filmink.com.au

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Stormy Petrel - FilmInk

️Dov Kornits
️Sun Oct 17 2021

by Stephen Vagg

What was the most influential Australian TV series of all time? Most would say Homicide, which proved beyond a doubt that Australians would watch their own dramas on the small screen. One could also make claims for My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? which proved we could enjoy a local sitcom in huge numbers, or The Mavis Bramston Show, which proved the nation would stop to watch our own satire, or Bellbird, which established how Australia could do nighttime soap, or In Melbourne Tonight, which proved how irritating Melbournians could be on the superiority of their local comedy scene (no offence, Melbourne, I love you, truly, but you go on about that more than you realise).

There’s also an argument for Stormy Petrel, which proved Australians could be really interested in watching stories about our own history. Look, okay, I will come clean – the most influential Australian TV series really was Homicide, but today I am going to write about Stormy Petrel, which also had a major impact. Certainly, a bigger influence than any other play I have written about in this series.

Stormy Petrel is not remembered much these days, but it’s remembered a little – indeed, it’s unfair to group it in a series on forgotten Australian TV plays, especially as it wasn’t a play, so much as a mini-series, consisting of twelve continuing episodes. But I’m going to do it anyway, because the cast and crew had all learned their trade making those plays, and also because, well, I don’t want to start a whole new series.

Stormy Petrel was a genuine groundbreaker: the first Australian mini-series, the first big television success from the ABC drama department, the first ABC drama to inspire a rip-off on the commercial stations (Jonah, made by ATN-7 in 1962), the first Australian TV drama to be adapted into a novel, the first Australian drama to inspire not one but two sequels. All those historical mini-series of the 1970s and 1980s that many of us grew up with – Against the Wind, For the Term of His Natural Life, Bodyline, etc – have their antecedents in Stormy Petrel.

It actually began life as a 1948 radio serial. The author of this (and the later TV mini-series, and its 1963 novelisation, and the 1961 mini-series sequel The Outcasts) was Rex Rienits, a one-time journalist who did a bit of creative writing on the side through the 1930s and 1940s, going full-time after the war.

Rienits didn’t limit himself to one format; throughout his career he turned out radio plays, stage plays, novels, short stories, screenplays, biographies, articles, general histories, criticism and TV scripts.

From 1949 until his death in 1971, Rienits was predominantly based in London apart from two long stints back in Australia (1954-55 and 1959-61), but throughout his entire career, he regularly wrote about Australian themes and subjects.

Among the lives, events and novels that he dramatised, included an ABC radio play about convict Margret Catchpole, a novel and film treatment on the Eureka Stockade (the latter formed the basis for the 1949 Ealing Studios movie), a BBC radio adaptation of Robbery Under Arms, and episodes for the Australian-set BBC radio serial The Flying Doctors.

Rienits also wrote material that had nothing to do with his homeland: you might have seen some British pictures based on his stories and scripts such as Assassin for Hire (1951), Wide Boy (1952), and Out of the Clouds (1955). And he worked on screenplays for some of the extremely rare Australian films of the 1950s such as Walk into Paradise (1956), Three into One (1957) and Smiley Gets a Gun (1958).

The radio serial of Stormy Petrel told the story of Captain William Bligh, focusing on the two main turbulent events of that man’s life, the Mutiny on the Bounty and the Rum Rebellion. Rienits was motivated to write it, in part, by his feeling that Bligh had been slandered in the 1935 Hollywood film Mutiny on the Bounty and wanted to rectify the man’s reputation. The serial was very well received, selling to Britain and being reprised on Australian radio in 1953, 1959 and 1962.

In mid-1959, Rienits relocated from London to Sydney to take up a position at the ABC as television drama editor. Aunty had been producing TV plays since 1956, but these mostly consisted of versions of foreign scripts; Rienits’ appointment seems to have been motivated by a desire to put a little more professionalism and Australian content on the ABC drama slate.

Rienits was one of a number of Australians who had established reputations writing for British television (others included Peter Yeldham, Bruce Stewart, Michael Noonan, Richard Beynon, Philip Grenville Mann, Raymond Bowers, Iain MacCormick, and, in the US, Sumner Locke Elliot and Michael Plant) – but Rienits was the first to come home (well, one of the first… I think Michael Noonan was doing work here on the 1959 TV series The Flying Doctor around the same time).

Over the next 12 months, the ABC would film several Rienits scripts that had been previously shot for London television: Bodgie (an adaption of Wide Boy relocated to Kings Cross in Sydney), Close to the Roof and Who Killed Kovali?

Apparently, when Rienits first took up his job at the ABC, there was no intention to adapt Stormy Petrel for the small screen. According to Colin Dean, who ultimately directed the series, the ABC were thinking about making a limited-run serial, Dean’s wife had been listening to Stormy Petrel on the radio and suggested that it be turned into a TV series. Dean says he was unsure about this as most of the radio version centered around the Bounty story, which mostly took place outdoors and/or on water and thus would be prohibitively expensive to film. However, the director then had the idea of an adaptation that focused solely on the Rum Rebellion section, a story which mostly took place indoors on dry land. Dean pitched the idea to Rienits, who was enthusiastic, and they took it to the ABC who agreed to proceed. (The source for this is an excellent oral history with Dean recorded by Graham Shirley for the National Film and Sound Archive).

