Projects in Development

Clown Doctors
Clown Doctors
Writer - A Multiple Episode Television Series

Clown Doctors is an observational documentary series that follows the work of the Humour Foundation, an organisation more generally known as Clown Doctors.

Clown Doctors touch the lives of over 100,000 people every year in surprising and intimate ways. They are part of life in all major children's hospitals, and aged care facilities around Australia.

Isn’t enough to be a good clown. Clown Doctors work with children and elderly people in distress. They work with their families, frequently in distress too. They have to understand some medical procedures, and they have to negotiate the environment and politics of the hospital and the nursing home.

Part fool. Part Counsellor. Part Psychologist. Clown Doctors have to be talented, decisive and sensitive, professional and resilient. Funny and smart.

 

Dark Emu
DARK EMU
Writer - 2x1 hour Television Series

Commissioned to write the treatment to Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu.

We’ve been taught to think of Australia’s first people as hunter gatherers, wanderers across a land they did not own, did not farm, did not build houses upon.

In this remarkable book Bruce Pascoe maintains that they farmed, cultivated and built. They settled and they traded. They managed the land successfully for tens of thousands of years and occupied every part of this vast continent and every extreme of climate. They are the oldest and most successful civilisation on this Earth.

Dark Emu is a contemporary journey across our landscape and through the history, the stories, the foods, and the achievements of Australia’s First People with writer Bruce Pascoe.

 

Hajime Toyoshima and Matthias Ulungara
THE CURIOUS COLLISION OF HAJIME TOYOSHIMA AND MATTHIAS ULUNGARA
Writer - Television Feature

The first Japanese soldier taken prisoner in the Second World War was Hajime Toyoshima, a 22 year old fighter pilot who crash landed his aeroplane on the remote Northern Australian Tiwi Islands. He was captured by 22 year old Tiwi man, Matthias Ulungara.

Hajime Toyoshima is a Samurai of the sky. He serves an Emperor from the oldest monarchy on Earth, a divine being, a direct descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Descended from the Gods who made the Islands of Japan.

Matthias Ulungara is a Tiwi warrior, a man from the oldest culture on Earth, a direct descendent of the spirit woman Mudungkala, who made the Islands of Tiwi.

Hajime Toyoshima and Matthias Ulungara are not so different from each other. Both are the product of a long and deep culture that stretches back to the dawn of time and the creation of the Earth.

 

Alexis Benoit Soyer
SOYER
Writer - Television Series

The celebrity Chef who found Grace.

Alexis Benoit Soyer is a wildly successful French chef based in London. He writes best selling cookbooks and markets a range of signature kitchen products and named cookware. He’s a media personality and an advisor to government. He’s a brand. A household name. A chef at the very top a new vocation he largely invents, because the year is 1853, and Alexis Soyer is the world’s first celebrity chef.

A sensual epicurean, a somewhat vain man who discovered through grief a type of grace, a purpose, and with this purpose firmly in mind he changed the way we cook, and the way we think about food in practicality, nourishment and economy.

 

The Sweet Above
THE SWEET ABOVE
Writer - Feature Film

Commissioned to write the screenplay. Everycloud Productions Producers Deb Cox Fiona Eagger

Based on a true story. It’s 1934 and the Great Depression.

In Albury, a small country town on the bank of the mighty Murray River, things are tough. Work is scarce. Evictions are common. The town is fracturing.

The legendary eccentric confectionary mogul, Sir Macpherson Robertson, inventor of the Freddo frog, has provided a rich prize for the winners in an epic and dangerous air race from London to Melbourne. Most of the town couldn’t care. But not our heroine Amy, who in the dark of a stormy night will rally the town to save one aircraft and all souls aboard her from certain death. She will also kiss Arthur.

‘The Sweet Above’, is a story about the power of ordinary people to achieve great things.

