Forgotten Australian TV Series: Jonah

by Stephen Vagg

I have a theory that the ABC is more influenced by commercial stations than it likes to pretend. That was certainly the case through the 1950s and 1960s when the national broadcaster, despite easily being the biggest producers of television drama in Australia at the time, always seemed to lift their game after developments in the commercial field.

For instance, it started making more locally-written shows after the commercials did them on Shell Presents (1959-60) and Emergency (1959); they went into comedy in a big way only after the success of Mavis Bramston in 1964; they dropped mini-series in the mid-‘60s but went back to them later that decade after the commercial hits You Can’t See Round Corners (1967) and The Battlers (1968).

The commercial stations tend to be less shy about admitting when they are influenced by the ABC. That’s mostly because Aunty doesn’t rate as highly with audiences – it never has. But when the national broadcaster does score a hit, the commercials are never too proud to copy.

And Stormy Petrel, made in 1960, was a solid hit. This tale of the Rum Rebellion was a critical and popular success – a genuine “water cooler show” that really broke through into the national consciousness. The following year saw the ABC release a sequel, The Outcasts and ATN-7 enjoy ratings success with its meat pie Western series, Whiplash! – financed by Britain but shot in Australia, and drawing heavily (albeit shakily) on aspects of Australian history including much Aboriginal folklore. Sensing there was a market for historical tales of colonial era Australia, ATN-7 in Sydney commissioned Jonah (originally called Tycoon, apparently) for broadcast in 1962.

Jonah was a regular series rather than a mini-serial, i.e. episodes would have self-contained storylines instead of a serial component. It resolved around the adventures of Jonah Locke, a fictitious merchant in Sydney during the 1830s through to the 1850s, who regularly came into contact with various real-life figures (that’s why the timeline was so flexible). The titular role was played by Brian James, who had so impressed as Captain Bligh in Stormy Petrel, with the other regulars being Hilary Bamberger, as Jonah’s housekeeper Ann, and Neil Fitzpatrick, as his nephew Brett.

Jonah was shot at Artransa Park Studios in Frenc’s Forest, Sydney which had been the production base for Whiplash! – there was plenty of bushland nearby which was useful for exteriors. ATN-7 later claimed the budget was £3,500 an episode, of which two Australian sponsors, the Commonwealth Bank and Arnotts Biscuits, ponied up £1,600 between them (twice what a sponsor would normally pay, apparently). This left a shortfall of almost £2,000 an episode which had to be made up via repeats and overseas sales – though the figures have to be taken with a grain of salt because they came from ATN-7 and it was/is in the interest of producers to cry poor and/or hype production budgets (I’m not saying they lied, I’m just saying that it is always good to check their references).

The series was meant to go for at least 26 episodes (that’s what ATN-7 said – some accounts stated it was meant to be 39, which was the standard amount at the time to sell a show into syndication; Whiplash! aimed for that but only made it to 34). David Cahill and Ken Hannam, two of the best TV directors in Australia at the time, if not the best, were the main men behind the camera. The producer was Harry Dearth, a top radio producer. The head writer and story editor was Michael Plant, a young but hugely experienced Sydney scribe who had been working in the biz since he was a teen, including stints in Hollywood, London, and Broadway; he later became the first producer of The Mavis Bramston Show. (Random trivia: Dearth would die of cancer in 1964 and Plant of an accidental drug overdose in 1965.)

Thanks to the National Film and Sound Archive, I was able to see two episodes of Jonah, both written by Plant – “No Time for Despair” (directed by Cahill) and “The Coal Mutiny” (directed by Hannam). The first concerns a possible discovery of gold in the colony, with appearances from Count Strzelecki (Hans Farkash) and Governor Gipps (Ron Haddrick). The second involves busting the coal monopoly in Australia, which apparently was a thing, via James Brown (Tom Farley), who apparently was a real person; Noeline Brown (in possibly her first TV role) plays a flirt who gets between Ann and Brett.

I admit I had no idea what to expect out of Jonah going in – except maybe a lot of two-shots and people being pompous in period costume. Well, there is a bit of that, and it’s as creaky as you’d expect a 1962 Australian TV drama to be but based on these two episodes Jonah was quite a good show. The plots were well structured and contained decent twists and turns – Michael Plant knew his stuff. It helps immeasurably that the part of Jonah Locke actually has light and shade – he’s no goody-two-shoes Santa Claus figure, but a sharp operator with one eye always on the main chance and I loved how his nephew and housekeeper were always suspecting him of doing something dodgy. Brian James is excellent in the part and the support cast is lively.