Stormy Petrel was something of a gamble – twelve 30-minute episodes is a lot of television to risk on a single story, and Dean was not that experienced in drama (I think his only TV play credit at that point had been a 1959 adaptation of the Max Afford stage play Lady in Danger). However, Rienits was a very experienced writer, thoroughly familiar with the period and characters from his work on the radio serial, and well-schooled via his British training in how to write production-friendly scripts for television. The material was essentially dramatic and integrally Australian (though the latter would have caused some apprehension in the more culturally Australophobic sections of the ABC), and Dean had an impressive track record as a documentary filmmaker. Also, the overall cost of the production would be less than making, say, twelve stand-alone 30-minute TV plays because you could re-use sets and costumes.

The series debuted in Sydney on 15 May 1960, broadcast live from the ABC studios at Gore Hill; it was recorded and shown in other cities at a later date. Critical response was, on the whole, very enthusiastic – and ratings, for an ABC drama were extremely good. According to one account, Stormy Petrel recorded an average 13 share in Melbourne, which was high for the ABC (though to put in context, Emergency, a little-remembered 1959 Australian medical drama on the commercial station GTV-9 got a 27 share. There was a lot of audience prejudice against watching shows on the ABC even back then).

I was recently lucky enough to watch all episodes of Stormy Petrel and it’s easy to see why the response was so positive. It’s not a classic or masterpiece, a work of its time, i.e. 1960 Australian television drama (for instance, I think there’s maybe one mention of Aboriginal people, and most scenes consist of a few people talking in a room). But, by those standards it’s extremely good. It’s just so… competent. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but having worked in television, trust me, it’s hard to do even that.

Stormy Petrel is solid storytelling involving two three-dimensional antagonists who have a compelling conflict that leads to a surprising, yet inevitable concision. The narrative line is clear and clean: Bligh (played by Brian James) is given a mission to bust the control that John Macarthur (Walter Sullivan) and the rum corps have over the colony of New South Wales, and finds himself in an almighty battle. Bligh is a lot more sympathetic here than in most Mutiny on the Bounty films but he’s no saint – angry, touchy, a lousy diplomat – while Macarthur is greedy, ruthless and sly but also charming and brilliant. They are both fantastic roles.

There’s a strong array of support characters, too, including the morally uncertain Major Johnston (Nigel Lovell), the perennially drunk Judge Atkins (Richard Parry) and the shifty Major Foveaux (Rhoderick Walker). Even better, the series has a co-protagonist, Bligh’s daughter Mary (Delia Williams), who accompanied him to Sydney during this time; she’s a sounding board during the Macarthur stuff but also has her own plot line, marrying John Putland (Ric Hutton) over her father’s objections, nursing Putland through illness, befriending Elizabeth Macarthur (Margo Lee), eventually becoming a widow and finding love again.

Emphasising Mary Bligh was, for me, Rienits’ masterstroke because it opens up the world of the characters, and ensures that there’s a female in the story front and centre. And yes, that’s due to history, but plenty of historical adaptations routinely ignore/downplay the role of women. Rienits always gives Mary prominence; for instance, he gave Bligh’s real-life secretary, Edmund Griffin (Alastair Duncan), an unrequited love for Mary, which adds a powerful emotional undercurrent to all their scenes and proved to be a real favourite with audiences. (NB. Rex Rienits wrote another 1948 radio serial, Bligh Had a Daughter, which focused on the Mary Bligh story; presumably he drew on some of that material for the TV series.)

It’s not a perfect collection of scripts. Some of the dialogue (never Rienits’ forte) is on the nose and the series falters in its middle episodes when the action gets bogged down in a series of trials – Rienits would have been better off using this screen time on something else like, say, fleshing out the under-utilised character of Elizabeth Macarthur, and/or giving Ric Hutton something else to do as Putland, other than cough. But it recovers for an exciting and satisfactory finale.

Brian James and Walter Sullivan are outstanding in the leads, but my favourite was Delia Williams, who plays Mary with verve and a twinkle in the eye. Williams was a Welsh actress who moved to Australia and had a short but glittering career here, nabbing many of the best roles on Australian TV drama at the time (eg. Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Nina in The Seagull); she had presence, beauty and charisma and it’s a shame that her career ended shortly after this when she married and became a mother. Muriel Steinbeck (Reflections in Dark Glasses) isn’t given much to do as Mrs. Bligh but it’s good to see her. Ric Hutton gives a slightly camp portrayal of Lt Putland but even if you do interpret it as meaning Mary Bligh married a gay man, well, Putland did spend a lot of time at sea and that’s kind of interesting in its own way.

It was with Stormy Petrel that the ABC unlocked the code on how to make successful television drama: (a) find an interesting story with compelling characters that is (b) based on pre-existing IP that has been road tested in another medium which is (c) about something intrinsically Australian so you don’t have to worry about unflattering comparisons with foreign versions and (d) broadcast it over consecutive weeks so word of mouth has time to build. The thing is, I am not sure that the ABC realised it. Or if it did, they were hesitant about what to do with the discovery.