 

Tide of Souls
TIDE OF SOULS
Writer - Feature Film

Commissioned to write the screenplay to The White Divers of Broome, by John Bailey published by Pan Macmillan. At the turn of the 20th Century, pearl diving in the remote North of Australia is largely an Asian operation. Japanese, Malay, and Timorese divers dominate the industry. To conservative White Australia, towns like Broome are intolerable Asian enclaves on Australian soil.
English divers, British Navy trained, are brought to Broome to break the Asian hold over the pearl shell industry. The English Divers are employed literally, to Whiten the industry. They call it the White Experiment. A love story about greed, desire and the greatest pearl in the world.

 

Moonrose
MOONROSE
Writer - Feature Film

There’s a rose summoned to bloom by the light of a full moon. A rose so rare, so red, so plump, that by this moonlight, it’s dazzling white. The story of a young girl, her Mother, and a young century. A story jangled and blurred. A history leaking with a senses of loss, a physical disability, some Jewish neighbours and a passion to fly.

 

The Curious Case of the Unknown Man
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE UNKNOWN MAN
Writer - 1 Hour Television

This is the weird tale of a well dressed, middle-aged dead man found on a suburban beach in 1948. Somerton Beach in Adelaide.
There are no signs of violence nor suicide. The man has no wallet, nor any identification. The labels on his clothing have been removed. An exhaustive investigation fails to identify him. Nobody knows him. For a while, they keep him in a bath of formaldehyde and then before they bury him, they make a plaster cast of his head and shoulders. A bust. They publicly exhibit the bust and still, nobody knows who he is. Over the years, the plaster bust gathers dust like an artefact and they nickname him, 'Somerton Man', and still, nobody knows who he is. Weird.

 

Blue Rose
BLUE ROSE
Writer - Feature Film

The story of Percy Grainger, an almost unknown Australian composer. A seriously weird and gifted man who composed some of the loveliest music of the twentieth century. You know it, you just don’t know anything about him.

 

The Story of Maps
THE STORY OF MAPS
Co-writer - 4x1 hour Television Documentary

The Earth wasn't always a globe. It's an erratic, restless, little planet. This is the history of the shape of planet Earth as perceived by the people who made the maps. Maps are art and science. Power and empire. Maps are wonder and desire. Identity and faith. The history of maps is nothing less than the history of human enterprise on planet Earth.

 

The poet who never was ever
THE POET WHO NEVER WAS EVER
Writer - Television Feature

I agree with Robert Hughes. He says the Ern Malley Affair is the greatest literary hoax of the 20th Century. It all happened in Adelaide in 1943. The world was at war. In Adelaide they were fighting about poetry. Ern Malley destroyed three men, and made one man who never existed, quite famous. It’s an affair, a jape, a shemozzle, a courtroom farce, it’s about the Modern in Australian Art and culture, and a poet who never was ever.

 

Eureka
EUREKA
Writer - 2x1 hour Television Feature

Eureka is a story about greed, corruption, murder and brotherhood, and then at the end, there's a bloodbath. It all happened in 1854 in the township of Ballarat in the Colony of Victoria on the richest goldfields in the world. At the Eureka goldfield, miners armed themselves and built a stockade. The Government sent the army. Eureka was a vicious, 15 minute fight after a long simmering summer of bureaucratic chickenshit and violence. It was the beginning of democracy in Australia.

 

Michelangelo, Laszlo and the year of rage
MICHELANGELO, LASZLO, AND THE YEAR OF RAGE
Writer - Television Feature

In 1498, Michelangelo Buonarroti carved his Pieta, a work of sublime beauty. In 1972, Laszlo Toth, an unemployed Australian geologist, attacked Pieta with a hammer. 1972 was a strange year.

