Australian play dealing with the murder of an Aboriginal.
The first Australian TV credit to my knowledge of Philip Grenville Mann.
Plot
In the 1830s, a white settler is speared in the Newastle district. An Aboriginal, Jacko, is charged with the crime. However Captain Alcot interrogates Jacko, becomes convinced of his innocence, and sends a
despatch to Sydney saying he is going to release the man. That night a
party is held in the officers' mess and, in a drunken stupor, Lt Ned
Louden shoots Jacko in the back.
Urged on by Nathaniel Carlton, the resident magistrate, Captain
Alcot writes to Sydney to explain the situation. Louden is arrested and
brought to Sydney for a trial. Thomas Morland, the acting
attorney-general, is sent to Newcastle to investigate the murder.
Captain Alcot wishes to keep on the good side of the land-hungry
Carlton so they attempt to defend the drunken lieutenant who has shot a
native. Neither believe the prisoner Jacko had anything to do with the
murder of a white settler, since he was captured 60 miles away from the
crime. So they bribe Sergeant Constantine, who arrested Jacko, into
saying that the place of arrest was close to Newcastle.
At a trial in Sydney, the lieutenant is charged with murder by
the Acting Attorney-General. False testimony by Constantine brings a
verdict of not guilty; but the playwright makes it clear that it is as
much a victory as a defeat—"people will have second thoughts" about
molesting aborigines after this.
Cast
- Alistair Duncan as Thomas Morland, the acting Attorney General
- Deryck Barnes as Sgt Constantine
- Gordon Glenwright as Captain Alcot
- Candy Williams as Jacko
- Stewart Ginn as Nathaniel Carlton
- Fernande Gynn as Constantine's wife Bessie
- Hugh Stewart as Robert McDonald
- John Gray as Sgt Lane
- Reg Lye as Joshua Beer
- Keith Buckley as Jack Salisbury
- Noanie Roathsay as Matha Sailsbury
- Edward Hepple
- Jon Dennis as Newton
- Douglas Bladen as Sentry
- Lance Bennett as Taylor
- Phillip Ross as Gaoler
- Max Meldrum as the lieutenant
- Nigel Lovell
- Moray Powell
Background
The play was based on a real life trial when a soldier was charged
with the murder of an Aboriginal.
It was written by Philip Grenville
Mann, an Australian writer who was living in England. He got the idea
for the play after reading historical records at Australia House
in London; he read about the accidental shooting of an Aboriginal
during the time of Governor Phillip and did further research. He wrote
it originally under the title The Sergeant from Lone Pine.
The play won equal first prize in the 1959 New South Wales Journalists' Club Award out of 250 entries.(The other winner was J.V. Warner's World Without End.)This was awarded in April 1960. (Mann returned to Australia in October.)
President of the Journalists' Club was Kenneth Slessor and the judges, representing each of the three Sydney television stations, were Brett Porter (ATN-7), Raymond Menmuir (ABN-2) and Peter Benardos (TCN-9).
The play World Without End was read by Channel 7 but never made.
Porter was enthusiastic about the entries saying "I believe it won't be long before we find we have in this country about 12 writers about to produce good TV plays... This competition and others have shown us what we can expect." He drew parallels with British cinema, which was considered inferior "then came the war and the production of In Which We Serve. British films suddenly became desirable and they have never looked back." Porter said it was important that Australian writers disguise their Australian characteristics, "If we treat the Australian writer as inferior he will be inferior. It is up to the television stations to create a market for him."
Menmuir says the moment he read it, he suggested the ABC buy it. "It's a
darned fine play," said Menmuir. "The scenes are short, the action
moves swiftly and smoothy and it has a universality of appeal." He added "I don't know what some viewers will think about it because it shows that right and justice don't always win." Rights were also bought by the BBC.
Mann returned to Australia in 1961 after six years in England and replaced Rex Rienits as the ABC's drama editor. He would later write the historical ABC drama series
The Patriots.
Other versions
The play was also broadcast by the BBC and screened for West German television.
The play was filmed by the BBC in 1961 as The Attorney General. It was directed by Harold Clayton
It was turned into a radio play in 1961.
Mann then adapted it into a play Day of Glory which had its debut in 1964. It was reworked for a 1970 production.
Production
It was shot live at the ABC's studios in Sydney. Alistair Duncan
was an English actor who had recently settled in Australia and had
played Captain Bligh's secretary in Stormy Petrel. Sets and costumes were by Geoff Wedlock.
Nine sets were constructed for the play, including gaols and courtrooms
Reception
The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that "it is an admirable
play, dealing searchingly with the impulses, compulsions and motives of a
gallery of characters...The production... was quite gripping; the play
itself, most notably in the courtroom scenes, showed how telling a
medium TV can be... this play was one of the best the A.B.C. has done."
