Period dramas get a rough ride from historians, critics and sofa pedants alike. Jimmy McGovern’s Banished makes it difficult to buck this trend. The first episode (aired on 5th March 2014) was riddled with disappointments, among which were a fair few glaring inaccuracies. But the biggest problem facing this seven part drama is the scantiness of its cast. Banished relies on a mere eighteen characters: Governor Arthur Phillip, nine convicts, five marines, a clergyman and two wives. As a result, Port Jackson is made to feel more like a gathering of shipwrecked castaways than a nascent convict colony. The First Fleet offloaded more than one thousand live individuals on 26 January 1788. They included 736 convicts (548 male and 188 female), about 250 marines and over one hundred free emigrants (including the wives and children of marines). It is perhaps unfair to expect BBC budgets to capture the true scale of colonial Australia’s first settlement, but Banished is so ruthlessly starved of extras and so focussed on its soap opera-sized cast that the astonishing ‘bigger picture’ of transportation is almost entirely lost.
Perhaps anticipating the wrath of historians, McGovern recently admitted on the BBC Writers Room blog to having ‘taken liberties similar to those taken by the makers of, say, Deadwood or any other western. It is not a drama-doc (where accuracy is essential). It is fiction. It is entertainment.’ Banished weaves fictional characters in with a few real historical figures, notably Governor Phillip (the wise and relatively humane founder of the first settlement) and fleet commander Major Robert Ross, the choleric thorn in his side. I have nothing against this approach in principle but why stray from fact when it deprives a story of so much drama and emotion? McGovern set out to tell the convicts’ side of the story, a laudable undertaking, but this begs the question: why are his convicts so unrepresentative of reality? I hate to bring up age but the actors playing the crims clock up an average age of at least forty. The youngest is 23. In reality, the average age of First Fleeters was 27, the vast majority were under 35 and the youngest was just nine (John Hudson, a chimney sweep). This may seem like nit-picking but the age of convicts had huge implications for the colony’s social climate and economic development, as well as for an individual’s personal experience of transportation.
Episode One focussed on a melodramatic and rather implausible love triangle involving the central convict characters, James Freeman (played by Russell Tovey), Elizabeth Quinn (MyAnna Buring) and Tommy Barrett (Julian Rhind-Tutt). To be fair to McGovern, this storyline did offer insights into the genuinely explosive sexual politics of the nascent colony. Port Jackson witnessed such a frenzy of illicit sexual activity on the convict colony’s first night that Governor Phillip was forced to ban convict men from entering shacks designated for female convicts. It is also true that Phillip reluctantly allowed female convicts to be used as bargaining chips to prevent a mutiny among his marines. If you can resist analysing the dialogue too closely, McGovern does convey the vulnerability of the nascent colony and the on-the-hoof manner in which rules were made. Leaving aside the heavy-handed plot (concluding with a cringe-worthy redemption scene on the camp scaffold), Banished stuffs a decent helping of passable Georgian discourse, clothing, food, violence, prejudice and morality into an hour. And this is a beautifully filmed drama contrasting sun-drenched eucalyptus trees with depressingly dingy huts and prison cells. But there are some surprising and problematic omissions. Having recently contributed to Redfern Now – a television drama about indigenous Australians living in a 21st-century Sydney suburb – McGovern gives no screen-time to the Aborigines of New South Wales in any episode of Banished. “Natives” are spoken of but never seen, and this will remain the case throughout the series. This is despite the fact that Port Jackson witnessed a great deal of interaction (often involving highly televisual confrontation and violence) between convicts/marines and the Iora tribe.
Australia’s exotic fauna fared a little better in Episode One but we were still rationed to cockatoo sound effects and a glimpse of crocodile’s tail. I hope McGovern has a few kangaroos, koalas and snakes up his sleeve because it is impossible to convey the experience of transportation without venturing beyond camp into the Australian wilderness. Providing that he has read Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore (1986), there is still hope for this series. This masterpiece is, as Peter Ackroyd enthuses, ‘A unique phantasmagoria of crime and punishment, which combines the shadowy terrors of Goya with the tumescent life of Dickens’. Hughes also weaves the most intricate descriptions of geology, weather, flora and fauna into his rich tapestry of convict experience. Early on, he observes, ‘Half a dozen kinds of patagarang [kangaroo] lived around the harbour, nibbling its wiry grass and appearing silently, like fawn wraiths, among the guttered shelves of the fern-gullies.’
Having read Hughes’ astonishing book on my first visit to Australia a few years ago, I was surprised to discover that so few films have been made about the convict colony. McGovern goes further, recently boasting that “There will be so many Australian writers kicking themselves when they see this [Banished]. It’s an amazing story that’s never been told”. He is mistaken, of course. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s multi-award-winning play, Our Country’s Good, was first staged in 1988 and was itself adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker (1987). But the film industry has certainly been slow to catch up. 2009’s Van Diemen’s Land, a debut film by a Tasmanian director, was the first release since 1927’s silent production, For the Term of His Natural Life, to take on Australia’s convict era. With brutal realism, Van Diemen’s Land tells the hellish true story (also described in The Fatal Shore) of Alexander Pearce, an Irish labourer transported in 1819 for stealing shoes. In 1822, Pearce escaped with seven other convicts and fled into the immense and terrifying Tasmanian wilderness. Having killed and eaten his companions, Pearce alone survived, making most survival stories look like a package holiday with a slightly disappointing buffet.
Perhaps Banished will improve and perhaps it will inspire other writers and directors to approach the subject, but I have my doubts. Whether for patriotic or commercial reasons, there remains remarkably little appetite to make films about convict Australia. This is a great shame because the archives are overflowing with film fodder. Scriptwriters and producers be advised, there is a Schindler’s List or a Twelve Years a Slave to be made about Norfolk Island. There, I’ve said it.
The first episode of Banished was broadcast on BBC 2 on March 5th 2015 and is currently available on iPlayer. The series will consist of seven episodes.