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.”
The small screen’s coverage of Australian history has been intermittent and only occasionally noteworthy. The production house Kennedy Miller had great success in the 1980s with a string of mini-series that included The Dismissal (Gough Whitlam’s sacking as Prime Minster in 1975), Bodyline(England’s controversial cricket tour of 1933), and Vietnam (Australia’s internal struggle in the 1960s over the Vietnam War), but this century, initially at least, appeared to reveal an Australia that didn’t want to look back.
“When I got here [in 2000] I was surprised at how little a part Australia’s history played in TV drama,” says George Adams, the Scottish-born creator and producer of the ABC’s The Doctor Blake Mysteries. “Part of my feeling was that we forget how young the country is in relative terms. Now we’re at a point where we feel like we do have a history – no one is alive who was there from the start of the 20th century, so we feel that can look back and tell an historical story.”
The idea for The Doctor Blake Mysteries, which begins its second season on Friday, February 7, came to Adams early one evening when he was in Ballarat, working on an installation at the Sovereign Hill theme park. Walking down a city street – “I suspect going to the pub,” he admits – Adams realised that contemporary Ballarat could still easily pass for the rural city of the 1950s.
Soon after, he pitched the case of the week drama to the ABC, which had just commissioned the first batch of scripts for what would be the equally successful Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. There is a viewpoint that those two shows offer the safety of nostalgia, which is somewhat questionable given that they’re both built around often-violent crime (and bonkers costumes in Miss Fisher’s case). For Adams, the lure of setting a show in 1959 Ballarat was that the decade was not only untouched by television, but had tremendous pressure just beneath the traditional surface.
“It wasn’t World War II in the 1940s and it wasn’t the swinging ’60s. That’s what makes it fascinating,” says Adams. “For a murder mystery the other thing I love about the late 1950s was that if you walked into a bar almost anywhere in the world chances are a high percentage of those present had either killed someone, seen someone killed, or knew someone who had been killed. From a mental approach to violence and death it was a singular time.”
It’s a recurring refrain among those who work on historically driven television shows that virtually every corner of Australia’s past holds surprising stories and unlikely events. In Nine’s forthcoming Love Child, an 8-part series set in 1969 Kings Cross, the era’s well- known freedoms are contrasted with the historic practice of pregnant and unwed teenage girls giving up their babies for adoption via institutional care.
“Up until 1972 people didn’t know that children were taken from single 16-year-old girls who got pregnant – that was a surprise to my daughters. Girls got pregnant and they didn’t have abortions, because they were illegal, and they were sent to these places by their parents,” says Jo Rooney, executive producer of drama for the Nine Network. “It will come as a shock to the younger generation, who have no awareness of that but are fascinated with what happened in the past.”
Love Child, which stars Jessica Marais (Packed to the Rafters), Jonathan LaPaglia (The Slap) and Mindy McElhinney (Howzat! Kerry Packer’s Cricket War), is one of several prominent 2014 offerings from Nine that draw on Australia’s past.
The Underbelly series is rebooted with Fat Tony & Co. which makes captured crime boss Tony Mokbel its central protagonist, while the telemovie Schapelle looks at the travails of Australia’s best known prisoner, convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby.
“We think that the Australian audience just want to know more about these stories. With Schapelle everyone knows the tabloid stuff, but they want to get behind that,” says Rooney. “With Fat Tony you could invent that story, but no one would believe it.”
Rooney believes Nine had great success in 2012 with Beaconsfield, the story of trapped Tasmanian miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell, because it went beyond the headlines to show what it was like for the pair, trapped underground for two weeks in a space no bigger than beneath a dining table. But last year, when it programmed the media baron saga Media Games: The Packer-Murdoch Story, the mini-series played to disappointing ratings.
“It came a day after the federal election and I think the national mood was that people were sick of angry men in suits,” Rooney says.
As much as they’re rooted in the past, nearly all these period productions comment in varying degrees on the present, whether by contrasting then and now or reminding us that some issues have long, unresolved lives.