Val Marshall from the Sunday edition of the
Herald said it
"let me with that rather unsatisfactory feeling of a good piece of
material well handled, but which could have been a great deal better
than it was" saying that "it got first rate treatment from Raymond
Menmuir" but felt 90 minutes was too long and Duncan was miscast."
 |
SMH 20 March 1961 p 17
|
 |
SMH 23 March 1961 p 17
|
 |
TV Times Qld 22 March 1962
|
 |
TV Times Vic
|
 |
TV Times Vic 9 June 1960
|
 |
NAA Listener Letter
|
 |
NAA LL
|
.jpg)
Forgotten Australian television plays: The Sergeant from Burralee
by Stephen Vagg
(Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article may contain images and voices of people who have died.)
Phillip Grenville Mann isn’t a writer particularly well remembered today – indeed, he was not that famous at his peak, yet he had a moment in the sun, in particular, as drama editor for ABC television in the early 1960s.
While the actual heads of drama at the time were Paul O’Loughlin and Neil Hutchison, Mann was the “point man” for anyone who wanted to submit a script to the ABC. And that was a big deal since until Homicide came along in 1964 the ABC were the only ones consistently making television drama.
Mann was born in 1921 and keen on writing at an early age – he won a series of writing competitions while at high school. His career was interrupted by war service, with Mann doing a five year stint in the Royal Australian Navy; this provided him with the background to his successful radio play, The Seas Between, which starred Peter Finch. Come peacetime, Mann did many of the things that people did back then when they wanted to be a professional writer: taught school, wrote radio plays, tried to get his stage plays on, and emigrated to England.
He had some success in the Old Country writing television and rep theatre. While in London, Mann was reading up on Australian history in the library at Australia House when he came across an incident which led to his television play The Sergeant from Burralee.
This work is set in 1830s New South Wales and focuses on the murder of Jacko, an Aboriginal prisoner, by a drunken British officer. Jacko was in custody for spearing a colonist, a crime for which he was innocent – indeed, Jacko was scheduled to be released when he was killed. The whites assume Jacko’s murder will be swept under the carpet, but an Attorney General in Sydney decides to try the officer for murder.
The Sergeant from Burralee doesn’t contain too many dramatic surprises. There’s (spoilers) no doubt of Jacko’s innocence, or who murdered him, or even the final result – the Attorney General expects to lose and he loses.
Mann wasn’t that gifted as a writer when it came to dramatic construction nor was he overly strong on characterisation – we never really get a sense of what makes the Attorney General tick (he sort of floats through the story like a bewildered academic don, although that might be in part due to Alistair Duncan’s performance), and the character of Jacko doesn’t get a single line of dialogue. There are no hooky twists or reveals.
However, Mann did have guts – The Sergeant from Burralee is a remarkably bleak depiction of race relations at the time, the way crimes were instinctively covered up within the army, the relentless use of racist jargon, the politics that undermine attempts at justice, the utter lack of sensitivity of soldiers and politicians towards the local population, the corruption of senior figures using every excuse they can to grab more land, the ethical dilemmas of witnesses to the crime.
Burralee won equal first prize in a 1959 competition held by the Sydney Journalists Club for Best Television Play. (The other winner was World Without End, by a Woomera rocket scientist – this was never filmed.) One of the judges for the competition was ABC drama director Ray Menmuir, who recommended the Commission buy Burralee. The script was also bought for production by the BBC (who filmed it as The Attorney General with John Gregson in the title role) and West German television (who filmed it in 1962 with Albert Lieven). This achievement impressed the ABC so much it offered Mann the job of replacing Rex Rienits as drama editor in 1961, the year The Sergeant from Burralee was filmed by Menmuir in Sydney.
I was lucky enough to see a copy of the ABC production recently – the National Film and Sound Archive have just digitised the copy they had in storage. It’s very well directed by Menmuir, with excellent production design and strong performances (as well as weak ones).
Candy Williams plays Jacko, the sole Aboriginal character – we never see the impact of his death on any others. The ABC was anxious about local material around this time, which might explain why the credits emphasise that the play won a prize (“see! It’s not our fault if you don’t like it!”). Mann later adapted the work into a stage play, Days of Glory.
Mann’s other credits at the ABC included The Patriots and The Ballad for One Gun. The spectacular critical failure of the latter seemed to derail his career a little, although he stayed at the ABC for over a decade as an in-house script editor, and he never stopped writing for television, stage or radio, later moving into novels as well.
In the early 1960s, Mann was a figure in the ABC’s war on Australian scripts – I’ve read scores of letters from this time at the National Archives of Australia where Mann rejected television plays from authors as varied as Della Foss Paine, Peter Yeldham, Michael Noonan, Dorothy Blewett, Don Houghton, Michael Plant and Tony Morphett (as well as a lot of letters where Mann pushed his own scripts and bitched about his colleagues). As the ABC’s drama budget expanded in the mid-sixties, it got in other script editors and Mann’s influence within the organisation lessened. This was a good thing – I don’t mean to be nasty, truly, but he wasn’t very supportive of other Australian writers at a time when they needed support. Mann’s abilities as a writer should be remembered and acknowledged, but so should his influence within the ABC.
Still, The Sergeant from Burralee is a gutsy, significant work in the history of Australian television drama and it’s a wonderful thing that it’s now more easily available at the NFSA.
The author would like to thank the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this article. All opinions are the author’s.
See here
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment