by Stephen Vagg
One of the funniest subplots in David Williamson’s brilliant stage play (and later movie) Emerald City involves the writer hero, Colin, scripting a telemovie set in World War Two, Coastwatchers, with a collaborator Mike McCord (who Williamson later assured us was in no way – no way, do you hear us – based on Denis Whitburn with whom Williamson wrote The Last Bastion). His regular producer, Elaine (played memorably in the film by Ruth Cracknell) refuses to get involved, calling Coastwatchers “a turkey” because “coastwatchers watch coasts” – probably one of the all-time great lines in Australian theatre. Anyway, Colin decides to produce himself, it’s a disaster, and he returns to being a writer.
Elaine did have a point – for all their importance to the Allied war effort, and it was considerable, coastwatchers did, well, mostly, watch coasts. And sat on the radio. But they also did dramatic stuff like hide, run, and fight the Japanese, and get captured and be executed, and worry about the locals betraying them. Their adventures can be the stuff of good screen drama – and I’ve got proof because I just watched via the National Sound and Film Archive [NFSA] The Coastwatchers, a 50-minute Australian TV drama broadcast in 1962.
It was produced and directed by New Zealander Roger Mirams, best remembered today for his kids shows like The Magic Boomerang and Secret Valley.
Mirams moved to Australia around the time of the Melbourne Olympics and set up operations here; in the late 1950s, he thought that there might be a TV series in Australia’s coastwatchers, who earned a legendary reputation in World War Two, and had recently come back into the public eye via (a) being the topic of a subplot in the musical South Pacific (the heroes go off to be coastwatchers at the end), and (b) the election of John F Kennedy as American President in 1960, because JFK’s life had been saved during the Pacific War by Australian coastwatcher Reg Evans.
Coastwatchers started popping up in Hollywood films – Chips Rafferty played one in The Wackiest Ship in the Navy (1960), Michael Pate featured as Reg Evans himself in the JFK biopic PT109 (1963) (with Cliff Robertson as JFK), Cary Grant was a coastwatcher in Father Goose (1964), so too Stanley Holloway (impersonating an Aussie) in In Harm’s Way (1965). The little-remembered 1965 Australian anthology TV series Adventure Unlimited featured an episode about Reg Evans called The Coastwatcher.
Mirams got in on this coastwatch-sploitation bandwagon relatively early and raised money for a pilot, which was shot in 1960. I’d read somewhere that this comprised of two 30-minute episodes, but the play I saw at the NFSA seems a very self-contained one hour – indeed, it’s so self-contained that (SPOILERS) the hero dies at the end.
Anyway, the script was written by John Sherman, an actor-writer who did a lot of work for Mirams, and the producer raised money in part from GTV-9 in Melbourne, but mostly from himself. It was a decent whack of coin too, because it involved location filming in New Guinea (based out of Rabaul) with other filming taking place in Melbourne.
The Coastwatchers is set in 1942 New Guinea. The hero is Don Marshall (Ken Goodlet, not a famous actor but very familiar and born to play this kind of role), a local district officer and coastwatcher who reports to a nearby officer (Kevin Colson).
The action starts when Marshall reports the location of a Japanese ship and calls in the Air Force to blow it up (via the incorporation of documentary footage), which makes things too hot for him in the area. Marshall has to flee his base one step ahead of the Japanese, accompanied by two plantation owners, one snarly and untrustworthy (Philip Stainton, giving the best performance in admittedly the best part), and another bloke who mostly exists to have a good-looking daughter (Patricia Kerr), who gets surprisingly little screen time.
The complications that follow are smart and logical: Stainton is Trouble, the Japanese capture Marshall’s Chinese servant, Marshall’s radio runs out of battery and needs recharging, his contact is facing his own troubles with the Japanese.
It’s all very well done, skilfully using location footage, well-acted with decent action and fast pace. The Japanese are as sympathetically depicted as you’d expect but at least the head officer is played by a real Japanese (James Ohki, a journalist living in Melbourne at the time) as opposed to a white actor in yellowface, and while Marshall’s loyal servants (New Guinea sergeant and troops, a Chinese servant) are very much within the trope of the self-sacrificial native servant, they at least get to be heroic, which is pretty good for POC characters at the time.
Marshall is a strong central character – smart, tough, laconic, quite ruthless (he’s not shy about risking his men’s lives) – and Goodlet plays him so well, I’m surprised he was never given the lead in a Crawfords cop show (maybe he had the chance but turned it down – certainly, he guest starred in enough of them).
I think it’s implied that Marshall had a fling with one of the local women, who gets a close-up. If they’d fleshed this aspect out more, and the relationship with Patricia Kerr’s character, Mirams could’ve easily expanded the running time to 80 minutes and had a decent B picture on his hands. As it is, The Coastwatchers makes a good, tight 51 minutes.
After filming, Mirams showed The Coastwatchers before members of the Houses of Parliament and tried to drum up funding for a series, but he was unable to do it (GTV-9 eventually pulled out). A big admirer of the show was Sir Charles Moses, General Manager of the ABC and a veteran who saw active service in the Pacific War. The ABC could not finance a series of The Coastwatchers (too expensive) but agreed to buy the play and screened it on Anzac Day 1962. I think this was the first time the ABC showed locally made drama from an outside production company.
Mirams went on to have a strong relationship with the ABC, who broadcast many of his shows such as The Magic Boomerang. It’s just a shame that the Commission couldn’t have allocated some of the budget it wasted on filming foreign scripts like Clemence Dane’s Marriage Lines and instead spent it on more first-rate local stuff like The Coastwatchers.
To be honest, I’m not sure The Coastwatchers had “legs” as a series – after all, as Elaine said in Emerald City, coastwatchers basically watch coasts, and once you do the “escaping the Japanese after being busted” story, where else do you have to go in terms of episode ideas? (In Mirams’ defence, he did kill off Don Marshall at the end – a very effective shock ending – and he may have been planning an anthology series). But, there were definitely lots of stories in the “Australians behind enemy lines in World War Two” arena, as proved when Mirams repurposed the idea later on as the classic TV series Spyforce (1971-72), about a special operations unit along the lines of Z Force. Starring a svelte Jack Thompson at his swaggering best, Spyforce often stretched credibility, not to mention geographic reality, but was enormous fun and never ran out of stories (some of which featured coastwatchers).
Still, The Coastwatchers is worth checking out – and it’s not hard to find, as you can access a copy at the National Film and Sound Archive.
