Gum-Nut Tragedy All the Way

By ROBERT HUGHES

THE THORN BIRDS ABC, March 27-30

Dear Dad,

Sorry I didn't make it home to Gun-dagai for the bushfires. Fact is, I got stuck in New York with this sheila I met on the plane, watching a preview of a TV series the Yanks made of The Thorn Birds--you know, the novel by Colleen McCullough that Auntie Pat was reading before the port got her. Long as a snake's liver and all about this priest (Richard Chamberlain) and a girl named Meggie (Rachel Ward) on a station (or ranch, as they call it here) who get a big thing for one another and keep simmering away for about 35 years, slinging the stuff about guns, and guilt but rarely getting to the Main Event. No wonder all the mums liked it. Anyway, one of the networks here, ABC, made a saga about it, the word for anything ten hours long and slow as a stunned mullet. They say (well, they hope) the Yanks are going to watch it in their millions. Which just shows there's probably no limit to the number of poor suffering drongos who'll sit back and have the Box come the raw prawn on them.

The Yanks think life back home is pretty tough. In Thorn Birds the characters bellyache about the flies and heat all the time and talk about "being stuck out here in this hellish place" beyond the black stump. Actually, they never leave Northern California, except to go to Hawaii, which is the network's idea of Queensland. You don't see many gum trees either, and Qantas didn't lend the filmmakers its koala, but they did borrow a kangaroo, and now and again the director, Daryl Duke, shoos it across the set for local color. It died of a heart attack during the shooting, they tell me. No wonder. I suppose with white cockatoos going for $2,000 apiece, after Baretta, they couldn't have any flocks of those; there were enough flaming galahs behind the camera anyway.

Beats me why they couldn't just bundle the whole crew up and send them to Australia and get the scenery for free. The upshot is that everything on the station, called Drogheda, looks a bit wrong: wrong tools, wrong guns, wrong gates and so on. Believe it or not, they've even got singing shearers. Never mind, the Yanks won't notice. They like television to look cheap even when it's expensive.

Then there's the voices. They didn't use Australian actors--not many lurking in L.A., I suppose, and you can't have Peter Allen chewing the ram-stag mutton and pretending to be a jackaroo. So they all talk either Ma Maison Irish or Rodeo Drive pommy. Not a trace of Strine from magpie to mopoke until Bryan Brown (who plays Luke, the shearer Meggie marries when she can't get her priest) looms up on the horizon, picking the damper crumbs from his Great Whites with a stringybark sapling. But he's the only dinkum specimen in it. The kids even call their mother Mom, which nobody outside America does.

So Drogheda's a pretty strange place for the first few hours, except for two things. The first is Barbara Stanwyck, who plays exactly the same old knacker-bashing matriarch she used to play years ago in The Big Valley. Now she's at it again, hissing and squinting around like a great goanna in a woodshed. The second is the scene where the priest, Father De Bricassart, tells the child Meggie about the meaning of menstruation. He does his explaining in a rose garden, just like the old Modess ads on Brisbane TV--even the same Henry Mancini-style music.

But the truth is that nothing could look all that real, given the script, which is by Carmen Culver. You see Barbara Stanwyck pawing at Richard Chamberlain and coming out with lines like, "I have always loved you--so much that I could have killed you for not wanting me. . . Inside this stupid body I am still young, and I still want you, O God, how much!" Everyone's quite troppo over Father De Bricassart, from Rachel Ward to old Greek women and even his senior coach, a papal legate played by Christopher Plummer, who keeps referring to the opposite of determinism as "free wheel," musing that "I often wonder what can account for such sadness in a face of such spiritual beauty," Chamberlain's, and comparing his pupil in Rome to "ze beautiful sleek cat among ze plump startled pitcheons."

The compliments never stop flying in Chamberlain's direction, even six hours into the series, when his hair turns white and he starts to look like Andy Warhol in a cassock. By contrast, poor Rachel Ward hardly cops any at all. There she is in the Deep North, leafing through the racy bits in D.H. Lawrence and contending with flies, ticks, funnel-webs, sandy blight and hot westerlies, and all hubby Luke wants to do is wrestle with cane cutters. Gravely neglectful, in my view.

Rachel's a beaut-looking sheila, and she's fairly serious about acting, but what can you do with a script like that? It's gum-nut Irish-Greek tragedy all the way, with Fate banging on the roof like a giant possum. "I will have given everything I have ever had or loved in my whole life," she has to elocute, on hearing that her kid (a bastard by Father De Bricassart) is going to become a priest. "Surely God can't ask for more than that?" At which point you just know it's 13 to 2 he can and will--and he does, by forcing the lad to drown about ten feet from shore in a sea that's as flat as a strap, while his sister is busy naughtying with a German diplomat.

You see how the attitude to Great Writing has changed in show biz? In your day, they'd take Tolstoy or Shakespeare and hire three hacks to give it the old re-bore. Nowadays they take Colleen McCullough and treat her dialogue and thoughts on destiny as though they were Holy Writ. And they say Australia's upside down! Well, see you there--and don't stub your toe on any Yank researchers.

Love, Dave

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.