Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Patriots

by Stephen Vagg

Australian cinema is notorious for the long-gestating sequel: there were considerable gaps, for instance, between The Man from Snowy River 1 (1982) and 2 (1988), Wolf Creek 1 (2005) and 2 (2013), The Wog Boy 1 (2000) and 2 (2010), and of course, Alvin Rides Again (1974) and Melvin Son of Alvin (1984).

Australian television is generally a lot quicker to cash in on any sequels that it feels are required – maybe because they are worried that the audience might forget (I’m talking sequels not reboots). So, Underbelly (2008) immediately led to a raft of Underbellies, My Name’s McGooley What’s Yours? (1966-68) begat Rita and Wally (1968), The Interpretaris (1966) was followed by Vega 4 (1967) and Phoenix Five (1969), and Stormy Petrel (1960) was followed by The Outcasts (1961) and The Patriots (1962). Today, I am writing about The Patriots, aka Stormy Petrel 3: Democracy’s Revenge!, having recently seen all ten 30-minute episodes.

It was the third in the ABC’s unofficial trilogy of historical mini-series: Stormy Petrel tackled the Rum Rebellion, The Outcasts concerned William Redfern and Lachlan Macquarie fighting for emancipist rights, and The Patriots would involve William Wentworth’s battle for more emancipist rights.

The first two were written by Rex Rienits, who opted out of The Patriots, so he could return to London to focus on his books and radio work. (He would script the fourth in the series, The Hungry Ones (1963), which was a kind of prequel.) Scripting duties instead went to another Australian who had worked in London radio and TV: Phillip Grenville Mann. Among Mann’s Australian TV play credits were The Sergeant from Burralee (1961), a groundbreaking-for-its-time tale about the murder of an Aboriginal in colonial New South Wales, which had been also filmed for British TV as The Attorney General; Funnel Web (1962), an entertaining Dial M for Murder style thriller; and The Ballad for One Gun (1963), a reinterpretation of the Ned Kelly story which starred John Bell as ol’ bucket head. I haven’t seen any of these plays (I am not sure copies exist) but I have read the original scripts and they are all solid work: Mann could clearly write. He also replaced Rienits as the ABC’s drama editor and would adapt stage plays for filming by the ABC like Luther and Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The character of William Wentworth had featured in a minor capacity in The Outcasts, talking to his highwayman-surgeon father Darcy, crossing the Blue Mountains and generally being a young Man of Destiny. He was played in that one by Phillip Ross, but James Condon took over the role for The Patriots which examined Wentworth as a middle-aged Man of Destiny. Condon was handsome with a deep speaking voice and rich head of hair – all three factors ensured he worked steadily as an actor throughout his career although he had a limited range. (Random trivia: in real life he was Mr Anne “Neighbours” Haddy.)

The main thrust of the plot for The Patriots is similar-ish to Stormy Petrel in that it’s about the clash between a wealthy landowner and a strict governor; only here the landowner, Wentworth, is the goodie, wanting rights for the locals, while the governor, Darling (Allan Trevor), is the baddy, trying to maintain New South Wales as a military dictatorship. The thrust of their dispute concerns the case of Sudds (Stewart Ginn) and Thompson (Frank Taylor), two soldiers who deliberately committed a crime so they would be sentenced to prison, which they figured to be a better gig than soldiering. There’s also Wentworth’s romance with Sara Cox (Beverly Phillips), his bromance with James Wardell (Nigel Lovell) who gets challenged to a duel, and his friendship with Colonel Robinson (Alastair Duncan) as a soldier who turns against Darling.

Colin Dean directed the first five ABC mini-series, from Stormy Petrel through to The Purple Jacaranda (1964). He admitted in an oral history for the National Film and Sound Archive that, in looking back at his career, he got The Outcasts and The Patriots mixed up. Both lack the “high concept” nature of Petrel and The Hungry Ones and the disaster factor of Jacaranda. Both had good stuff in them, particularly the costumes and sets.

I feel there was a key difference, however: The Outcasts entailed an epic sweep; it lacked focus but did provide plenty of dramatic juice, covering more than a decade. The Patriots doesn’t really have enough material for 300 minutes. The conflict between Darling and Wentworth is really solid, and focusing on the Sudds case would have made a fantastic 90 minute play. It’s about an important topic, too – the role played by a free press in effecting change, and how democracy can struggle to emerge. But stretched over ten episodes, there’s a lot of padding. Undramatic padding too, with a lot of scenes consisting of characters standing around being indignant about what they are reading in the paper. It even skips some stuff that happened in real life which was cool, such as Wardell meeting a violent death at the hands of escaped convicts.

The ABC had dealt with this subject matter before in radio: Edmund Barclay wrote the play, Spoiled Darlings, back in 1940 which dealt with this story comically adding a fictitious love story. The play was so well received it repeated in 1941 and was included in a 1946 published collection of Australian radio scripts. Maybe, that’s the better way to treat the material.

Still, there are a lot of fun bits to enjoy in The Patriots: John Fegan popping up as a “turnkey” (he has clearly come up in the world from The Outcasts, where he played a “flagellator”), Ruth Cracknell doing wonders with the thankless role of Mrs Darling, a scene where all the colonialists get on the booze in Wentworth’s posh Vaucluse House and it strikes you as something that could have happened at Malcolm Turnbull’s place, the duel between Wardell and Henry Dumaresq (Ellis Irvin) (there was a lot of duelling in Australia back in the day, people had too much time on their hands), Stewart Ginn’s moving performance as poor old Sudds. The sets and photography are superb.

The Patriots isn’t up to Stormy Petrel but it has its pleasures, and the ABC were far better off making things like this than all those British TV scripts they filmed in 1962.

The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and Simon Drake of the NFSA for their assistance with this article. All opinions are my own.

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