In the 1950s the Australian public had little or no interest in supporting an Australian film industry. In fact, as Lee Robinson remarked some years later in an interview with Graham Shirley, if the public were aware that a feature film was Australian it meant death at the box-office: ‘To put an Australian tag on it [an Australian feature film] was the worse thing you could do’. This reaction to local production was shared by Prime Minister Menzies and his Federal Liberal-Country Party Government. When Lee Robinson, Chips Rafferty and veteran Australian cinematographer George Heath tried to raise money in 1952 for their feature film, The Phantom Stockman (1953), the Federal Government refused to relax the wartime restriction which placed a £10,000 limit on any non-essential Australian company. Hence Robinson, Rafferty and Heath’s production company, Platypus Productions, was forced to make the film with a budget of only £10,000. Robinson also had to abandon a proposed film based on his script, co-written with British editor Inman Hunter, titled Saturday to Monday. He sold the script to Ealing who eventually filmed it as The Siege of Pinchgut (1959).

Raised in a Mormon family Robinson was more interested in writing when he drifted into film production in the last years of World War 2 as part of the Army Military History Unit. He recorded the entry of Australian troops into the Japanese-held territory at Rabaul and his first directorial effort took place in Timor when he set up scenes for the camera. He also covered the Japanese surrender. After the war he joined the Department of Information (DOI) Film Unit and in January 1946 he wrote a treatment called Namatjira the Painter. Because there was nobody else in the unit capable of directing the film, Robinson was sent to central Australia in April to make the documentary on Albert Namatjira. Although Robinson is proud of this film he admitted later that his knowledge of the medium was very limited and he was reliant on British director Harry Watt, who was working in Australia at the time, to provide him with rudimentary information such as camera set-ups and providing sufficient material for the editor

Within the DOI Robinson established a reputation as a director of ‘exotic’ documentaries that specialised in distant locations. After viewing one of these films, Double Trouble, Chips Rafferty selected him to direct The Phantom Stockman as he wanted somebody who had experience in working in difficult conditions and was determined to make the film in the outback and not in a film studio. After the success of Namatjira the Painter Robinson directed a wide range of films for DOI including Darwin: Gateway to Australia, Crocodile Hunters, The Pearlers and Outback Patrol. He was also caught up in the political battles that were dividing Australia in the early 1950s as the DOI, like much of Australia, was racked by internal dissent between the left and the Catholic Action Movement over the issue of Communist influence within the unions and other areas of Australian life. During this period Robinson assisted, uncredited, on a number of short films for various left wing groups. His career breakthrough came with Phantom Stockman and the decision to allow Robinson, who was still in his twenties, to direct the film may have been helped by the fact that he had formed a friendship with Rafferty while working on the script for the 2UE radio serial ‘Chips. a story of the outback’. For his work on this serial Robinson was paid £350 a week – well in excess of the meagre £9 a week he received as a director for the DOI.

The strong generic basis of The Phantom Stockman as Robinson’s first feature film is, in terms of his overall career, revealing. Robinson came to realise early in his career that the Australian feature films needed to be sold overseas if a viable industry was to be established. To this end he remained an ‘internationalist’ with regard to Australian production throughout his career. He maintained that if Australian films, or television programs, were going to have reasonable budgets and an acceptable degree of quality, they had to appeal beyond just Australia and pre sales were an important part of the financing. Hence his feature films and television productions were rooted in generic and melodramatic story structures. The Phantom Stockman, for example, utilised the familiar elements of the B or series western which were transformed so that they could accommodate an Australian setting and Australian attitudes. This, of course, was not the first attempt to utilise western conventions with an Australian setting – the 1936 Australian production of Rangle River was directed by American Clarence Badger, based on a Zane Grey story and starred Hollywood actor Victor Jory. Later, in the 1940s, Ealing Studios also became interested in producing ‘Australian’ westerns and this resulted in The Overlanders (1946) and Bitter Springs (1950), both starring Chips Rafferty. Even closer to the style of The Phantom Stockman was The Kangaroo Kid (1950), the last film made by the McCreadie Brothers who imported a veteran Hollywood director of series westerns, Lesley Selander, as well as American actors Jock O’Mahoney, later to star as Tarzan, Veda Ann Borg, Douglas Dumbrille and cinematographer Russell Harlan who was very familiar with this kind of film.

Robinson was convinced that if a film, such as The Phantom Stockman, had an exotic or unfamiliar setting (for overseas audiences) it should have a conventional storyline so as not to alienate the audience. Hence The Phantom Stockman is mainly a reprise of the series western formula of a young woman, Kim Marsden (played by Australian model Jeanette Elphick who was later more well known in Hollywood as Victoria Shaw), forced to protect her cattle property from the evil designs of a greedy neighbour (Guy Doleman) after her father is murdered. She is assisted in this fight by the Australian bushman, the ‘Sundowner’ (Chips Rafferty) and his mate, Dancer (Henry Murdoch). This storyline draws upon elements not only from the series westerns of Tim Holt and others but also the mystical relationship between the Sundowner and the aborigines – as in the comic strip The Phantom, for example. The film, however, is less interested in the narrative and more concerned with showing the unique qualities of the Australian bush around Alice Springs and the cooperative relationship between the bushmen and the local aborigines – Robinson even includes an extraneous scene between the Sundowner and Albert Namatjira.

