The first stage of Australia’s digital transition and its implications for Australian television drama

This article analyses how digitisation and screen policy reform altered the production of domestic drama and children’s programmes in Australia. Focusing on dynamics that developed before widespread use of streaming services, it maps the disruptions and evolution that digital ‘multi-channels’ caused and how they challenged audiovisual policy frameworks intended to safeguard local television including drama on advertiser-funded broadcasters. The article reveals how the effects of fragmentation undermined commercial television’s business model and eroded investment in scripted content. Shifting policy priorities also brought new support mechanisms for local programmes and led to adjustments to the ABC’s drama funding practices, with significant effects on the form, content, and cultural visibility of Australian drama. This initial stage of digital disruption – spanning roughly 2001–2014 – is often overlooked but is crucial for appreciating the challenges facing Australian television drama production in the 2020s.

LIZZIE LEIGH! Or, the Murder Near the Old Mill: A Story of Three Christmas Nights – A Domestic Drama, in Three Acts by W. R. Waldron

Richard Waldon’s play Lizzie Leigh can be interpreted as a domestic drama, a temperance play, or a sensational melodrama. In editing the script we asked ourselves which generic frame – the domestic or temperance – enables the sensation narrative to speak to an audience more powerfully today. Since the discourse of temperance is effectively culturally dead, our first editing decision was to delete the opening temperance dialogue and all subsequent references to temperance as such. We open our version of the play in the midst of an action, and all subsequent deletions to the script were made in the service of keeping the core action of the play in the foreground. We strived to capture how the action might speak to our audience within the contexts that we carry with us from our own cultural moment, our heightened awareness of forms of violence against women, and uncertainties about truth claims being the most prominent. Thus, we shortened the long paeans to lost domestic security and happiness, keeping domesticity as a thread but not a preoccupation. In other words, we kept enough of the domestic context to highlight the action with the intention to make the action as legible and as credible as we could.

Palliating Humanity in The Last Man

Chapter four examines Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the story of an incurable plague that kills all of humanity. Shelley interrogates the Romantic belief in the possibility of a medico-poetic panacea (cure all). The novel begins with a domestic drama whose tragedy is figured as incurable, and this metaphoric incurability sparks the far more literal plague. Characters react to both scourges by longing for a panacea, which, when it does not appear, plunges them into a despair that aggravates the initial illness. Shelley’s story critiques the binary mindset underwriting both total affirmation and rejection of panacea, posing a middle ground that offers literature as the palliation of a dying humanity. In the same way that medical philosophers like Jean Georges Cabanis tied the imperfection of medical knowledge to the necessity of palliative care, so The Last Man suggests that suffering and death are unavoidable, both individually and at a species level. In the novel, literature takes on the function of a palliative care doctor, shepherding humanity to its final end by ‘taking the mortal sting from pain’ and preserving its fragmentary memory (p. 5).