 

The Dreaming
THE DREAMING
Writer - Feature Film

Commissioned to write the screenplay to The Dreaming, by Queenie Chan published by Tokyopop. Identical twins Jeanie and Amber are new students at Greenwich Private College, an exclusive private boarding school that lies deep within the bush. Upon arriving at the school, the girls discover that the blind vice-principal Mrs Skeener has a strange and inexplicable prejudice against twins. They also discover that the school has a history of students vanishing. Young girls from the school have wandered off into the bush, and vanished without a trace. It has never been explained, just accepted by those who live in fear of it. The twins began having identical dreams, which neither can understand the meaning. How are the dreams connected to the history of the school? What is the mystery behind The Dreaming?

 

A Plain Person's History of Deadly Diseases
A PLAIN PERSON'S HISTORY OF DEADLY DISEASES
Writer - 4x1 hour Television Documentary

A scary romp through historical epidemiology. A personal wander through the human condition in all it’s gory splendour. A look at the fascinating and frequently bizarre relationship between humans and disease. In four parts. One, Pale horse, black rat, mad cow. Two, The battle for the air. Three, Pox, clap and other unmentionables. Four, Revenge of the microbes. Be afraid, alert, somewhat alarmed, no; entertained, and all of the above.

 

Turning Into Light
TURNING INTO LIGHT
Writer - Feature Film

Commissioned to write the screenplay for ‘Fifty years of Silence’, a memoir by Jan Ruff O’Hearn. Published by William Heinemann. Jan Ruff O’Hearn was a young woman, not much more than a girl, systematically and brutally raped in a Japanese prison camp. She never told anyone. Fifty years later, she told the world. But first, she had to tell her daughter.

 

The Demon Killer
THE DEMON KILLER
Writer - Television feature

In 1892 Frederick Bailey Deeming is a household name. A name to loath and fear. The international press call him, ‘The Criminal of the Century’. Blending drama with documentary storytelling, this is the spine-tingling tale of the foul deeds, capture, trial and execution of a Lancashire psychopath, the first serial killer of the modern age of mass media believed by many, to have been Jack the Ripper. When they hanged him in Melbourne 10,000 people gathered. They gathered to cheer.

 

Outrage
OUTRAGE
Writer - 2x1 hour Television Feature

Forget everything you have seen or heard. The Kelly gang were Irish outliers who in the late 1870s, robbed, murdered, and managed to endear themselves to a nation. The story is true. Nobody could make this stuff up. If the Kelly Brothers were around today, they would be re-birthing cars in the outer suburbs. They were horse stealers. They re-branded, re-birthed, and on sold-them. Then they turned to robbery, then murder and, finally, a bloodbath in the night with the bullets striking sparks from the steel of their armour, and then, it all finishes in an epic, emotional tragedy.

 

Lilly, Joan and Leon
LILLY, JOAN & LEON
Writer - Feature Film

Gentle black farce about two women, a taxi driver who wears women’s clothes, and a night that changed everything. Life is mostly waiting around for the one person who wants to fall in love with us; the thing is, to make the waiting as pleasant as possible.

 

love letters from a captive moonlite
LOVE LETTERS FROM A CAPTIVE MOONLITE
Writer - 1 hour Television Feature

Andrew Scott is passionately in love with James Nesbitt, and James with him. None of this may be remarkable, until you consider that the year is 1880, and James Nesbitt is dead, and Andrew Scott wants to be buried with him in the same grave because Andrew, better known as Captain Moonlite, is to be hanged within the hour.
This program is about an extraordinary gang of outlaws, attitudes to homosexuality in the late 19th Century, and a passionate love complicated by persecution, violence and death.

 

love letters from our deceptive heart
LOVE LETTERS FROM OUR DECEPTIVE HEART
Writer - 1 hour Television Feature

Felicity Prim lives in Melbourne. Prince Kenneth Nweze lives in Nigeria. Felicity and Kenneth fall in love via email. Neither expected this. Neither was looking for love but sometimes, just sometimes, love is looking for you.
This program is about long distance relationships and deception of a cruel and callous kind, the kind that steals millions of dollars annually. It’s about a new sport for the 21st century involving witty geeks with a sense of humour and a malicious heart.