By Erin Free
FilmInk is on the phone with Bryan Brown to chat about the new home entertainment release of his classic 1981 TV mini-series, A Town Like Alice. But before we get to that, FilmInk wants to know how this veteran Aussie actor and producer – and bona fide cultural institution – has been doing through COVID and the various other nightmare that 2020 has had to offer. “I’m pretty fine,” he says. “I’d really like to complain about something, but I can’t. I’ve been sensible about doing certain things and wearing a mask when it’s necessary, but we’ve been lucky in Australian being an island, obviously. Not many people actually know anybody that’s had it…not to say that people haven’t had it, of course, but it’s just rare to know somebody that’s had it. We’re lucky here. Workwise, nothing has been happening in front of the camera, but I’ve been developing a lot of things and working with writers. So, for me, it hasn’t been very bad.”
Way, way, way before COVID-19 – and way, way, way before he was famous for seminal performances in films like Two Hands, Dirty Deeds, Dead Heart, Cocktail, The Empty Beach, and F/X – Bryan Brown was a young actor forging his way in the film and television industries when they were still really forging their own ways. A Town Like Alice was Brown’s springboard into much, much bigger things. Produced by Australian television pioneer Henry Crawford, 1981’s A Town Like Alice was based on British-born, Australian-based author, Nevil Shute’s 1950 novel (previously adapted for the big screen in 1956 with Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna), which follows wealthy young Englishwoman, Jean Paget, who suffers as a prisoner-of-war at the hands of the Japanese in Malaya during WW2, and then, many years later, attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community in Australia.

The novel is also a deeply romantic one, essaying Jean’s relationship with Australian farmer turned soldier, Joe Harman, whose acts of friendship towards Jean and her fellow prisoners during WW2 results in cruel and unusual retaliation from the Japanese soldiers. With the great Helen Morse (who had become a star thanks to 1976’s masterful Caddie) cast in the role of Jean and superb British import, Gordon Jackson, playing the beefed up role of Jean’s lawyer, Noel Strachan, A Town Like Alice was positioned as a major television event. For the role of Joe Harman, The Seven Network – one of the principal backers of the mini-series – was pushing hard for American actor David Soul, a huge star thanks to the hit TV cop show, Starsky And Hutch.
Henry Crawford, however, had his eye on Bryan Brown, who had featured in the producer’s previous epic mini-series, Against The Wind, playing Irish rebel Michael Connor in the first episode. “It was a great role,” Brown says, “a real lead-type role…but I got killed in the first episode.” Two major establishing films for the actor, meanwhile, were in the can but still unreleased. “Breaker Morant hadn’t hit yet,” Brown explains, “and my first lead role in Stir hadn’t come out yet either. I heard about David Soul when we were shooting…Henry said, ‘Jesus, they tried to get us to cast David Soul!’ So much goes on when you’re doing a show. I think initially that there was a bigger name English actress in line to play Jean when there was more involvement from the BBC. But when that folded up, they went straight for Helen Morse, who was a big star off Picnic At Hanging Rock and Caddie. These kinds of twists and turns happen on nearly every project.”

Still pretty much an unknown quantity, Bryan Brown had to audition for the role, and his tapes were sent to both to The Seven Network and the BBC in the UK, who had first right of refusal to screen the mini-series. The role, of course, ultimately went to Bryan Brown, and his performance as Joe Harman remains amongst the actor’s finest work. He brings an unequalled earthiness, honesty and authenticity to the role of the quietly heroic Harman. “He’s the common man,” Brown says. “But the common man can sometimes have incredible spirit. He’s a bush farmer, and suffers horribly during the war, but he battles through it. He’s a bloke that enjoys life, and he’s put in incredible situations, and that kind of makes him heroic, but he’s really just a good bloke.”
As well as its sweeping story and unforgettable narrative beats, A Town Like Alice truly rides on the chemistry that burns between Bryan Brown and Helen Morse, two of our absolute best. The pair would reunite in 1982 for John Duigan’s Far East, a politically charged romantic drama. “Helen is just a fantastic actress,” Brown says. “She has an incredible warmth. It’s not difficult to play against her. On A Town Like Alice, the scripts by Tom Hegarty and Rosemary Anne Sisson were just excellent, and the characters were so well drawn…all that we had to do was come in and play it as honestly as possible. We had great things to play, and she’s a fabulous actress. It was just as comfortable and enjoyable working with Helen on Far East as it was on A Town Like Alice. It really is great playing opposite her.”