“For me, the best way to look at history is to give it a context so that people have a connection to it even though initially they might not think they’re that interested,” says Adams.
“If you can give them something where they go, ‘OK, we’re still doing that,’ or ‘we talked about that only the other day’, then it’s an opening. The trick is not to get too preachy about it.”
Numerous balancing acts are required to produce a period piece. For a start, they are some of the most expensive productions a television network can mount. At the ABC, Adams makes an hour of The Doctor Blake Mysteries for between $800,000 and $1 million, while the Nine Network budgets for a mini-series take shape from a starting point of $1.5 to $1.6 million an hour. Period detail is costly, yet the public leaps on the slightest mistake in production design.
The writing for fact-based shows, where specific events are being recreated, also has to make the careful leap from beginning with research to ultimately inventing private conversation and crucial moments without the latter undercutting the former.
Rooney plays a straight bat when asked if Schapelle will deliver a verdict on its subject’s guilt – “the audience will make their own judgment when they see it,” she says – but for the industry in general it’s a fine line.
It’s the same with tone: “The issue every creator of an historic television series has is the urge to make it a little tougher and a little darker, but that’s always a difficult thing with a network,” says Adams. “You hope that an audience will respond, but sometimes the network’s concerns are right. You don’t want to be known as the person who made an expensive and unpopular television show.”
But when a program does connect the viewer to Australia’s history, the reaction is measured in more than just the 1-2 million people who watch. There’s a level of passion and feedback that’s raw and immediate. Rob Carlton had been an actor for 25 years, but he’d never known a reaction like the one that followed his commanding portrayal of Kerry Packer in Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo. The actor’s own identity has become merged with Packer’s narrative.
And while four appearances by the character of Kerry Packer (via three different actors) eventually dried up that well, there’s no shortage of projects being pitched or going into production. In 2015, Nine will air a Gallipoli mini-series to mark the bloody military campaign’s 100th anniversary, and Rooney says the network’s executives are constantly weighing up eras and incidents such as the 2002 Bali bombings. “That story would have to be told very carefully,” cautions Rooney.
Adams would like to do a new adaptation of Frank Hardy’s Australian classic, Power Without Glory, which the ABC made into a mini-series in 1976, while Carlton points out that the recent hearings at NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption involving former ALP powerbroker Eddie Obeid was the biggest case of official corruption since 1808’s Rum Rebellion, itself a fascinating topic.
“We’re starting recognise that our history is steeped in great stories,” says Carlton.
”We want to see our villains and we want to see our heroes, and we want to see them in stories where they speak like us. That’s what connects us as a community.”
One of the consequences of creating television drama that draws on Australia’s recent history is participants in events can find themselves looking at a fictionalised version of themselves, an actor who bears their name and station in life, but who will do and say things that they never did. For the subject, the viewing experience can sometimes be unsettling or even upsetting, depending on how they perceive the portrayal.
“What I saw was a cartoonish caricature, which I thought reflected badly, and a show that was not particularly impressive,” recalls Melbourne lawyer Josh Bornstein, whose key role in the bitter 1998 waterfront dispute made him a crucial character in Bastard Boys, the 2007 ABC mini-series that recreated the industrial and ideological confrontation.
“There was a scene where I was depicted coming out of a pub and vomiting, then sliding down a wall while I swear and say something about briefing Julian Burnside, who’s a rock star,” notes Bornstein, now a principal at Maurice Blackburn and head of the firm’s employment and industrial law practice. “I looked like a ridiculous, buffoonish character – in a scene that never happened.”
Bornstein read the script and met with Justin Smith, the actor who played him. Aside from missing a preview screening, he prepared himself for the experience as best he could, only to realise that he wasn’t prepared at all. As a lawyer, Bornstein worried that his professional standing had been harmed, and even now people the real Bornstein has just met recall the screen Bornstein’s nude scene, where he studies law books in bed the night before a key hearing while naked. “It’s the bum scene, basically,” sighs Bornstein. “I was shocked by my on-screen depiction and found it very difficult to watch.”
Craig Mathieson – SMH – January 26, 2014