Cirrus@Austlit

'Peter Corris, the ‘Godfather of Australian crime fiction’, died in his sleep on 30 August 2018. His Godfather columns have been part of the Newtown Review of Books from the beginning, and we feel his loss keenly.' 

'A multiple story film about the emotional and physical damage that love gone wrong can do.' (Production summary)

When Rodney and Jessica witness two aliens crash landing on Earth, they undertake to protect them by roping them into joining the world's most unsuccessful children's television program, Kid's Breakfast (nicknamed Pig's Breakfast). Disguised as characters on the program, Grob and Meeba (and their pilot Queegle) are forbidden to reveal their real identities: the media believe them to be eccentric actors who prefer to stay in character (and costume). But the situation is complicated by the fact that the crashed spaceship was a school bus, and Grob and Meeba, although genuine aliens, are also genuine teenagers.

An anthology-style television program, like its British predecessor Tales of the Unexpected, Twisted Tales featured a weekly story of horror or the unexpected, each with a surprise ending. The program made use of a combination of emerging and experienced writers and directors. Each episode was introduced by Bryan Brown.

Twisted Tales was followed by Two Twisted.

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

Reporter Judith Wilkes leaves her husband and two sons in Sydney and goes to Malaysia to cover the story of the Vietnamese boat people. She becomes romantically involved with Kanan and strikes up a friendship with Lady Minou Hobday, who keeps a regular vigil at Turtle Beach, where the refugees try to land. Hobday's obsession with the beach is due to her secret hope that one day her own children will arrive there. Accompanying Hobday one night, Judith witnesses a brutal massacre by the Malaysians, which spurs her on to expose the horrors of the internment camps at Bidong.

Based on the true story of an Australian Army captain who, in 1946, was assigned by the Australian Army Legal Corps to prosecute Japanese soldiers for their role in the Laha Massacre (1942) and other incidents at Ambon Island POW camp between the fall of Ambon to the Japanese in 1942 and the end of the war.

Set against the background of international power politics, the script attempts to portray the perplexing issue of war guilt through the rhetoric of courtroom drama. It can usefully be compared with the Japanese documentary The Tokyo Trial (1984), the second half of which deals with the trial of twenty-eight alleged war criminals.

Set in Australia in the 1930s, For Love Alone is the story of Teresa, a poor young woman in love with a dashing but arrogant teacher who preaches free love and watered-down socialist precepts. She follows him to England, meeting a gentle banker en route. The film follows her relationships as they are transformed in England.

'A young Rumanian escapes from his homeland to find his way to Australia. Trying to get his wife out of a communist country, with little help from his new found home, leads him, after numerous frustrations, to a final resort - a public fasting campaign.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 31/1/2014)

While hang gliding one day, Mike is transported five hundred years into the future. When he arrives, he meets a primitive pagan community who ask for his help to cure their sickness. They need him to fly to get a cure from a group of wise women on an island isolated by a sea of nuclear waste. Reluctantly, Mike agrees to help and, with Katrin of the Clan Murray, he sets out on a dangerous quest through a savage land. (Source: Australian Screen.)

'Kevin Saunders is a builder in a small NSW country town.

'He has chosen to remain single but recently has been writing to a number of Filipina pen-pals and has asked one of them to marry him.

'[...] 'Mail Order Bride' tells the story of the struggle Kevin (played by Ray Meagher) and his wife Ampy (Chariot Ortez) have to maintain their marriage.

'The people of the town are racist and sexist, and Ampy soon finds herself caught between two cultures, having sympathy for the Aboriginals but wanting to be accepted as white.

'She suffers severe culture shock and chronic isolation and when violence erupts in the town, her aboriginal [sic] friend Iris (Justine Saunders) tells Ampy that the time has come for her to decide which side she is on.

'But for Ampy, the choice has already been made.'

Source:

'Final move of series', The Canberra Times, 27 August 1984, p.1.

A ground-breaking television series, Women of the Sun was, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, born out of co-writer Sonia Borg's desire for a more balanced televisual representation of Indigenous Australians: 'Angry at the plight of Aborigines, she was concerned that many scriptwriters could conceive of Aboriginal women only as prostitutes.' To counter this tendency, she contemplated a series that showed Australian history from the perspective of Aboriginal women, a project for which she sought the colloboration of sociologist and social worker Hyllus Maris.

Because, as Moran notes, it 'portrayed the history of Aboriginal people since the incursion of the whites, focusing on the relations between blacks and whites over the previous 200 years', Women of the Sun 'was a direct counter to the various official histories in preparation for the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988'.

Women of the Sun is divided into four parts, each of which focuses on a different woman in a different period of history.

'Alinta the Flame' (set in the 1820s) shows the interaction between the two cultures as an Indigenous Australian tribe (the Nyari) nurse back to health two English convicts whom they find washed up on the beach, only to find the new settlers increasingly encroaching on Nyari lands--a process that ends in the annihilation of the entire tribe, barring Alinta and her young daughter.

'Maydina the Shadow' (set in the 1890s) follows Maydina, abducted and abused by a group of seal-hunters, from whom she eventually escapes with her daughter Biri (who is of mixed Indigenous Australian and European heritage). Taken in by Mrs McPhee, head of a church mission, Maydina is separated from her child and sent into service for the church. When she falls in love with an Indigenous Australian man and attempts to leave with him and Biri to return to a traditional lifestyle, Mrs McPhee has them pursued by troopers, who kill Maydina's lover and remove Biri from her care.

'Nerida Anderson' (set in 1939) focuses on the Cumeroongunga Walkout, showing the deterioration in conditions on the reserve through the eyes of Nerida Anderson, raised on the reserve and returning there after a period working in the city as a book-keeper. Her attempts to foster improvement on the reserve are greeted angrily by the reserve manager, who attempts to have Nerida and her family tried for treason; ultimately, Nerida incites a successful walkout.

'Lo-Arna' (set in the 1980s) focuses on 18-year-old Ann Cutler's discovery that she is not of French Polynesian descent as she believed, but actually the biological daughter of her adoptive father and Alice Wilson, an Indigenous Australian woman from a nearby town, prompting her to reconsider her relationship with her adoptive parents and with her own identity.

Moran notes of the series as a whole that 'Although each of the four episodes of Women of the Sun is self-contained, nevertheless, taken together the episodes powerfully suggest what 200 years of white contact has done to Aboriginal society'.

Inspired by the 1974 riots at Bathurst Correctional Centre and the subsequent Royal Commission into New South Wales Prisons, Stir explores the desperation of prisoners subject to a flawed penal system.