Forgotten Australian Mini-series: My Brother Jack

by Stephen Vagg

During the early years of television drama, the ABC displayed a curious reluctance to adapt novels for the small screen. Radio plays were no problem. Neither were stage plays or even originals for the small screen, especially if they came from overseas. But for whatever reason, prose tended to be a no-no.

The cost of getting the rights may have been a factor – but surely, no more than that for stage and/or radio plays? I’m inclined to think that the main reason was nervousness about adapting something for the small screen. Radio and stage plays were easier to envision – they were already broken up into dialogue and scenes, they just had to be made a little more visual. Prose had all those darn words which needed to be distilled into dramatic form.

Still, it was weird because novels were routinely adapted into plays for Australian radio (in the 1950s, for instance, you could listen to wireless versions of such local novels as Robbery Under Arms, The Sundowners and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney). British TV had no problem adapting Australian books such as Seven Little Australians and The Naked Island.

Running times may have come in to play – but some TV plays went up to two hours, which is surely long enough to adapt a novel. And even though mini-series, a very friendly format for dramatising novels, started in Australia in 1960, it wasn’t until 1964 that one was based on a book: The Purple Jacaranda (which had been done for radio).

So, when the ABC decided to do a television adaptation of George Johnston’s novel, My Brother Jack, it was a big risk. For one thing, their last mini-series, The Purple Jacaranda had been an unmitigated disaster, disliked by pretty much everyone associated with it (it’s the only ABC mini-series for which there are no copies in their archives… I think someone binned it). For another, My Brother Jack was a relatively fresh novel – it had only been published in 1964, so hadn’t been road tested by the passing of time and/or an earlier adaptation. (Unlike, say, Seven Little Australians which had been adapted as a film in 1939 and by BBC television in 1953.) As Graham Shirley wrote in a 1992 essay on My Brother Jack (found in the program notes for an exhibit, Australian TV: The Early Years), the mini-series “stands as an isolated achievement, in its time springing from no particular ABC tradition and not being allowed to go on and create one.”

However, the novel had been highly acclaimed – it would win the Miles Franklin – and author George Johnston had a noted public profile due to his achievements as a war correspondent and his exciting seeming private life: he was married to fellow writer Charmian Clift, and they spent a lot of 1954-64 living on an artists’ colony on a Greek island, boozing it up and hanging out with people like Leonard Cohen.

Incidentally, Johnston had written for television before, just not here: Beachhead, a 1963 TV play for ITV starring John Meillon as an Australian war correspondent which was shown in Australia in 1964. Johnston’s novel The Darkness Outside had been adapted for British TV in 1960.

It was a little embarrassing that British TV filmed his stuff before we did but there was a tradition of that – authors such as Patrick White (A Cheery Soul), Russell Braddon (Naked Island), Jon Cleary (Knife in the Family), Peter Yeldham (too many to list), Michael Noonan (ditto), Dymphna Cusack (Stand Still Time) and Morris West (McCreary Moves In) were all adapted for the small screen in Britain before they were filmed in Australia. But the ABC did make amends by doing My Brother Jack.

Johnston was reportedly offered the job of doing the scripts but turned it down. Instead, Clift stepped into the breach. She described her process below:

I sat down and visualised the television screen and wrote down on paper what I wanted to happen on it, what I wanted to see, what I wanted to hear…groups and splittings of people, according to the dramatic situation that I wanted to emphasise; quietnesses, and intensities…. So, what I did eventually was to take the portion of the book I found most significant, the years of the Depression, and to cram into this as much of the earlier part of the book and as much of the later part as I could without overloading it. … What I have tried to do, what I hope I have done, is to stick to the truth of the book, the essence of it, and present it in terms more dramatically suitable to that little viewing screen than long chapters of narrative. I’ve done it with love and care and thought and as much understanding as I have.

The series was directed by Storry Walton and Gil Brealey. Walton (who also produced) did the bulk of, the scenes shot in tape in studio, while Brealey handled the filmed segments (mostly exteriors). It’s the sort of collaboration that could have been disastrous, but it worked very well and comes across as seamless. The story was set in Melbourne but all the studio work and most location shooting was done in Sydney. There were some Melbourne exteriors filmed; Shirley says that a young Fred Schepisi came along to watch the shoot with his daughter.

