Cirrus@Austlit

Spanning the 1890s to the 1950s, Power Without Glory is the story of a man determined to make something of his life. Raised in a Melbourne slum area, John West later gains wealth and power, his influence extending into his business, his political ambitions, and his family life. The events of his life unfold against a backdrop of major historical events, including World War One and the beginnings of the Australian Labour Party.

A spy series set, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'very much in the same locale and situation' as Contrabandits. The two spies work for FIASCO (Federal Intelligence and Security Control Organisation), run out of Canberra by the never-seen and rarely heard Dave Shannon.

Moran notes that Shannon's Mob was glossier than Contrabandits, but also mundane:

In its own eyes the company had made a fundamental mistake in not coming up with a formula that used some real point of Australian difference. Many other countries had harbours, boats, and water. For that matter the special investigation team headed by Shannon was very ordinary indeed.

In his Classic Australian Television, however, Don Storey suggests that 'The spectuacular scenery, particularly of the Harbour, is fully exploited.'

Shannon's Mob received poor treatment from the network (which persistently delayed its televisation) and was widely panned by critics when it did air, perhaps in part because the popularity of spy stories had peaked some decade earlier. Storey concludes:

It would be easy to suspect that the treatment of Shannons Mob, coinciding as it did with the cancellation of the three Crawford cop shows (Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police), was part of the plot to sabotage Australian production. However, there is no evidence or even speculation to suggest that anything was deliberately done against the series - although it would be safe to assume that in the prevailing climate nothing positive would have been done to help the series either.

In an early report on the series, The Australian Women's Weekly noted, 'All writers for the series will be Australian, and among them will be some of those who produced the most successful of the "Boney" scripts' (Wed. 10 October 1973, p.10).

One of Australia's earliest television dramatisations of its gold-rush era, Rush is, as Don Storey points out in his Classic Australian Television, in many ways two entirely separate programs: between series one and series two, the setting shifts from the Victorian goldfields to a New South Wales mining town, and jumps forward from the 1850s to the early 1860s. However, both series take place in the same universe, use the same chronology, and have a clear internal coherence, centred on the continuing character of Sergeant Robert McKellar. Therefore, they are generally treated as two separate series of a single program.

(The differences in cast, crew, writers, and directors between the two series are given in detail in the film details section below.)

With its enormous, intricate, expensive, and accurate sets, costumes, and props, Rush proved extremely popular with viewers, despite series one airing in an awkward weeknight 8pm slot (which, as Storey notes, put it against the second half of the highly successful Homicide in Melbourne). Series one did, however, attract some criticism for being filmed in black-and-white when colour programming was only a matter of months away in Australia.

Series two (which drew on foreign financing to cover its cost, an extremely high--for a domestically produced program--$24,000 an episode) was made in colour. Following Sergeant McKellar (the only character to carry over from series one), series two pushed the character forward through two disillusioning events (the Eureka Stockade, which prompted McKellar's resignation from the Victoria Police, and the death of his wife Sarah) and dropped him into the conflicts of a small New South Wales mining town.

Series two was also extremely popular but, according to Storey, plans for series three were shelved when the new Fraser government instituted (among other things) a hefty budget cut to the ABC.

Series one gained renewed prominence in the 1990s when, like police procedural Bluey, it was re-dubbed and sent up on The Late Show (as The Olden Days).

Contrabandits was a fifty-minute procedural series following the Customs Special Branch, an elite group of law-enforcers intercepting contraband in Sydney.

Colin Free was script editor for the series (as well as scripting several episodes).

Source:

Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series

Storey, Don. Classic Australian Television http://www.classicaustraliantv.com/contrab.htm (Sighted 13/9/11)

See also:

Musgrove, Nan. 'Contrabandits'. Australian Women's Weekly 4 October 1967, p.17.

'Smuggling Theme of New Series'. Canberra Times 18 September 1967, p.15.