A piece with a truly international flavour, A Town Like Alice was shot in Broken Hill in outback NSW, in studios in Sydney, and on the island of Langkawi, 30 km off the mainland coast of northwestern Malaysia. “It was pretty amazing,” Brown recalls. “Ten years before that, there wasn’t even an Australian film industry, and now we’re flying off to Langkawi? I remember thinking to myself, ‘This acting caper might be alright!’ We had a sixteen-week schedule for six hours of TV, which isn’t a lot, but Henry Crawford, [director] David Stevens and [cinematographer] Russell Boyd were just such professionals…they were so on top of everything. I’m sure they had huge things to deal that I had no idea about, but they were just such pros. It looked great, they brought it in on time, and I never felt any more pressure than I’ve felt on anything else that I’ve done. It’s fun making movies, so to have a quibble about anything is pretty bloody difficult. Henry and David might have been under pressure, but that pressure never filtered through to us actors. It was a very enjoyable shoot.”
A local hit of massive proportions, A Town Like Alice eventually won an International Emmy for best mini-series, along with many other awards. The show also represented a massive career shift for Bryan Brown. “Two things happened,” the actor explains. “Breaker Morant was released and A Town Like Alice was a huge hit, both at around the same time. They were great, great roles, and both of them were seen internationally, and by all the right people in LA, so a lot of offers started to come my way.” The first one that Brown said yes to was The Thorn Birds, the gargantuan 1983 American TV mini-series based on the sprawling Australian novel by Colleen McCulloch. Brown was the only Aussie in a major role, and it was on this production that he met his wife, British-born actress and now successful director, Rachel Ward.

Brown was also offered another major American film, but had to turn it down due to a pre-existing agreement that he would appear in John Duigan’s aforementioned Philippines-set drama, Far East. Schedules were examined and efforts were made, but due to complex funding arrangements (this was back in the days of the notorious 10BA system), Far East couldn’t be moved, and though there was nothing on paper – just an old fashioned handshake deal – Brown stuck with John Duigan. “My agent was like, ‘What are you getting paid on this?’ I told him, and he said, ‘You’ll get five times that on this American movie!’ I’d explained to my agent that I’d told him about Far East, and that I’d already agreed to do it even though there was no contract or anything. So I didn’t do that American film, but the next thing I was offered was The Thorn Birds, which I was totally available to do. That was just massively, massively huge…that was a whole different ballgame.”
With remakes, reboots and re-imaginings (even of vintage Aussie properties like Picnic At Hanging Rock, Wake In Fright and The Devil’s Playground) all the rage at the moment, how would Brown feel if one of his seminal titles was reconfigured? “Well, I sort of expect it at some stage, but say there was a remake of The Shiralee, I’d really have the shits,” Brown laughs of the classic 1987 mini-series in which he played the wonderfully rough-hewn Macauley, a 1940s drifter who suddenly finds himself in the role of single father to the incredibly precocious Buster, played by brilliant young actress, Rebecca Smart. “She was a nine-year-old playing a six-year-old, but she was a little one. She was amazing…they could never find another actress like Rebecca Smart. Our relationship on that was incredible. We never had to rehearse…we’d just walk down the road saying these lines to each other. She just knew exactly what it was. She was sensational…she made it really easy for me. But on all those shows, they all made it easy for me. On The Shiralee, Rebecca made it easy for me, on A Town Like Alice, Helen made it easy for me, and on The Thorn Birds, Rachel made it easy for me. They all made it easy for me because they’re just really good! I just have to stand there and do my minimalist stuff, and everything works!”