The story goes from 1932-39 and focuses on the relationship between two brothers, the intense, aspiring writer Davey (Nick Tate) and the easy-going, knockabout Jack (Ed Devereaux). Over the course of ten 30- minute episodes, both have various adventures, including hanging out with intellectuals, changing careers (Davey becomes a top journalist), finding love, and dealing with the onset of war.

It’s not exactly plot heavy, more of a character piece. Some contemporary critics thought the story would have been better suited to a 90-minute play but I’m not so sure – you need time to explore the world. Out of interest, the 2001 mini-series version took two 90-minute episodes, using more of the novel.

The sets are beautiful and the acting is excellent, particularly from the leads but I also liked June Thody as Sheila and Rosalind Seagreave as Helen. This was one of the first, if not the first, really “ABC drama-type” shows… decent budget (15,125 pounds, apparently), based on a classy piece of literature, made with love and care. I’m not bagging the mini-series and plays that came beforehand, especially not Stormy Petrel – this just seems like a step up.

Despite the positive reception to My Brother Jack, the ABC’s new head of drama, David Goddard, decided not to make any more mini-series, investing funds instead in his pet projects, including Australian Playhouse, Bellbird and Contrabandits. Plans for a second series of My Brother Jack, which would have tackled the rest of the novel, came to naught. Goddard did a lot of good at the ABC but in hindsight he should have kept the mini-series going and made less television plays; the issue didn’t last long… within a few years the ABC got back into mini-series in a big way and made some terrific ones. An aside: Storry Walton and Devereaux reunited in 1966 on an episode of Australian Playhouse called Watch It.

Johnston’s papers are full of TV plays written but never produced including The Party Next Door, The Measurers, The Albatross Colony, Bed of Thorns, Clean Straw for Nothing (which Mel Gibson tried to make in the 1980s), and Kate Perrin’s Life plus numerous pitches for film scripts and TV series. Charmian Clift has no further credits either. All writers’ files have these… but it is weird that TV broadcasters were so allergic to Johnston and Clift after the success of My Brother Jack.

Clift wound up killing herself in 1969; Johnston died in 1970. Both passed into legend. A mini-series/TV movie/film of their lives would seem to be obvious (adultery, fame, Greek Islands, alcoholism, poverty, suicide, feminism) with guaranteed awards for whatever actors played the leads but none has been made yet (there have been plenty of books, articles, and a play, and apparently Sue Milliken is working on a documentary).

I asked Storry Walton for his memories of making the mini-series. He was kind enough to provide me with the following:

The idea for the television series was initiated by Neil Hutchison, then Head of Drama and Features at the ABC. Johnston’s novel had been a huge success, and following their return to Australia after a decade in Greece, Charmian had quickly become a much-loved feature writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, writing with wonderful insight and originality about the life, culture and lives she was newly discovering. When George admitted he was too close to his own writing to make the necessary adaptations for the screen, Charmian was able to bring her fresh eyes to the task with the same clarity she brought to her newspaper articles – plus a gift for visual language.

George’s and Charmian’s celebrity drove the conviction for the ABC that a television version was a safe bet, and whetted public expectations of it. However, for all George’s celebrity the pre-production period was frequently accompanied by unease, mainly in political circles, but also in the ABC, about his left-wing history.

When, in Parliament, the Postmaster General Alan Hulme questioned why the ABC was proposing to produce a series written by a left wing socialist, pre-production was temporarily halted by the ABC.  But Neil Hutchison told Charmian and me to keep working ‘inconspicuously’, and the matter blew over.

The ration of the words ‘bloody’ and ‘damn’ per half-hour and the banning of the word ‘Mick’ for ‘Catholic’ were also a product of the same suspicion about George together with a lingering concern in some quarters about the vulgarities of ordinary life. At Hutchison’s bidding, and with his protection, we blithely ignored it all without recrimination.

MBJ had a great popular reception, even though the ABC screened it at 9.10 pm, out of peak period and not at the programme cross-over time for viewers at the hour or half hour mark – the so-called ‘common-junctions’.

Its critical reception was good overall. It was tempered by some concerns about concentration on the daily routines that I so carefully deployed as part of the ‘realistic’ style, and by some concerns about slow pace, with which I now agree.

 In his 1992 article for TV Times, Graham Shirley notes that there was a noticeable difference in style between young Nick Tate’s naturalism and the rather forced geniality of Ed Devereaux. I agree with Graham. This was a mis-match in acting style that I failed to overcome. Nick Tate’s comfortable naturalism is what I was aiming for. And there are other passages that seem rather melodramatic to me now, and I wish I had been alert to them.

