Category Archives: Australian popular culture

Pulp Friday: Number 96 paperback tie-ins

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

Bev & BruceLike the television show they were based on, today’s Pulp Friday offering, Number 96 paperback tie-ins, contain nudity, sex, free love, devil worship, infidelity and murder.

The Australian TV soap opera Number 96 depicted the lives of the residents of a fictitious block of inner Sydney flats. These days it comes across as a cultural curio and a sleazy late night commercial TV reminder of early, pre-feminist, seventies. It was indeed those things, but also much more.

Number 96 debuted on March 13 1972, “The night Australian television lost its virginity”. There was moral outrage about the explicit nature of the show and protestors picketed Channel 0 (now the Ten Network) with placards demanding the station “ban this filth”.

It was a huge success with audiences, however, who were keen to dive head first into the warm water of the increasingly sexually liberated early seventies. The show resulted in a feature film and even had its own passenger train that transported the cast and crew from Sydney to Melbourne for the annual Logie awards (Australia’s equivalent of the Emmys). The train made stops at country towns along the way at which thousands turned out to see it.

The end titles always featured a shot of the exterior of the apartment block.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Australian television history, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday

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Pulp Friday: Scobie Malone & “our new Errol Flynn”

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Movie newsSomething a little different for this week’s Pulp Friday.

I recently watched the 1975 Australian film, Scobie Malone, starring Jack Thompson. Also known as Murder at the Opera House and Helga’s Web, the latter from the title of the 1970 Jon Cleary it is based on, the film was long unavailable until its recent re-release by Umbrella Entertainment.

The plot involves larrikan Sydney homicide detective Sergeant Scobie Malone (Jack Thompson) investigating the murder of a women whose body is found in the Sydney Opera House. In the course of his inquires, Malone discovers the women, Helga (Judy Morris), was a high priced prostitute involved with several important clients, including the Minister for Culture (James Workman), who she was blackmailing, and film director Jack Savannah (Joe Martin).

There are numerous suspects for her death, including the Minister’s  wife and a local criminal going by the wonderful name of Mister Sin (Noel Ferrier). The events leading up to Helga’s death are told in a series of flashbacks. Most of the police work is done by Malone’s hapless offsider (Shane Porteous), leaving the title character to spend most of his screen time having sex with a bewildering variety of women, including nearly all the female inhabitants of the singles only block of flats he lives in.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian popular culture, Ozsploitation, Pulp Friday

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Shining a light into Melbourne’s clandestine drag history

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

In the beginning there was the incredibly successful 1994 movie, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And, as if out of nowhere, drag was everything. “People saw the movie and all of a sudden every man and his dog wanted drag at their staff Xmas party,” a drag queen told Melbourne’s gay newspaper Star Observer that year.

At least, that must be how it seemed at the time. For a longer, more in-depth take on the history of drag, its role in creating awareness and acceptance of gay culture, and the evolution of Melbourne’s gay community more generally, you should check out the What A Drag! exhibition, showing as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival.

Priscilla’s success proved what anyone brought up on ’70s British television series such asDad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Are You Being Served? with their frequent plot lines involving men dressing as women, knew already, if only subconsciously; there’s an allure to cross dressing.

You can read the rest of this piece here on Crikey’s Daily Review site.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture

Policing Melbourne’s TV mean streets: Homicide at 50

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

HomicideIt’s been a day for nostalgia. Foremost I’ve been thinking about the passing of Australia’s great reforming Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who died this morning at the age of 98.

But I’ve also been giving a lot of consideration lately to another Australian icon, probably the most influential Australian television show ever made, the crime drama, Homicide.

At 7.30pm on Tuesday 20 1964, Channel 7 showed the first episode of Homicide and what Australians would see on their TV screens would never be the same. Homicide’s influence was truly revolutionary. It was introduced at a time when an estimated 97 per cent of drama content came from the US and Great Britain. It was the first locally produced show to hit number one. It spawned several similar programs, including Matlock Police and Division 4 and established many of the key conventions of Australian true crime television: the team of dedicated police solving a crime per episode and a commitment to realism.

Homicide ran until 1975. The individual Homicide episodes have aged remarkably well in my opinion as self contained hour-long pieces of hard hitting TV crime drama. They are also a fascinating glimpse into the class, gender and social relations of Melbourne society in the sixties and seventies. If you want proof, check out this clip for episode 475, which aired in 1975, towards the end of Homicide’s run.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Crawford Productions, True crime

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Pulp Friday: Nurse in Vietnam

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Nurse in Vietnam

While Sydney-based Horwitz Publications was Australia’s largest pulp publisher, it was not the only one. Cleveland Publishing Company, publisher of today’s Pulp Friday offering, Nurse in Vietnam, was another sizeable operation.

I’ve been able to find out virtually nothing about who was behind Calvert.

All we know about Shauna Marlowe, author of Nurse in Vietnam, is she (if it is actually a woman and not a man writing under a woman’s name) is credited with writing 41 books, nearly all of them for Calvert, from the late fifties to the early seventies.

On one level, Nurse in Vietnam, is just another nurse/doctor romance story (a hugely popular sub-genre of pulp in the fifties and sixties). The nurse in question and a handsome doctor have been captured by Viet Cong rebels. The doctor’s main pre-occupation is not escape but whether she’ll agree to his marriage proposal.

But the publication date, 1965, is significant. A small number of Australian military advisors had been stationed in Vietnam since 1962. We did not start to commit significant ground forces until 1965.

What was the first mainstream Australian novel to tackle the war in Vietnam? Perhaps William Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot, published in 1975. Nurse in Vietnam shows pulp publishers were onto Vietnam as a setting for fiction straight away.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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