by Stephen Vagg
Our series on Australian television plays explores the sexy 1962 outback drama, The Hobby Horse.
In early 1962, the ABC, responding to (entirely accurate) criticism that its local television drama had been overly dominated by foreign scripts, scheduled a season of six Australian-written television plays. The stories were a genuine mixture of genres: Greg Bunbury’s Boy from the Corner was a crime drama; George F. Kerr’s Jenny concerned the emotional break down of a teenage girl with divorced parents; Chris Gardner’s The House of Mancello told the story of Italian immigrants; Philip Grenville Mann’s Funnel Web was a thriller about a murderous cad; and John Cameron’s The Teeth of the Wind focused on Australian soldiers representing the UN in Africa. The last in the series was Robert Wales’ outback character study, The Hobby Horse.
Robert Wales was a Scotsman who had emigrated to Australia after World War Two; he ran a textile business in Woolloomooloo before deciding in the early 1950s to try his luck as a grazier out near Walcha on the Northern Tablelands (as you do). Wales’ daughter Angela later wrote a charming memoir about this time, Barefoot in the Bindis, and much of the personal information on the author is from this book. According to Angela, her father got the writing bug in an unusual way – he and a mate were listening to a radio play on the ABC one evening; they’d both had a few drinks, and Wales declared that he could write something better than that, causing his mate to promptly bet ten pounds that he couldn’t.
Wales subsequently heard about a writing competition held by the University of New England, which included categories for plays and short stories; he decided to enter both and wound up coming second and third respectively. This, on top of the ten pound bet winnings, caused the grazier to think that there might be money in writing (good luck!). Wales started entering plays in other competitions, which were quite prevalent at the time – Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Shifting Heart were both discovered this way.
The Hobby Horse won a stage play competition held in Coffs Harbour to celebrate that town’s centenary. One of the judges was Leslie Rees, who worked at the ABC; the Commission decided to adapt The Hobby Horse for radio and television (as well as another play of Wales’, Wings on the Morning, for radio). Wales, who was struggling with farming by this stage (the credit squeeze was on, and wool prices were low), decided to sell the family farm, move to Sydney and see where this writing caper would take him.
The Hobby Horse is a drama about Billy, a legendary rodeo rider/buck jumper who gets a job breaking horses on a New England property, only to discover that the wife of his new boss is Bill’s ex-wife, Maggie (their marriage was annulled by her parents). Billy is hero worshipped by a young Aboriginal horseman, Harry, whose sister Sally has a sexual affair with Billy. Bill starts things up again with Maggie, but then he gets (spoilers) mortally wounded in a rodeo and dies in Maggie’s arms, leaving all his money to Harry.
Reading that synopsis, you’ll probably get a sense of what sort of drama The Hobby Horse was: a downbeat character study of an ageing champ, who still manages to have lots of sex, sort of like an Australian version of all those Hollywood rodeo films that came out in the 1970s (Junior Bonner, JW Coop, The Honkers). Wales’ script feels authentic, has a terrific central male role, and powers to a strong conclusion. It is also strikingly adult – Billy beds both Maggie and Sally (on consecutive nights, if we’re not mistaken). This is very racy stuff for 1962 Australian television.
The script has two main flaws (we’re talking the TV and radio adaptations – we have read those scripts, not the original stage play). First, we never meet the character of Maggie’s new husband, he is only referred to (sometimes this can be an effective dramatic device, here it’s just weird). Second, all the rodeo/horse stuff happens offscreen. TV plays around this stage would routinely incorporate brief scenes shot outside on film (such as the 1959 version of Ned Kelly), but this didn’t happen in The Hobby Horse, presumably for cost – it’s a shame, as those scenes cry out for visualisation.
