A Big Country (1968 - 1991)
Reality series
Weekly x 30 minutes
Series synopsis:
Each week, A Big Country documented the lives of rural Australians from across the country, and through those stories explained to city people the world of those living on the land.
Curator’s Notes:
For over 20 years A Big Country broadcast 370 programs in 32 series on prime time ABC television, winning awards and high ratings. The program trained generations of documentary filmmakers including the legendary Bob Connolly who cut his teeth on these 30 minute documentaries developed by the ABC Rural Department before striking out with his wife Robin Anderson to create their prize-winning documentaries.
Each Big Country program was made with a producer, a reporter, a sound recordist and camera operator. In the days when the ABC still trained crews, there would also be a camera assistant learning on the job. Often, the stories were discovered by ABC rural officers living and broadcasting locally across the country, who would pass them on to the Big Country unit back in Sydney.
Titles in this collection
A Big Country – Perkins Navy (1979)
Bruce Perkins owns a fleet of flat-bottomed barges that help the people of northern Australia to inhabit some of the least accessible areas of the top end.
A Big Country – The Challenge of Lake Eyre (1978)
Lake Eyre is generally a massive environment of death or rather lifelessness, and every year for several months, John and Roma Dulhunty come to the lake to conduct their geological survey.
A Big Country – The Prices (1979)
A pioneering family has taken over a cattle station at Cape York and is trying to make a go of it.
A Big Country – The White Rose (1979)
Frank Bourke is ‘The White Rose’ – the dance band known and loved throughout country New South Wales.
