Cirrus@Austlit

Television script-writer, script editor, and producer.

Tony Cavanaugh began his career with Crawford Productions as a teenager, working on a film crew. After reaching the position of camera assistant/focus puller, he moved into the script department as an editor, where he edited and wrote episodes of such programs as The Sullivans, Carson's Law, Zoo Family, and The Flying Doctors.

In the late 1980s, Cavanaugh left Crawford Productions in favour of Barron Entertainment. Here, he co-wrote both series of Clowning Around, based on the novel Clowning Sim by David Martin: series one (1991) was co-written with Shane Brennan and series two (1993) with John Coulter.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cavanaugh worked widely as a script-writer and script editor, including writing episodes of G.P. and contributing to the Australian Children's Television Foundation's series Lift Off.

In 1991, Cavanaugh formed Liberty Films with Simone North. Cavanaugh continued to write scripts for such series as Neighbours (1992) and Secrets (1993), as well as the feature film Father (1990), in which a woman must come to terms with her father's past as a war criminal.

Liberty Films's first production was Fire (1995), a thirteen-part series set in a Brisbane fire station, written by Cavanaugh, Deborah Cox, and Everett De Roche and directed by Geoff Bennett, Peter Fisk, and Megan Simpson Huberman. It was followed by second thirteen-part series in 1996, written by Cavanaugh, de Roche, Graham Hartley, and Peter Schreck and directed by Bennett, Fisk, Ross McGregor, and Geoffrey Nottage.

After the second series of Fire, Liberty Films formed a co-venture company, Liberty & Beyond, with the Beyond Group: Liberty & Beyond produced, as their first venture, Medivac (1996-1998), for which Cavanaugh was both producer and supervising writer. He followed this with two scripts in 2000 and 2001: The Love of Lionel's Life (co-written with Des Power and directed by John Ruane) and Finding Hope (co-written with John Misto and Jackie McKimmie and directed by Geoffrey Nottage).

In 2001, Cavanaugh and Simone created and produced Day of the Roses, a mini-series focusing on Australia's worst train disaster. Among their awards for the series were an AFI Award (Best Mini-Series or Telefeature) and a Logie Award (Most Outstanding Telemovie/Mini-Series).

Since then, Cavanaugh has written and produced the telemovie Through My Eyes (based on the story of Lindy Chamberlain), directed by Di Drew for Beyond Distribution, and produced I Am You (also known as In Her Skin), written and directed by long-time collaborator Simone North.