Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Hungry Ones

by Stephen Vagg

During the early years of Oz television, the proportion of local drama that was written by Australians ebbed and flowed. It would go up (1956-58), then down (1958-59), then up (1959-62), and down (1962-64), then up again (1965 onwards).

The year of 1963 was a real low point – the only drama made by the commercial stations consisted of the last season of Consider Your Verdict, some filmed plays (Portrait of a Star in Perth, and a version of And the Big Men Fly in Melbourne), as well as two little-remembered series, Time Out and Tribunal, where Alistair Duncan would interview historical figures over ten-minute episodes. There may have been a few other productions I have missed but it was pretty grim. The ABC was, as is/was so often the case, the only game in town.

And while Aunty pumped out a fair bit of drama in 1963, when it came to producing locally-written content that year, the national broadcaster sunk to the occasion: Australian authors were routinely ignored in favour of home-grown versions of plays by Robert Bolt (Flowering Cherry, A Man for All Seasons), Shaw (Man of Destiny), Shakespeare (The Tempest), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), RC Sheriff (The Long Sunset, The White Carnation), Jean Anouilh (The Fighting Cock), Aldous Huxley (The Giaconda Smile), Hugh and Margret Williams (Double Yolk), Leslie Thomas (A Piece of Ribbon), Sacha Guitry (Don’t Listen Ladies), Alun Richards (The Hot Potato Boys), a 1935 play by Laurence Houseman (Young Victoria), someone called Norman King (Night Stop), someone called Max Frisch (The Chinese Wall), someone called James Saunders (Barnstable), a play by Rodney Ackland they’d filmed four years earlier (A Dead Secret), another play they’d filmed six years earlier (Dark Brown). There were some Aussie works (Prelude To Harvest, Uneasy Paradise, The Right Thing, Concord of Sweet Sounds, a kids TV series called Smuggler’s Cove), but they were very much in the minority. Thus, the annual ABC mini-series for that year was a particularly big deal in terms of local content.

This was The Hungry Ones.

Like its three predecessors – Stormy Petrel, The Outcasts and The Patriots – The Hungry Ones was a tale of early colonial Sydney. However, it did not continue the timeline of that initial trio, and might be best considered a “prequel” to Stormy Petrel, focusing on events around the First and Second Fleets. There are two main plot strands: the attempts by Captain Phillip (Edward Hepple) to get the colony up and running in Sydney, and the escape of convict Mary Bryant (Fay Kelton), her husband Will (Leonard Teale) and their associates in a long boat to Timor.

The Mary Bryant saga is one of the great yarns of colonial Australia, having been told several times in various books, stage plays, radio plays, and mini-series, most recently the 2005 British co-pro The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. The Hungry Ones wasn’t even the only account of this story that came out in 1963: an episode of the ATN-7 show Time Out focused on Bryant (played by Lyndall Barbour), and there was a book published that year called The Transportation, Escape and Pardoning of Mary Bryant and 3AR radio station played a show called The First Fleeters which included an episode on Mary. (No one’s ever cared that much about Will.)

The story of the First Fleet is also quite familiar ground – it too has been the subject of various books and plays as well as a recent co-pro mini-series, Banished (2015). In 1963, the ABC had already aired the aforementioned First Fleeters radio show and shown the TV play Prelude to Harvest (also directed by Colin Dean) and documentary The Land That Waited, which touched on some of the stories shown in The Hungry Ones… That’s a lot of First Fleet-sploitation… I guess it was the 175th anniversary…

The initial three ABC mini-series told stories that were predominantly set indoors, so they could be shot in-studio. Any dramatisation of Mary Bryant’s life inevitably had a lot of outdoor scenes, which would probably have scared off the ABC only a few years earlier, but by now the drama department had grown in confidence and technical ability. The Hungry Ones was mostly shot in the ABC’s Gore Hill Studios but also featured extensive location footage filmed at Jarvis Bay, where the Royal Australian Navy provided facilities, personnel and a boat. (You can look at some stills at the State Library of NSW website.) Apparently, this was the first Australian mini-series to be entirely taped beforehand, with no live broadcast elements.

The script (or, rather, scripts – there were ten episodes, each running 30 minutes) was written by Rex Rienits, who had penned Stormy Petrel and The Outcasts before handing over scribe duties to Philip Grenville Mann for The Patriots. Apparently, Rienits wrote The Hungry Ones in London but didn’t return home for production, presumably confident that his words were in good hands with Colin Dean, who had directed all the mini-series to date.

Rienits had written radio serials on famous colonial era women such as Margaret Catchpole, Mary Bligh and Margaret Reiby; to my knowledge, he never did one on Mary Bryant although Aileen Mills did for the BBC in 1949, called Escape from Port Jackson, which had aired on Australian radio as recently as 1959.

The Hungry Ones was closer to Stormy Petrel than The Outcasts or The Patriots, in that it had a tighter timeframe and built up to a specific climax (her escape and capture). It was the first Australian mini-series focused on a woman, incidentally… though Mary does disappear for slabs around the middle, when the action becomes more about the travails of the First Fleet.

I read a 1961 interview with Rex Rienits in the TV Times, where he expressed interest in doing a drama on John White, the chief surgeon on the First Fleet, and White features quite heavily in this series (played by Nigel Lovell), making eyes at Mary, worrying about hygiene, and getting “close” to a female convict assigned to him, Rachel Taylor (Vivienne Lincoln) (NB In real life, White knocked up Rachel then pissed off back to England but Rachel married another dude and became rich). I wondered if maybe Rienits wasn’t more interested in the First Fleet aspect of the story (White, Phillips, food, etc) than Mary Bryant. It does kind of dovetail, and I guess he did have to come up with five hours of material, it’s just a thought.

