So hot right now: How Tasmania became TV’s favourite place to be seen

By Karl Quinn

Kate Box and Madeleine Sami on the set of Deadloch. Creators Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney were initially drawn to Tasmania by the ‘Scandi-noir’ qualities of its landscape.Credit: Prime Video

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Turn on the TV, and there’s Australia’s southernmost state: it’s on streaming in Deadloch; it’s on SBS on demand in Alone Australia (one of the year’s biggest free-to-air shows); and, from next Sunday, it’s on your ABC on Bay of Fires, a thriller dramedy co-created by Marta Dusseldorp, a Tasmanian by marriage, and resident since 2018.

It may be winter in the Apple Isle, but the place is just so hot right now. But if Tasmania is finally on the map as far as screen stories are concerned, how, and why, did it get there?

First and foremost, it’s the look of the place.

When Melbourne-based producer Andy Walker headed south to shoot The Kettering Incident in 2014, he was immediately struck by the aesthetic that has come to be dubbed “Tasmanian gothic”.

More and more Australian TV shows are being filmed in Tasmania, including Rosehaven, The Kettering Incident and Deadloch.Credit: The Age

“There was such a palpable sense of place and history,” he says. “Fifteen to 30 minutes out of the city you can be in the most extraordinary landscape.”

Kate McCartney, who co-created Deadloch (which has been a top 5 hit for Amazon Prime Video in the US, UK and Canada, and number one in Australia and New Zealand) with Kate McLennan, agrees.

“The landscape sold itself to us first,” she says. “We were really looking for something that was an Australian version of that Scandi-noir aesthetic. There’s a visual poetry to it.

“Landscape is really important to the storytelling,” she adds. “It’s not just words that make the story, the whole frame makes it.”

Like Deadloch (which was shot largely in and around Cygnet on the south-east coast), Bay of Fires leans heavily into that darkness, casting its location of Queenstown in the west (not far from where Alone was shot) as a place of brooding secrets.

But not every show has typecast Tassie as a devilish place. “Rosehaven was soft, gentle, comfortable,” says Walker, who produced that show and Deadloch as well as Kettering. “Deadloch has a very high body count, but it’s steering away from the historical gothic, making more of a comment on the new Tasmania – the blend of the old and new, the co-existence in a lot of places of people with a colonial history alongside the new money, the tree changers, who are saying ‘this is paradise’ and bringing a whole lot of mainland trappings with them.”

Showrunners Kate McLennan (left) and Kate McCartney on the set of Deadloch in Tasmania.Credit: Patrick Bradley/Prime Video

Another huge factor in the emergence of Tasmania from the shadows is that it has simply become a lot more feasible to shoot there.

Tasmanian-born director Shaun Wilson, who is currently working on the evangelical church drama Prosper for Stan in Sydney, started making short films as a teenager. But the idea of making a career of it seemed far-fetched at the time.

“When I started there was not much of a film industry there, not many people could say they worked as film crew for their main job,” he says.

In Wilson’s telling, the local scene got an unlikely jolt in 2009 when Ozploitation master Brian Trenchard-Smith made an apocalyptic climate-change movie called Arctic Blast in Hobart.

“It was a terrible film, but it was a turning point because it employed heaps of people in jobs they didn’t know how to do,” he says. “I got a job as best boy in the electrics department; I was second in charge even though I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. You just had to learn on the job.”

Adoptive Tasmanian Marta Dusseldorp co-created and stars in Bay of Fires.

Through its agency Screen Tasmania, the government was actively trying to develop an industry. But its focus was primarily on Tasmania as an exotic backdrop.

Typically, a feature film will shoot for five to eight weeks, depending on budget. Tasmania had intermittent success in attracting such productions: The Hunter (2011), starring Willem Dafoe, was shot in wilderness areas in 2010; some scenes in Lion (2016) were filmed in Hobart; Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in 2014 while making lighthouse drama The Light Between Oceans (2016), which was shot both in Stanley on the north-west coast and in New Zealand; and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) showed the state’s colonial past in a way that was uncomfortably honest.

But these productions were infrequent and did little to develop a local base of filmmaking talent. “Films would come, shoot, then piss off, and we’d never see them again,” says Wilson.

In fact, there was so little infrastructure that when Tasmanian-born writer-director Jonathan auf der Heide made his based-on-fact colonial-era cannibal drama Van Diemen’s Land (2009), he was forced to shoot most of it in Victoria’s Otways National Park.

“Back then you could find 30 per cent of your crew from Tasmanian locals but you had to import the rest, which is expensive,” he says. (Legend has it that only half a dozen or so of the crew on The Hunter were locals.)

It all began to change when the focus shifted to television productions, which tend to employ people for longer, and offer more opportunities for “attachments” – often funded by the state agencies or Screen Australia – through which people can learn a trade by shadowing someone who is already doing it.

Willem Dafoe in The Hunter.

The first big show was The Kettering Incident (2016), written by Tasmanian Vicki Madden. She had vast experience away from her island home, including on Halifax FP and The Bill, and a determination to create opportunities for locals on the show she had created. There were 13 attachments on Kettering, Shaun Wilson among them.

“There’s no point bringing an entire crew from somewhere else and pushing out the locals,” Madden said in 2016. “It’s important to bring them in, train them up and hopefully get them to stay as well and not go to the mainland.”

Many of the people who worked on Kettering moved onto Rosehaven. And though there have been other shows, including Madden’s own The Gloaming (2020) and the short-form series The Tailings (2021), everyone agrees it was the ABC’s smalltown sitcom – co-developed by and starring Celia Pacquola and local lad Luke McGregor – that did most to wake the mainland up to the viability of Tasmania.

“They had multiple seasons so they trained locals up to higher level positions, because they knew and trusted them from previous shoots,” says auf der Heide. “That means it’s now cheaper to shoot out of Hobart with locals than it is to import a crew and house them remotely.”

At the time he joined the agency in early 2016, says Alex Sangston, executive manager of Screen Tasmania, “the state really wasn’t part of the national conversation for the production sector. Kettering had just shot and Rosehaven series one had been greenlit, but they were seen as outliers, and nobody really believed we could deliver.”

The longevity of Rosehaven changed everything. “It was a complete gift for us, because it gave our crews better and better experience over five years,” he says.

Rosehaven creators and stars Luke McGregor and Celia Pacquola.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Now, shows can be largely crewed with locals, and Sangston is aiming to keep the work flowing, and Tasmania on our screens.

“My ideal level of production is to have cameras rolling on a scripted drama all year round,” he says. “We got very close last year.”

But there are limits. There is no studio in Tasmania, and most of the specialist gear – cameras, cranes, trucks and so on – needs to be imported from the mainland. And, with a state population of just over half a million, there’s an in-built capacity to how much work the locals can handle.

“Honestly,” says Sangston, “after Deadloch and Bay of Fires, they didn’t want to do another show, because they were all just cooked.”

Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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