In hindsight, the success of Stormy Petrel should have prompted the ABC to reallocate that portion of its drama budget which it spent on filming TV plays by foreign writers (during the run of Petrel alone, this included adaptations of Shadow of Heroes, The Emperor Jones, and Farewell, Farewell Eugene) and used it to commission two, if not three, new mini-series a year. They could have made at least one in Sydney and one in Melbourne (to minimise interstate rivalries) and based the stories on some road-tested pre-existing IP like a radio play, novel, and/or historical event. There were certainly plenty to choose from – a lot of famed Australian mini-series from the 1970s and 1980s were based on novels first published prior to 1960, including Sara Dane, The Timeless Land, Power without Glory, A Town Like Alice, All the Rivers Run, Robbery Under Arms, For the Term of His Natural Life, Come in Spinner, The Far Country, Golden Fiddles, Seven Little Australians, The Harp in the South, and The Shiralee.

I know that it’s great that those stories were filmed for TV eventually, but the ABC could have adapted them twenty years earlier. If the ABC just wanted to adapt more Rex Rienits radio plays, they could have filmed stories about Ned Kelly, Margaret Catchpole, Mary Reiby, John Flynn, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, George Barrington, and Matthew Flinders – seriously, he wrote that much Australian themed stuff (for the ABC and BBC).

Anyway, it didn’t happen – I think loathing for Australian culture was far too entrenched in (some sections of) the ABC for such a radical change. And to be fair, memories may have lingered about some earlier not-particularly-successful screen attempts to dramatise Australian history such as Charles Chauvel’s Heritage (1935), Ealing Studios’ Eureka Stockade (1949) and Hollywood’s Botany Bay (1953)… making the accomplishment of Rienits, Dean and so on in Stormy Petrel (i.e. dramatising Australian history in a compelling way) even more remarkable.

However, to its credit the ABC did decide to follow Stormy Petrel’s success with an annual locally written mini-series. The first four were all directed by Colin Dean, starting with The Outcasts (1961), a kind of sequel to Petrel, set immediately after the events of that story, which focused on ex-convict surgeon William Redfern (Ron Haddrick). Although written by Rienits, reviews were not quite as positive, but it led to a second sequel, The Patriots (1962), based on a script by Phillip Grenville Mann, whose hero was William Wentworth (James Condon). The year after that, saw Reinits’ The Hungry Ones (1963), about the famous escape by Mary Bryant (Fay Kelton), then 1964 brought Richard Lane’s The Purple Jacaranda, a contemporary thriller which was generally held to be a disaster. However, the 1965 effort, an adaptation of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack, was a considerable triumph.

Then, the ABC stopped making mini-series… an incredibly foolish decision that was reversed a few years later, resulting in an adaptation of the novel Pastures of the Blue Crane (1969) (directed by Tom Jeffrey who was floor manager on Stormy Petrel) and a string of mini-series over the next twenty years.

In addition to those ABC mini-series, Stormy Petrel prompted ATN-7 to make their own historical series starring Brian James, Jonah (1962). This was meant to be a recurring series rather than a limited-run serial, focusing on the adventures of a Sydney merchant in the 1840s (or thereabouts) called Jonah (James) whose adventures would bring him into contact with real-life figures from colonial Australia such as Ludwig Leichhardt, Ben Boyd, and Lady Franklin. Reception to the series was strong – the ratings exceeded that for Stormy Petrel – and it sold to the UK. However, the latter achievement ended up inadvertently sealing Jonah’s doom – Actor’s Equity demanded residuals for the cast from the foreign sale, the production company refused, the union went on strike and the show was axed prematurely. It was a totally full-on situation that contributed to no new drama being made on the commercial stations in 1963 and stands as a reminder as to why we need a drama quota.

Rex Rienits spent his last decade in London, but he never stopped writing about Australia. His later works included a novel of Stormy Petrel (1963), a biography of James Cook (1969) and some books on Australian artists co-written with his wife Thea; he was working as an editor on Australian Heritage magazine when he died of a heart attack in 1971.

Rex Rienits was no artist, but he was a first-rate craftsman and complete professional. He came across in interviews as affable, down-to-earth and lively; according to Peter Yeldham, Rienits was also a nice person, an Australian in London always willing to help his countrymen. He proved that it was possible to make a good living dramatising Australian history at a time when that was considered weird and embarrassing. He truly was a giant in his field, and Stormy Petrel is a testament to his considerable ability.

The author would like to thank Peter Yeldham, Graham Shirley and Simon Drake of the National Film and Sound Archive for his assistance with this article. All opinions are my own.

For more articles like this, read:

60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & ‘60s

Annette Andre: My Brilliant Early Australian Career

Barry Creyton Live

Forgotten Australian TV Plays – The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: A Tongue of Silver

The Flawed Landmark: Burst of Summer

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Grey Nurse Said Nothing

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: You Can’t Win ‘Em All

Forgotten Australian TV plays: Marriage Lines

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Merchant of Venice

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Seagulls Over Sorrento