User:Wizard30/Anne Whitehead (author)

Anne Whitehead (author)
Anne Whitehead is an Australian author and historian of three non-fiction books, essays and long form journalism, with a background as a film and television producer, director and screenwriter.

Personal Life
Anne Whitehead was born in Sydney in 1942. Because of her peripatetic engineer father, she was educated at eleven schools, including Lincolnshire and Yorkshire villages, the PNG highland goldfields and coastal town of Lae, and three Australian boarding schools. In 1972 she graduated from the University of Sydney with an MA in Australian Literature and in 2001 with a PhD in Government and International Relations for a History thesis on the gender politics at William Lane’s ‘New Australia’ colonies in Paraguay, 1893-1909.

She was married to ABC-TV 7.30 Report current affairs producer Phil Wallington, has had long relationships with journalist and historian Roger Milliss, book publisher John Kerr, author Christopher Koch and for many years has been with former Australian diplomat Allan Deacon, who has joined her in research on her projects in the UK and the South Atlantic island of St Helena.

Film and Television
In 1964, with a BA and Dip.Ed from the University of New England, Whitehead began three years teaching English and History at Queenwood, Mosman and Macarthur Girls’ High School, Parramatta. In 1967 she was recruited to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney as a Specialist Trainee Producer and began producing radio dramas for schools. In addition in 1968 she worked as Script Editor for a new national weekly TV Current Affairs program broadcast nationally to schools. In 1969 she took over as producer/director and renamed the program Behind the News (BTN). Aimed at 8 to 14 year-olds and offering background to current events in Australia and internationally, it became enormously popular across Australian schools, acquiring a home viewing audience as well. In 2018 the ABC celebrated the 50th anniversary of BTN, the second-longest running current events series in Australia after Four Corners. Whitehead attended the celebrations in Adelaide where the program is currently produced.

In 1970-71 she initiated an ABC TV documentary series The Australians and wrote, produced and directed four documentaries: They Came to Stay (1970 on immigration); Blokes and Coves and Coots (1970, adapting Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend); Where Are You Going Mate? (1971, exploring contemporary Australia with Donald Horne, Manning Clark, Humphrey McQueen) and A Track Winding Back (1971, Charles Louis Gabriel’s photographic documentation of Gundagai, NSW c.1900)

A Track Winding Back, ABC-TV 1973; NFSA No. 20292, Producer, Director, Scriptwriter Anne Whitehead; Narrator Richard Oxenburgh; Music Director Alex Hood; Performer Don Burrows. This is the only film in Whitehead’s TV series The Australians to survive in the ABC or NFSA Archives.

In 1977 she was offered a Producer position at the newly-formed Tasmanian Film Corporation in Hobart. She produced some twenty sponsored documentaries while at the TFC, including A Sporting Chance on girls, sport and sex-role stereotypes, Cutting It Fine, featuring Bryan Brown, Chart Before the Course, a series of five films on Maps and Map-Making,  and the 35mm Franklin River Journey, supporting conservation of the wild Franklin River, directed by Bob Connolly (1980) and available on YouTube. The film won a Special Recognition Award at the 1982 World Wildlife Film Festival.

While at the Tasmanian Film Corporation Whitehead wrote and directed the first of two TV dramas: Round the Bend, a telemovie based on the case history of a schoolteacher suffering paranoid schizophrenia, it was jointly funded by the Tasmanian Mental Health Commission and the Nine Network. Starring Penny Downie, Shane Porteous and Olivia Brown, it was broadcast nationally by the Nine Network (1981).

Letting Go, a drama about teenage rebellion against oppressive parenting, sponsored by the Family Planning Association of Australia, it featured Robyn Nevin and John Ewart and was broadcast on the Seven Network (1981).

In early 1982 Whitehead returned to Sydney and, with a travel grant from the Australian Film Commission, travelled to Paraguay to research a planned television series on the 500-plus Australians who went to South America in the 1890s to found a socialist Utopia.

In 1985 Whitehead wrote and directed the feature-length documentary The Loner in the Lodge to commemorate the life of Australia’s war-time Prime Minister John Curtin. The film was presented by Mike Willesee for his Transmedia company, produced by Aviva Ziegler and broadcast on the Nine Network. Labor leader Kim Beazley arranged a special screening at Parliament House.