The Swagman (31 March 1965)

 Set in Australia but written by a Britisher. Controversial due to its sexual content.

Premise

Jack and Jane Bell are a married couple who live on a small sheep farm. Jane is a young Englishwoman who cannot adjust to the isolation of the outback.

Jane becomes attracted to the hired hand, a young Australian-born Italian, Tony. Jane and Tony arrange to be alone on the farm for one night, but their romantic plans are spoiled by the arrival of a swagman . 

Cast

• June Thody as Jane Bell
• Vincent Gil as Tony
• Don Reid as Jack Bell
• Edward Hepple as The Swagman
• Brenda Sender as the neighbour
  

Production

The play was written by English author Ian Stuart Black who had never visited Australia. He created Danger Man.

The script was recommended by a Mrs Lyon who lived in London and would read scripts for the ABC.

It was selected for production by Henri Safran. It was the world premiere of the play.

The play was shot in ABC's studios in Gore Hill, Sydney on 27 January 1965. Camera rehearsals took place 25-27 January.

The swagman was played by Edward Hepple, an English-born actor who had moved to Australia a number of years previously.

Music - Andy Sundstrom. Camera - Fred Richardson. Technical producer - John Hicks. Designer - Bernard Hides. Producer - Henri Safran. 

The NAA have a copy of the script. Info here. Not online.

My thoughts on the script

 A play about coitus interruptus, really. A station owner's wife wants to get off with a hunky foreman while hubby is away. She gets interrupted by a neighbour, a touring swagman, then the husband.

This led to a moral panic from some viewers who wrote in criticising the script. It was written by an Englishman but shot in Australia.

It's not very good but it is interesting. It's of more interest to examine that this was the one TV play that seemed to get viewers actually upset.

Reception

The TV critic for The Sydney Morning Herald said Safran "avoided the common fault of accentuating the Australian features" of the play. "An Australian production which does not stamp 'this is Australia' on any local subject matter may be said to make great strides in maturity and competence and there was promising evidence of this in excellent acting, capable camera work and fluency of treatment."

Another critic from the same paper said that although the play "had... some holes in its... story big enough to sink the entire cast and author combined, it came off as one of the finest bits of Australian drama from the A.B.C.'s Sydney studios... an absorbing bit of stuff. It plunged straight into the centre of the story with a minimum of preamble, the cast all turned in workmanlike performances, and action and suspense (even with those implausible holes) was sustained to the last."

A critic from The Canberra Times said the pay "opens tautly with not a moment wasted in creating the setting for a night of adultery" but that the writer was "unable to sustain this idea in the same vein. Overt blackmail by the tramp becomes the means of this progressive intrusion rather than the more subtle action of the couple's own guilt and fear. Paradoxically, the dramatic inevitability and tension arc shattered.^"

The Age TV critic said "it offended Australian women by implying bush wives are as hard as nails to swagmen... it made repeated and I think unnecessary, disparaging references to Italian migrants... painted a false picture of the swagman... the producer's quest for 'realism' provided early embarrassment with protracted scenes of passion on the bed which left nothing to the imagination... [the ABC] should have warned viewers of the 'torrid' scenes in store. One hesitates to slam the ABC so hard for presenting a drama with an Australian theme. But the viewer has the right to expect dramas selected by the national network to have merit, and not to be produced on the strength of the title alone, which seems to have been the case here."

Another column in The Age used the play to discuss the uncertainty of Australian censorship laws and called it "unquestionably a well-designed, well-presented, well-acted play. But why the ABC has to concentrate so much on raw meat and the unwholesome passeth all understanding."

The Canberra Times called it among the best locally produced television dramas of 1965

Controversy

The screening of the program prompted letters of complaint from viewers.

One letter called it a "sordid ugly spectacle of a married woman being outraged."

This led to a series of correspondence. Copies are below:

Radio Version

The play was adapted for radio and broadcast by the ABC  in May1965.

TV Times Vic

 

SMH TV Guide 30 March 1965

The Age TV Guide 25 March 1965

Canberra Times 2 April 1965 p 15

SMH 2 May 1965 p 96

SMH TV Guide 23 March 1965 p 4

SMH 1 April 1965 p 11

SMH 4 April 1965 p 92

The Age TV Guide 8 April 1965 p 2

The Age 10 April 1965 p 23

Canberra Times 2 April 1965 p 2

Canberra Times 3 April 1965p 2

Canberra Times 5 April 1965 p 2

Canberra Times 6 April 1965 p 2

Canberra Times 7 April 1965 p 2

Canberra Times 6 Sept 1965 p 2

The Age 7 April 1965 p 2

the Age 13 April 1965 p 2

The Age 17 April 1965 p 2

The Age 19 April 1965 p 2

The Age 21 April 1965 p 2

Canberra Times 31 Dec 1965 p 7

 

Cover of script

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Swagman
by Stephen Vagg
May 28, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at the steamy (ish) 1965 ABC drama, The Swagman.