John Garton was the lighting director. He broke new ground in ABC drama. To give the series a more realistic and natural look I had decided to shoot the exterior scenes as film to avoid the highly artificial look of studio attempts at exteriors with their bushes already drooping with the heat of the lighting and the fake look of the studio cyclorama as sky. Even when film was used with the ABC’s allowable duration of between 3 and 5 minutes per hour, there was still a jarring discontinuity on the cut from studio scene to a filmed scene.

So, (for the first time and with resistance) we filmed on 35mm for better initial quality than 16mm. John Garton attended all of the many film locations and carefully noted the natural lighting conditions of the day, the intensity and angles of the film lighting and the portraiture. When it came to the television studio, he then reproduced as closely as possible, on every set in the studio the same exterior lighting ‘condition’ to ease the transition as seamlessly as possible between the chemically produced film image and the image orthicon electronically produced studio cameras. It required a lot of planning and very clever, sensitive lighting of the huge studio rig.

Jack Montgomery was the designer of the series. He had come to ABC from long experience in North America. He was a meticulous designer for period productions. He studied journals, newspapers, fashion magazines, store catalogues and movies to get the overall decor right, and spent days at second-hand stores, theatre companies, props stores and private homes to find every last property and dressing, down to the correct cutlery, kitchen clocks, hairnets and vases.

In Sydney, the DOP was Bill Grimmond, a fine cinematographer from Australia’s rich film heritage having worked among others with Charles Chauvel on Jedda and Sons of Matthew. His quiet attentive assistant was a young John Seale, who went on to Hollywood fame as a DOP.

My production assistants were Bob Ellis who went on as screenwriter and columnist, Richard Brennan, who went on to be notable producer, and Chris Penfold who founded the Scriptworks agency and collective in the UK.

After my high hope that the success of My Brother Jack would precipitate some socially realistic contemporary drama in series and serials at the ABC, my work dried up.

Neil Hutchison, who had championed that idea as a follow-up, left to be ABC Representative at the BBC in London. For a year, I collaborated with Charmian on a detailed proposal for a contemporary documentary drama series based on stories of the real lives of the residents of a large new high rise apartment building that she passed on her daily walks in Neutral Bay.

She interviewed residents, built up a detailed proposal and treatment and presented it twice to the ABC Drama Department. But she received no acknowledgement of its receipt, and no response. I was dismayed and took my cue and later left to work in the UK.

Here are a few excerpts for a beautiful letter dated October 8th 1965 that I received during the period My Brother Jack was screening. It was from a woman for whom the serial had evoked memories of her own childhood and of her own father.

‘…This character ‘Jack’ has become so real that now I find myself crying for a much loved Father who has been dead these last 20 years. Only now, through this story, am I really beginning to understand all that my parents must have suffered through those awful Depression years…’

She told matter-of factly how her father came back from WW1 as a limbless soldier, suffering severely from gassing. Her parents got by with a returned soldier’s pension that was one shilling more than the dole, and when he lost his job, he, like Jack set off on foot to find work…

‘…watching the episode where Jack was sleeping in the open, and fishing in a river I suddenly remembered my Mother and Father packing a swag and putting in a fishing line as he remembered places from his boyhood in Gippsland where the fishing was good…and felt again, and for the first time really realised the dreadful desperate reason that hung over the home that day when I was only 5 years old and we walked part of the way along the road with my one-armed Dad.’

Making a similar journey as Jack did, her Dad walked from the outskirts of Melbourne to Tenterfield in northern NSW in search of work and money to support his family at home.

Eventually her Mother had information that he was walking home.

‘…every day we looked for him across the paddock…we had a letter from his sister in Gippsland saying that a swagman had passed by the school that her children attended, it turned out to be Dad…Watching Jack walking home in the program last week, I remembered again the day Dad finally came home. We saw him on the road ahead of us in his battered old army hat and military overcoat…’

Young as she was, she realised her Father was very ill. but as a family they battled on through the rest of the Depression years.

This letter is my most cherished memento from My Brother Jack.

The author would like to thank Storry Walton and Graham Shirley for their extensive contributions to this article, particularly Mr Walton who basically wrote half of it. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions are my own.

Main Photo: Wedding of Jack and Sheila: Priest (unknown actor), Marion Johns (Mum), June Thody (Shiela), Nick Tate (Davey) and Ed Devereaux (Jack). Photo from Storry Walton Collection