Tatoulis.

Since 2000, Parsons has continued this pattern of focusing on adult (largely crime) dramas with occasional scripts for children's television. She has written for Water Rats (2000-2001), McLeod's Daughters (2001), Marshall Law (2002), Young Lions (2002), White Collar Blue (2003), MDA (2003), Blue Heelers (1999-2005), Headland (2005-2006), Home and Away (2008), Out of the Blue (2008), K9 (2009), Dance Academy (2010), and Bed of Roses (2010).