Judging from contemporary accounts, Australian TV plays rarely attracted that much press attention in their day. There were a variety of reasons for this – lack of publicity, irregular broadcasting times, a tendency to shoot foreign scripts rather than local ones, the fact that most of them were on the less-watched ABC, etc. Some did break through into the general cultural conversation, though – particularly the ones about sex. A case in point was The Swagman (1965).

This was an original for TV set in Australia but, oddly, based on a script by a British writer, Ian Stuart Black, who had never been here. Black was a highly experienced scribe who wrote all sorts of things – novels, scripts, screenplays – and was important in the early days of the classic TV series Danger Man. I don’t know what possessed him to write something about Australia, but Australian-set TV plays were not uncommon on British screens in the 1960s.

The Swagman is set on an isolated outback property, whose owner (Don Reid) has gone into town overnight to get medicine for his unwell foreman Tony (Vincent Gil)… not knowing Tony is faking the illness so he can root the owner’s wife Janet (Jane Thody). Their attempts at rumpy are interrupted, at first by a nosy neighbour (Brenda Sender) and then by a visiting swagman (Edward Hepple). They get rid of the neighbour soon enough, but the swagman hangs around, doing odd jobs and eventually worming his way into the house so he can have his own crack at the wife.

The Swagman is a fascinating piece, part neglected-housewife-wanting-sex-in-a-sweltering-hot-environment melodrama, part psychological thriller. I guess you could call it “outback noir” only there’s no plot to murder anyone for cash. It’s got a great sense of menace and rising tension, because you sense the swagman character is going to do something bad but you’re not sure what and you don’t know how reliable Tony is going to be about stopping it.

The three leads are all superb: Hepple is terrifying as the slimy, scruffy, misogynist, violent Iago type swagman; Thody, an actor with whom I was unfamiliar, is stunningly good as the lonely, bewildered farmer’s wife, who just wants some decent conversation; and Gil (later famous for his biker/roughneck roles) impresses as an insecure would-be stud muffin. I also enjoyed the performance of Don Reid as the cuckolded farmer and the director Henri Safran handles it all with pace and tension. The script does require Janet and Tony to be dills in act two, but I guess they don’t know they’re in a TV play.

The production was shot at ABC’s Gore Hill Studios in Sydney in 1965. Some critics loved The Swagman, others got up in arms. The Age said it “offended Australian women by implying bush wives are as hard as nails to swagmen”, “made repeated and I think unnecessary, disparaging references to Italian migrants” and “painted a false picture of the swagman.” There were also angry letters to the editor of various newspapers complaining about the content, followed by letters defending the piece.

The controversy was reminiscent to that surrounding an earlier Australian TV play, The Multi Coloured Umbrella (1958), based on the stage play by Barbara Vernon, about a family of Catholic bookmakers where one brother lusts after the wife of his sibling, who is not sexually satisfying the wife. That production was given a big splash at the time, the first one broadcast from ABC’s Gore Hill Studios, but resulted in a storm of complaints about its content (well, a couple of people wrote in to the paper, anyway).

In both The Multi Coloured Umbrella and The Swagman, the female lead was a married woman unhappy with her sex life and actively attracted to a third party. I believe it was this factor more than anything else which upset (some) viewers. You didn’t have this controversy for TV plays about men who cheated or wanted to cheat (Marriage Lines, Split Level)… but if a wife wanted to cuckold hubby, gasp, it was the end of days. To be fair, The Swagman also climaxes (SPOILERS) with the swagman trying to rape Janet… a very well-done, confronting, and all-too believable scene that may have confronted viewers with its verisimilitude, particularly if they were sentimental about swagmen.

The response to The Multi Coloured Umbrella shook the ABC in 1958: plans to show the production in Melbourne were cancelled (sorry, the “tape was damaged”) and the ABC did not film an Australian script for TV for something like 12 months. However, in 1965, when The Swagman was shown, the cultural conversation had shifted; sexual content on screens was more common, so was Australian content. There was still an uproar, but it doesn’t seem to have had as big a fall out – the ABC were a little tougher by now, and they kept pushing Australian content (on the whole).

The Swagman is a powerful, unusual drama. It is problematic, like much television about women’s sexual desires that is written and directed by men… I mean, Janet is really punished for wanting to have sex with Tony: she winds up almost raped, her husband no longer trusts her, the swagman and Tony leave… and she didn’t even get to have her slice of afternoon delight. But it is extremely well made and acted. It’s also great that it stirred the pot and the ABC didn’t back down afterwards, the way they had seven years earlier… they, like the country, had grown up a little from 1958 to 1965.

Syd 64-65 NAA