“You forget certain things. Some jobs you look at, and you think, ‘This is okay, but it’s not going to affect people in a very powerful way. It’s just going to provide a couple of hours’ entertainment and distraction, which is fine.’ It’s really special when you get to do a film that actually has a profound effect on people…a film that says something about the human condition, a film that people really recognise or really relate to. I had a very strange thing happen to me the other day in a little town near Armidale. I was in a bar having a drink with Rachel, and this bloke was looking at me. He goes, ‘Oh my god, it’s Bryan Brown.’ And I go, ‘Oh my god, what’s your name?’ He told, and then he says, ‘Sweet Country, great movie.’ I said, ‘Thanks. Guns and horses, had great fun doing it.’ Then we had some dinner, and after that, he came up to me again. He was about forty or so. He said, ‘I remember this show you were in, and you had a daughter and she was really sick and nearly dying.’ Rachel said, ‘Oh, that would be The Shiralee.’ He told me that he’d watched it with his mother when he was about nine-years-old. He said, ‘There’s a scene where you cry in the hospital when your daughter gets better, and I asked my mum why you were crying. She told me that you were crying tears of joy. I’d never heard that before. About a year-and-a-half ago, my own daughter had a brain tumor. When she was in hospital, and she woke up after it had been cut out, and I cried those tears of joy. And I remembered The Shiralee.’ I was really glad that he told me that, and I thanked him for it. When you make something about the human condition like that, people can relate to it in all sorts of ways. That’s what good storytelling does. If it’s good storytelling, it’s about us. It’s about how we deal with each other and how important we are to each other and how we clash with each other. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re at, we all laugh, cry, love, despair, whatever. Good storytelling is about the humanness of us all.”

Bryan Brown has a good eye and a well-tuned ear for that kind of storytelling, and he’s been nurturing it and encouraging it as a producer and actor for over forty years now. But the iconic figure of Bryan Brown first truly came into view with A Town Like Alice, a piece of truly essential Australian television. Almost as soon as it screened, Bryan Brown that he’d starred in something special. “I was shooting something in Melbourne when it first screened on TV,” he recalls. “I remember walking into a hotel there, and Gough and Margaret Whitlam were in the hotel foyer. It must have been a Labor party thing, and Gough was at the checkout. At this stage, they’d shown about three hours of A Town Like Alice on television. Margaret Whitlam saw me and walked up, and started calling out, ‘Gough, Gough, it’s Bryan Brown from A Town Like Alice!’ And I remember thinking, ‘Fuck me! It’s really gotten somewhere! The old Gough’s watching A Town Like Alice? Well, shit, it’s doing okay out there!’”
A Town Like Alice is available now on DVD and Blu-ray. If you liked this story, check out our features on A Town Like Alice producer Henry Crawford; the making of Breaker Morant; the making of Caddie; and the making of Two Hands.
“A Town like Alice” is , rightfully , one of the Gems of the Golden “Wave” of Australian TV at the ’80s and , thank God , that TV “wave” find it’s Place , early on , in Home Video for the rest of the World who didn’t “catch on” in the first place . I am refering for Greece (where I live when the series was made and showing … ) who was one of the Lucky Ones (Countries) who saw it then . Thankfully , i saw it again when in come to VHS , early after it’s First Showing ! It , just , solidified any Appreciation for the Australian TV Drama .
And Bryan Brown is STILL a Hero (for me , anyway) AND a Bloody Good Storyteller ! Thanks for the Memories !
Just been watching A TOWN LIKE ALICE AGAIN, its sooo memorable and I loved the actors and the story.its really wonderful and has stayed with me over 40 years …one of those beautiful , amazing series which has been enjoyed countless times over the years by soo many..thankyou Bryan and Helen and the amazing Scottish actor who passed too soon..The legendary Gordon Jackson.. ATLA will live on in the hearts of many…I cannot say enough about it…so well acted..I thought it had really happened but not to the Brits it seems but to the DUTCH perhaps !? BRAVO EVERYONE !
Well acted