As a writer, Rienits was strong on structure and story, but less skilled with character and dialogue. When history provided that for him, as in Captain Bligh in Stormy Petrel, it wasn’t an issue. But like many writers who tackle this story, he seemed unsure exactly how to pitch Mary – is she a plucky, spirited lass? Coquettish vixen? Simpleton? She’s a little vague here, despite fine work from Fay Kelton in the role; it was perhaps unfair of Rienits to make the character a bit of a dill, committing robbery to be with Will and then later be the one whose blabbing in Timor leads to their secret being uncovered. (Personally, I think the way to do this story is to either make Will more of a villain and Mary an innocent victim, or to make Mary more of a spirited “bad girl”. Either would work, I just think Rienits needed to pick a lane).

The Hungry Ones is still very entertaining – Rienits was an excellent storyteller who dramatises key moments skilfully, particularly the descent of Sydney colony into starvation and the very exciting escape sequence. He always ensures there’s a flogging, hanging or brawl to keep things lively, not to mention a cat fight between Mary and another convict, Martha (Brigid Lenihan). The story is quite racy too, with a fair bit of (historically authentic) premarital sex going on: Mary gets knocked up to Will prior to them being married, Surgeon White keeps a mistress, Martha leaves her convict husband for a soldier, it is implied that Mary sleeps with a (unseen) Dutch captain to help them get material to escape. Incidentally, Rienits said four of the main characters were fictional, while some of the incidents were made up, but claimed it was faithful to history as a whole.

Another “Rienits touch” I noticed: as in Stormy Petrel and The Outcasts, a bunch of male characters are hot for the female lead – here, they include her fisherman-smuggler husband Will; fellow escapee James Martin (John Ewart) who, it’s implied, commits a crime to join Mary in Botany Bay; a prison warden (Robert McDarra); surgeon John White; the unseen Dutch captain; and Boswell (Laurier Lange). Clearly, there’s something about Mary.

The acting is very good; I especially liked Edward Hepple as Phillip and Brigid Lenihan and Stewart Ginn as convicts. There is even an Aboriginal character, too – well, “character” might be pushing it, one appears in the escape sequence to throw a spear at the convicts (surely, they could have made room for at least Bennelong?). The most fun characters are the rogues: the greedy Robert Ross (Ronald Morse), an informer (Reg Livermore!) and especially the incompetent Captain Atkins (Noel Brophy) of the Lady Juliana. Oz TV fans will love spotting early acting appearances from Livermore, Carmen Duncan (as a female convict), Mark McManus (as one of the escapees) and Barry Creyton (as a young John Macarthur).

Technically, the production is first rate with super costumes, sets, camerawork and lighting. The footage in Jarvis Bay is spectacular – I mean, the actors are out there, rowing away, looking exhausted. It’s an extremely well-mounted piece of TV drama.

Frank Roberts, TV critic of The Bulletin and a notorious hater of Australian writing, penned a typically bitchy review about The Hungry Ones – based on one episode, mind (Roberts was lazy as well as spiteful) – suggesting the ABC needed to film more drama using imported scripts and that Rex Rienits should take writing lessons from Leslie Thomas, whose A Piece of Ribbon had been filmed by the ABC. It’s embarrassing that The Bulletin employed a clown like Roberts as long as they did.

Admittedly, critical and viewer response to The Hungry Ones was less enthusiastic than for the previous three ABC mini-series. I think this was due to two factors. First, everyone was suffering from “colonial drama fatigue”; on top of this being the fourth in the historical mini-series, there had been commercial shows like Time Out, Jonah and Whiplash, as well as the ABC play Prelude to Harvest, which dealt with a similar period. Second, The Hungry Ones tells quite a gruelling story: the title is a very accurate description of the show, being full of prisoners and soldiers starving, sometimes to death; one convict, John Freeman (David Copping) is forced to turn executioner to save his own neck; Mary loses her brother, two children and husband, and her escape is ultimately unsuccessful. It’s dramatically powerful, historically truthful, and culturally important, but not exactly feel-good.

After four historical works, the ABC decided to make its 1964 mini-series a contemporary story. They could have gone in any number of directions – an adaptation of something by Ruth Park maybe, or D’arcy Niland, or Jon Cleary or Kylie Tennant or Patrick White or Eleanor Dark or any number of respected, popular Australian novels. Instead, they went for The Purple Jacaranda, a thriller based on a not-particularly-well-known book by Nancy Graham that had previously been adapted for radio. Colin Dean remained as director, Richard Lane turned it into script form, and the result appears to have been a complete disaster. I say “appears” because I have never seen it, and apparently there are no copies in existence… but Dean and Lane said it was bad, as did every single review I have read. Every. Single. One. It would be the last thing Dean directed, a disappointing end to a glorious career (he became an ABC executive).

However, the ABC bounced back in 1965 with a mini-series of My Brother Jack which was a notable success. So, the moral of the story – if you make a dud, don’t stress, push on and make something new.

Oh, and The Hungry Ones is a very solid piece of early Australian television.

For more articles like this, read:

60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & ‘60s

Annette Andre: My Brilliant Early Australian Career

Barry Creyton Live

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