by Stephen Vagg
(Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article may contain images and voices of people who have died.)
Phillip Grenville Mann isn’t a writer particularly well remembered today – indeed, he was not that famous at his peak, yet he had a moment in the sun, in particular, as drama editor for ABC television in the early 1960s.
While the actual heads of drama at the time were Paul O’Loughlin and Neil Hutchison, Mann was the “point man” for anyone who wanted to submit a script to the ABC. And that was a big deal since until Homicide came along in 1964 the ABC were the only ones consistently making television drama.
Mann was born in 1921 and keen on writing at an early age – he won a series of writing competitions while at high school. His career was interrupted by war service, with Mann doing a five year stint in the Royal Australian Navy; this provided him with the background to his successful radio play, The Seas Between, which starred Peter Finch. Come peacetime, Mann did many of the things that people did back then when they wanted to be a professional writer: taught school, wrote radio plays, tried to get his stage plays on, and emigrated to England.
He had some success in the Old Country writing television and rep theatre. While in London, Mann was reading up on Australian history in the library at Australia House when he came across an incident which led to his television play The Sergeant from Burralee.
This work is set in 1830s New South Wales and focuses on the murder of Jacko, an Aboriginal prisoner, by a drunken British officer. Jacko was in custody for spearing a colonist, a crime for which he was innocent – indeed, Jacko was scheduled to be released when he was killed. The whites assume Jacko’s murder will be swept under the carpet, but an Attorney General in Sydney decides to try the officer for murder.
The Sergeant from Burralee doesn’t contain too many dramatic surprises. There’s (spoilers) no doubt of Jacko’s innocence, or who murdered him, or even the final result – the Attorney General expects to lose and he loses.
Mann wasn’t that gifted as a writer when it came to dramatic construction nor was he overly strong on characterisation – we never really get a sense of what makes the Attorney General tick (he sort of floats through the story like a bewildered academic don, although that might be in part due to Alistair Duncan’s performance), and the character of Jacko doesn’t get a single line of dialogue. There are no hooky twists or reveals.
However, Mann did have guts – The Sergeant from Burralee is a remarkably bleak depiction of race relations at the time, the way crimes were instinctively covered up within the army, the relentless use of racist jargon, the politics that undermine attempts at justice, the utter lack of sensitivity of soldiers and politicians towards the local population, the corruption of senior figures using every excuse they can to grab more land, the ethical dilemmas of witnesses to the crime.
Burralee won equal first prize in a 1959 competition held by the Sydney Journalists Club for Best Television Play. (The other winner was World Without End, by a Woomera rocket scientist – this was never filmed.) One of the judges for the competition was ABC drama director Ray Menmuir, who recommended the Commission buy Burralee. The script was also bought for production by the BBC (who filmed it as The Attorney General with John Gregson in the title role) and West German television (who filmed it in 1962 with Albert Lieven). This achievement impressed the ABC so much it offered Mann the job of replacing Rex Rienits as drama editor in 1961, the year The Sergeant from Burralee was filmed by Menmuir in Sydney.
I was lucky enough to see a copy of the ABC production recently – the National Film and Sound Archive have just digitised the copy they had in storage. It’s very well directed by Menmuir, with excellent production design and strong performances (as well as weak ones).
Candy Williams plays Jacko, the sole Aboriginal character – we never see the impact of his death on any others. The ABC was anxious about local material around this time, which might explain why the credits emphasise that the play won a prize (“see! It’s not our fault if you don’t like it!”). Mann later adapted the work into a stage play, Days of Glory.
Mann’s other credits at the ABC included The Patriots and The Ballad for One Gun. The spectacular critical failure of the latter seemed to derail his career a little, although he stayed at the ABC for over a decade as an in-house script editor, and he never stopped writing for television, stage or radio, later moving into novels as well.
In the early 1960s, Mann was a figure in the ABC’s war on Australian scripts – I’ve read scores of letters from this time at the National Archives of Australia where Mann rejected television plays from authors as varied as Della Foss Paine, Peter Yeldham, Michael Noonan, Dorothy Blewett, Don Houghton, Michael Plant and Tony Morphett (as well as a lot of letters where Mann pushed his own scripts and bitched about his colleagues). As the ABC’s drama budget expanded in the mid-sixties, it got in other script editors and Mann’s influence within the organisation lessened. This was a good thing – I don’t mean to be nasty, truly, but he wasn’t very supportive of other Australian writers at a time when they needed support. Mann’s abilities as a writer should be remembered and acknowledged, but so should his influence within the ABC.
Still, The Sergeant from Burralee is a gutsy, significant work in the history of Australian television drama and it’s a wonderful thing that it’s now more easily available at the NFSA.
The author would like to thank the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this article. All opinions are the author’s.