The budget for the film was raised mainly by Rafferty selling £250 debentures to friends and business acquaintances, including newspaper tycoon Frank Packer, although Robinson also sold his house to assist the financing. The film was commercially successful and reinforced Robinson’s belief in the economics of generic stories for Australian productions that could be pre-sold overseas. The title of the film was changed to Cattle Station in the United Kingdom and to Return of the Plainsman in the United States and it made a reasonable profit in both countries with the investors doubling their initial investment. Robinson’s next film, King of the Coral Sea (1954), was an even greater success for Southern International, Rafferty and Robinson’s new production company. The filming was completed in November 1953 after six weeks shooting on Thursday Island followed by underwater photography on Green Island off the north Queensland coast.

This is a more assured film with a stronger dramatic structure and better production values although Robinson is careful not to let the melodramatic story interfere with his emphasis on the exotic beauty of Thursday Island and a detailed presentation of the pearling industry – pearling had been the subject of one of Robinson’s documentaries for the DOI (The Pearlers, 1949). Chips Rafferty as Ted King, the manager of the local pearling company, gives one of his most relaxed performances and the increased budget allowed the employment of greater talent in the supporting cast. This included Rod Taylor in his film debut as Rafferty’s American offsider (Jack Janiero) and Charles Tingwell as the ‘playboy’ Peter Merriman, the owner of Rafferty’s company, who romances King’s daughter Rusty (Ilma Adey). Nevertheless, compared to its Hollywood counterparts, this adventure melodrama is still leisurely paced although eventually the plot, involving illegal immigrants, takes over and the film’s climax sees King, Janiero and Merriman rescuing Rusty after swimming underwater to Weekend Island where the Malay villain Yusep (Lloyd Berrell) and the Australian traitor Grundy (Reg Lye) are holding her prisoner. It should also be noted that the dramatic basis of the film exploits deeply rooted Australian fears concerning illegal immigration and this is coupled with a vague reference to the fear of ‘foreign’ (read Communist) infiltration into Australia.

Strong overseas and local sales ensured that the film made a considerable profit by earning its production costs back in Australia. The overseas sales were all profit. Southern International’s next film, Walk into Paradise (1956), was also a financial success especially after American producer Joseph Levine bought the American rights and re-titled it Walk into Hell. The film earned £70,000 from sales in Britain alone and its total budget was only £68,000. The screenplay by Robinson and Rafferty repeated the formula of the earlier films by devising a conventional melodramatic story within an exotic setting – this time the location was New Guinea. Pre-production was nearly complete when French producer Paul-Edmond Decharme proposed a co-production with two French film stars and a French dialogue director, Marcel Pagliero, was sent to assist the production. Pagliero, a former actor who had worked with Roberto Rossellini, established an effective working relationship with Robinson and both men decided there should be only one director (Robinson) on the set and after Pagliero went through the lines with the French actors he left the filming to the Australian. Pagliero also assisted the Australian actors with their dialogue for the French version as every scene was shot twice, once in French and once in English. Pagliero was given a full credit in the French version when it was released in Paris in July 1956.

In May 1956 Robinson and Rafferty bought the Cinesound studio at Bondi and they formed Australian Television Enterprises. However, they retained the Southern International title for their feature films. Their next film Dust in the sun, which began filming in Alice Springs in October 1956, was not a success. Robinson later claimed that the decision not to cast Chips as the star was a mistake. The film suffered poor pre-sales compared with their earlier films as the star of the film, English actress Jill Adams, was not well known. Dust in the Sun did not receive a general release in Australia until 1960, which was after Southern International’s next film, The Stowaway, another French co-production. This time, however, Robinson did not have the same effective working relationship with his French counterpart, director Ralph Habib. Unlike the arrangement on Walk into Paradise, Habib directed the French version and Robinson the English one. The Stowaway, which was filmed on location in Tahiti and the Society Islands with Martine Carol and Roger Livesey in the lead roles, had a budget of £250,000 and was poorly received when it was released in Paris in 1958 and Australia in 1959.

Aside from The Intruders (1969), a feature film spin-off from the highly successful children’s television program Skippy, The Stowaway was Robinson’s last film as a feature film director. However after 1958 he became one of Australia’s busiest producers and writers. From 1958 to 1960 his company was involved with making documentaries for American television and throughout the 1960s and 1970s Robinson wrote, produced, executive produced, and developed numerous Australian films and television productions – including co-productions with Thailand and other Asian countries. This included Skippy, Nickel Queen, Barrier Reef, Boney, Bailey’s Bird, Attack Force Z and Highest Honor. He also directed a rock and roll spectacular for Lee Gordon with five cameras recording the performances of Johnny O’Keefe, Johnny Devlin, Col Joy and Johnny Reb as well as a documentary on Dawn Fraser in 1964. Above all else, Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty kept the feature film industry alive in the early 1950s at a time when nobody wanted to either make Australian films or watch them. For this alone, The Phantom Stockman, King of the Coral Sea, Walk into Paradise and Lee Robinson deserve a privileged place in the history of the Australian cinema.

Lee Robinson died on September 22, 2003 after a long illness.

Geoff Mayer
La Trobe University, Australia.
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Apr-04