Garry McDonald

The ABC Of... an interview series, revisits the pasts of famous Australians delving deep to uncover hidden archival gems, exploring how they changed Australia and how Australia changed them.

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A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.

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Venice is having trouble with the men in her life: she breaks up with her lover and starts an affair with her best friend. The aggravation of her ex-hippy dad, camped on her sofa, is the last straw.

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Tom is a British chef in a Bondi restaurant who seems to have decided there are no longer any rules he needs to obey. Whatever Tom is up to, his actions seem to be tolerated by those around him. As Tom descends into darkness, fragments of a different story begin to emerge. All the women in his world are trying in their own, very different ways to help put him back together.

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Australian television film based on alleged events surrounding the death of Caroline Byrne in June 1995. Byrne was found in the early morning of 8 June at the base of a cliff at The Gap, a notorious suicide spot in Sydney.

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The King is the story of Graham Kennedy, Australia's first and greatest home grown TV superstar. It traces his rise from working class Balaclava kid, through radio, TV, film, and back to TV again. It also tracks Kennedy's personal tragedies - the loneliness, the unrealised ambitions and the terrible pressures of being Australia's first homegrown superstar in the 1950s and 60s.

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This is the story of a typical contemporary Australian family. Skye is getting married to Lachlan. They have to tell her mother, stepfather, father, step mother, his father, his new wife, his mother and her girlfriend. Not counting grandparents, aunt and friends. They live with Skye's stepfathers son and best mate who is in love with Skye.

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A young woman goes missing when her car breaks down one rainy night. Her body is later discovered in a national park and for Detective Jack Kempson's offsider Sam, details of the crime mirror the disappearance of her friend Hannah, who vanished without trace some years ago. In Kempson's pursuit of the truth Sam is forced to face the sordid secrets of her past.

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Two Twisted is an Australian TV mystery anthology drama which premiered on the Nine Network on 14 August 2006. Narrated by Bryan Brown, who also produced the series' predecessor, Twisted Tales, each episode of the series contains two short half-hour stories, that have a twist ending. Also present in each episode is a link or connection between the two tales.

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Mary Bryant, a Cornish girl who was convicted of petty theft, is being transported to the Australian Penal Colony on the First Fleet with other prisoners bound for Botany Bay.

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Placid Lake has always been different. As an odd fish in a sea of mediocrity, his brilliant ideas are bound to get him into more trouble than success. So when he finds himself flying off the school roof and breaking every bone in his body on graduation night, Placid decides to make a bid for the elusive normal life. To his parents' horror, he gets a normal job.

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Police officers Lilywhite and Knutt (the "bad cop, bad cop" of the title) are hopelessly incompetent. Lafever is their friend, a lawyer with a relaxed attitude to the goings-on. Police graft, corruption and brutality are satirised in a very dry comic fashion, and with a stream of matter-of-fact obscenities.

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In 1931, three Aboriginal girls escape after being plucked from their homes to be trained as domestic staff, and set off on a trek across the Outback.

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A celebration of love and creative inspiration takes place in the infamous, gaudy and glamorous Parisian nightclub, at the cusp of the 20th century. A young poet, who is plunged into the heady world of Moulin Rouge, begins a passionate affair with the club's most notorious and beautiful star.

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Love Is A Four Letter Word is a 26 episode drama written by Matt Ford produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2001. It was set and filmed in Newtown, in Sydney, New South Wales, following the lives of a group of friends working in a pub, and the concerns facing urban 20somethings in Australia. One of the regular features of the drama was a performance in the pub by a contemporary Australian band.

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A very clumsy man and his UFO-obsessed girlfriend discover a plan made by his boss to market eggs laced with nicotine.

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Medical drama focusing on the working and personal lives of the doctors and nurses working on the front line of a busy inner city Emergency Department at All Saints Hospital.

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Fallen Angels is an Australian television series, aired by the ABC in 1997. Twenty episodes were produced, portraying a community legal centre in Endeavour Park, a fictional western suburb of Sydney, and the interesting clients represented by its overworked lawyers.

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Halifax f.p. is an Australian television crime series produced by Nine Network from 1994 to 2002. The series stars Rebecca Gibney as Doctor Jane Halifax, a forensic psychiatrist investigating cases involving the mental state of suspects or victims. The series is set in Melbourne. The producers of the film were Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier; Australian Film Finance Corporation and aired on the Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd 21 Episodes of 90 and 102 minutes each were produced, and the series has screened in more than 60 countries. The budget for each episode was an average of $1.3 million. Funding came in part from the Australian Film Finance Corporation and Film Victoria.

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Eggshells is a 1991 Australian sitcom about a divorced man.

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This little comedy is set in a small factory come halfway home, employing only handicapped people. Ollie Rennie is the boss and sometime minder of all his workers. He employees Pat Cannizzaro to help get all his workers into some sort of sport, and Pat just happens to be a soccer teacher. He forms a team and tries to take them all the way, with some funny results.

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A disturbed woman murders her husband, and others, so that she can be haunted by their "wronged" spirits.

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Parody of historical epics that focuses on real-life Australian explorers William John Wills and Robert O'Hara Burkes, who tragically tried to cross the Australian continent from the south, to the north, a distance of 3,250 km.

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Banduk discovers that Mr Kool is smuggling birds out of Australia.

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Mother and Son was a multiple Logie Award-winning Australian television sitcom produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 16 January 1984 until 21 March 1994. The show stars Ruth Cracknell, Garry McDonald, Henri Szeps and Judy Morris. It was created and written by Geoffrey Atherden AM. Its classic theme song features the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, playing to I Want a Girl, a jazz standard which was recorded by Al Jolson in the 1920s.

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After Dan collapses at a train station, he enlists Maxie to watch his beloved dog, Molly. Maxie develops a soft spot for her new furry companion - a dog which has a unique ability to sing in tune.

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The escapades of Ginger Meggs, local larrikin. He's trying to win the heart of Minnie Peters, but the pressures of school, his rival Eddie Coogan and bully Tiger Kelly make life tough for him. Besides, there's fishing to be done.

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Left behind by her friends on a boat trip, contemporary teen Mabel takes pursuit but is knocked unconscious on an island, where she has a dream involving pirates, sisters, a modern major-general, romance, and adventure.

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A man, his son and a piano player travel around Australia showing the first silent movies

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In the early 1900s, Miranda attends a girls boarding school in Australia. One Valentine's Day, the school's typically strict headmistress treats the girls to a picnic field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, Miranda and several other girls venture off. It's not until the end of the day that the faculty realizes the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared mysteriously.

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This Australian children's film is about scientist Bill Stewart goes to Fiji with his son Tim to investigate the appearance of the Crown of Thorns starfish in the reefs off the island.

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The lead character, Aunty Jack, a unique comic creation — an obese, moustachioed, gravel-voiced transvestite, part trucker and part pantomime dame — who habitually solves any problem by knocking people unconscious or threatening to 'rip their bloody arms off'. Visually, she is unmistakable, dressed in a huge, tent-like blue velvet dress, football socks, workboots, and a golden boxing glove on her right hand. She rides everywhere on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and referres to everyone as "me little lovelies" — when she is not uttering her familiar threat: "I'll rip yer bloody arms off!", a phrase which immediately passed into the vernacular.

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In the beginning the Devil made a bet with God. The Devil backed Eve, God backed Adam. What would have happened to love and sex if Adam hadn't taken the bite?

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