The ABC’s 1962 television production of The Hobby Horse was further undermined by miscasting. Everyone can act but no one seemed really comfortable in their roles, except Ken Goodlet, who plays Billy’s friend. Wyn Roberts (Billy) and Lyne Flanagan (Maggie) are clearly trying, they just don’t seem natural as long-lost rural loves. (Incidentally, perfect casting for the role of Billy would have been Grant Taylor, who was in the aforementioned Funnel Webb and Jenny, but those were shot in Sydney where Taylor lived, while Hobby Horse was filmed in Melbourne. You know who also might’ve been good? Chips Rafferty, who never appeared in an Australian television play despite needing the work around this time – we think that he was considered déclassé.) David Mitchell (Harry) and Beris Sullivan (Sally) do their best, but both feel too old for their roles – Mitchell’s hair is clearly receding (which happens in life, goodness knows, it just isn’t ideal for an actor playing a young kid), and he and Sullivan are white actors playing black characters; while the make-up is minimal it doesn’t help with authenticity. It’s a shame director William Sterling couldn’t have used some of the Aboriginal actors who were around at the time (some of whom he’d worked with before), such as Pat Wedge, Robert Tudawali, Candy Williams or Georgia Lee. As a director, Sterling was sometimes focused on funky camera angles rather than emotion and that happens in this production, with various scenes filmed full of foreground objects instead of actor’s faces. (Sterling’s wife, Carole Potter, has a small role, incidentally.)
Notwithstanding these flaws, The Hobby Horse still works as a drama – the lonely wife, the ageing champion, the young buck, the death. The play is culturally fascinating in its depiction of the buckjumping circuit and the predatory treatment of Aboriginal women by white stockmen (Billy’s instant, matter-of-fact assumption that he can sleep with Sally after just meeting her, and Maggie’s dismissal of Sally as a horny man trap, feels all too believable). The play features a scene between an Aboriginal brother and sister without any white people, which was exceedingly rare at the time – although they just discuss white people. The sets are first-rate.
Critical reaction to The Hobby Horse was negative, almost to the point of hysteria. Frank Thring in TV Week called it “a shallow piece of pseudo-symbolic outbackery” with a “nebulous plot” and “collection of completely superfluous characters and a lot of sentimental mish mash about hobby horses.” “Ion” of Listener In TV whined about the script’s “dreadful cliches” alleging “it sought ‘authenticity’ so frantically that it ended up 99 percent incomprehensible to the rest of the English speaking world.” (Honestly, how would “Ion” know that?) Frank Roberts of The Bulletin said… oh who cares, he was a dreadful critic, a foot soldier for Frank Packer’s anti-Australian drama campaign. Local television critics of the 1950s and 1960s generally loathed Australian writing – if you don’t believe us, read their reviews (Thring’s hatchet jobs were at least entertaining to read). This wasn’t a uniform policy, though: “Mendip” in the magazine Theatregoer was much fairer on The Hobby Horse, calling it “good entertainment” that had been “torn to pieces by the press” and “unnecessarily mauled by our critical arbiters of fashion”.
The 1962 season of Australian television plays was poorly received by an ABC Viewer and Listener Panel. This panicked the ABC, who decided to make less Australian written drama, and instead produced more local versions of overseas scripts such as Marriage Lines – a policy which continued for the next few years until the success of Homicide and The Mavis Bramston Show made it look silly. By the end of the 1960s, almost all Australian-filmed television drama was locally written.
The Hobby Horse was performed on ABC radio but after that it was, essentially, forgotten. This was a shame, especially after the Australian film industry revived in the 1970s, as Wales’ play would’ve been perfect for a big screen adaptation, with its dynamite male star part, steamy sexual content, and opportunities for visually dynamic rodeo scenes. The flaws of the script and production were easily fixed – add the husband, show the rodeo scenes, cast the lead roles appropriately, direct with more feeling.
Wales kept writing: his plays The Grotto and The Cell were performed on stage and radio, and The Cell was filmed for British and Australian television. According to Angela Wales’ memoir, in the late 1960s her father eventually fell in love with a woman who worked at the ABC, and left his wife and five kids to go live with her in London. He continued to write novels, television and plays with some success (one of his novels, Harry, was turned into the 1987 Australian film Bullseye). Robert Wales died of lung cancer in London in 1994. Incidentally, Angela Wales worked in various administrative roles for the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Australian Playwrights’ Conference, Australian Writers’ Guild, and (in the US) the Writers’ Guild Foundation, and her second marriage was to American screenwriter George Kirgo, who wrote some TV movies made in here in the late 1970s.
Robert Wales never quite reached the top rank of Australian writers, but he had talent and turned out interesting works, not the least of which was The Hobby Horse.
