From Phryne Fisher to Fat Tony, television is offering audiences more versions of Australia’s past than ever before.

Australian screen culture has long looked to the country’s history. In 1906, Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang was the world’s first feature length film, while the local screen renaissance in the 1970s was fuelled by a desire to see representations of Australia’s past and then present on the big screen.

In recent years we’ve seen Kerry Packer take on the 1970 British establishment to launch World Series Cricket in Nine’s mini-series Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War and the Seven Network’s 1950s-set drama series A Place to Call Home, the various Underbelly editions have documented the rise and fall of criminals a century apart, such as Carl Williams and “Squizzy” Taylor, and the ABC’s mini-series Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo examined sexual equality in the 1970s through a magazine publishing phenomenon.

This Australia Day, we can look forward to a year harking back to the ’20s (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries), the ’50s (The Doctor Blake Mysteries) and the ’60s (Love Child), not to mention the up-to-the minute sagas of Fat Tony & Co. and Schapelle.

“If we don’t produce stuff that is our own we tend to become invisible,” says Lisa French, deputy dean at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication. ”Australians do want to hear their own language, and their own characters, and their own stories, and their own humour on the screen.

“Your popular culture reinforces the idea that you exist and that you have a history. Australians are always anxious about that because we don’t have an obvious history,” says French. “In Rome you walk around a corner and there’s a 2000-year-old building. In a way it’s a reassuring function for the culture to tell these stories.” Continue reading TV’s trip down memory lane →