The scripts are a bit “history-lesson-y”: Plant clearly gave the encyclopedias a work-out and at the end of each episode a historian person appears and gives a quick summary of the factual background to the events dramatised. That makes the show feel more like the ABC than something for the commercials.

However, judging from the rundown of other episodes, I think Jonah was more gutsy than ABC drama back then, which tended to shy away from controversy if possible. One episode of the show, “A Nest of Hornets”, was about the Lambing Flat riots, with another, “The Man from Myall Creek” being about the Myall Creek massacre. I mean, that is amazing, that a primetime Australian drama tackled those issues in our country’s history.

Reception to Jonah was critically strong, but audience numbers were not terrific – it rated an average of 19 in Melbourne on HSV-7, six points higher than Stormy Petrel, but that was less than what they hoped (in Sydney Jonah remained a primetime show but in Melbourne it was shifted to Sunday afternoons towards the end of its run). Maybe it was too gutsy, too history-lesson-y. It was also very male focused. Maybe if it had been more of a family drama with, say, Jonah running his business with his wife and two kids, it would have had more cross-over appeal. Regardless, the show would be repeated in Sydney in 1965 and 1969.

In November 1962, Jonah sold to Lew Grade’s ATV in England for a reported £750 an episode. This was a massive breakthrough for television drama in Australia, the first time that had happened (I think) for a local series; ATV had invested in some Australian-shot shows like Whiplash! and The Flying Doctors (the 1959 one with Richard Denning) but Jonah was made by an Australian company.

However, the sale prompted Actors Equity to demand more money for the cast members (I think it was an additional 25%); ATN-7 refused so Equity told its members to go on strike. The issue was raised in Parliament, but the conservative government did not support the union, with Minister for Labor William MacMahon claiming ATN-7 had lost £300,000 on the show. Actors Equity refused to back down and ATN-7 wound up cancelling Jonah despite having made only twenty episodes.

In early 1963, the Federal Government held the Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television, which became known as the Vincent Committee and the situation of Jonah was frequently brought up, most commonly by production companies as a stick with which to beat unions but also to examine the difficulties of making television drama profitably in Australia. (Most of the information in this piece is from evidence given to that committee.)

The Jonah dispute stopped ATN-7 from making any drama for a while, which was a big deal since it, along with GTV-9 Melbourne, were the main producer outside the ABC. There was no new Australian drama on the commercials in 1963, except for a few isolated plays, the last series of Consider Your Verdict, and two “quasi-drama” series on ATN-7, Time Out and Tribunal, that consisted of ten-minute episodes of Alistair Duncan interviewing people from history. Time Out focused on figures from Australia’s past (Mary Bryant, etc) and I wonder if this repurposed material from Jonah. Anyway, things changed the following year with the success of Homicide, but Australian TV drama only really got on a firm footing on the commercial stations after a quota was introduced in 1967… which came out of the Vincent Report.

So, in its way Jonah was hugely influential. The first Australian drama series to be sold to the UK. (And it did screen there, by the way, in 1963.) The first Australian drama series stopped by industrial action. A show which proved that commercial stations can make really good, smart drama that was better than the ABC’s output… but that they need encouragement like, well, quotas, if they were to stay.

For the record, below I’ve listed the episodes of Jonah that aired, the original Sydney air date, and the historical figures who appear. They showed 19 episodes… The NFSA has records of twenty episodes being made… I think the twentieth (“The Exile”) was the first part of a two-parter so maybe that is why they did not show it. I have endeavoured to keep the errors to a minimum and beg forgiveness in case any sneak in. If you’re interested in checking them out, about nine episodes are available to the general public via a NFSA access centre:

Ep 1 (15 Oct 1962) – “No Time for Despair” – Count Strzelecki, Governor Gipps

Ep 2 (22 Oct) – “A Tale of Two Bees” – Benjamin Boyd, Sir John Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin

Ep 3 (29 Oct) – “A Ring Around a Rosa” – Caroline Chisolm

Ep 4 (5 Nov) – “The Wrong Hands” – Ludwig Leichhardt

Ep 5 (12 Nov) – “Freedom for Port Phillip” – John Dunmore Lang

Ep 6 (19 Nov) – “A Nest of Hornets” – Chinese migrants at Lambing Flat, Captain Zouch

Ep 7 (26 Nov) – “The Hashemy” – the ship The Hashemy

Ep 8 (3 Dec) – “The Marquis of Mullambimbee” – William Wentworth, Henry Parkes

Ep 9 (10 Dec) – “Black Henry” – Black Henry O’Brien

Ep 10 (17 Dec) – “The Railroader” – Miles Morgan

Ep 11 (24 Dec) – “The Coal Mutiny” – James Brown

Ep 12 (31 Dec) – “Where is Adelaide?” – William Light