For the 2008 Australian TV series see Rush (2008 TV series)

Rush (2008 TV series)

-DVD releases:-Achievements:-International distribution:-External links:...

.

Rush was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 series produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...

 between 1974 and 1976. The first 13 episodes were produced in 1974 and filmed in black and white. In 1976, 13 more episodes were produced, in colour, in conjunction with French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 production company Antenne 2. Each series featured a different cast with the exception of John Waters

John Waters (actor)

John Russell Waters is a film, theatre and television actor and musician best known in Australia, to where he moved in 1968...

.

Story and characters

Rush was a historical drama set during the Victoria

Victoria (Australia)

Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

n Gold Rush

Gold rush

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States, while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.In the 19th and early...

 during the 1850s. The first series was set at Crocker's Creek and filmed in Melbourne. The main cast the first year featured Waters, Olivia Hamnett

Olivia Hamnett

Olivia Hamnett was a Manchester-born actress who found success after emigrating to Australia in the early 1970s. In the UK Hamnett had guest roles in such television programs as Department S and Randall and Hopkirk in 1969.She continued to act after moving to Australia, appearing in films and in...

, Brendon Lunney, Alwyn Kurts

Alwyn Kurts

Alwyn Kurts, also known as Alwyn Kurtis, was an Australian drama and comedy actor.Kurts originally worked as a war correspondent, before moving onto radio with his program "Raising a Husband" on radio station 3XY....

, Peter Flett, Max Meldrum. In 1976 the action was relocated to Turon Springs and shot in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

 utilising sets left over from a previous historical drama about Ben Hall. Waters, Jane Harders, Delore Whitman, Alain Doutey and Vincent Ball

Vincent Ball

Vincent Ball is an Australian actor who has worked both in Australia and in the United Kingdom....

 were the stars. Hugh Keays-Byrne

Hugh Keays-Byrne

Hugh Keays-Byrne is an English character actor who moved to Australia in 1973. He is well-known in Australia as a television and film actor...

 won a Logie Award

Logie Award

The TV Week Logie Awards are the Australian television industry awards, which have been presented annually since 1959. Renamed by Graham Kennedy in 1960 after he won the first 'Star Of The Year' award, the name 'Logie' awards honours John Logie Baird, a Scotsman who invented the television as a...

 for his performance in one episode of the second series.

The bulk of the scripts for the series were written by Colin Free and Ted Roberts

Ted Roberts

Ted Roberts is an Australian television screenwriter and supervising producer.After completing his education at Marist Brothers College in Randwick, Roberts worked in advertising and sales promotion before commencing his career as a freelance writer for television and filmTed Roberts began his...

.

Theme music and commercial releases

The theme to the series was released as a hit single in Australia by Brian May and the ABC Showband (b/w The Theme from Seven Little Australians

Seven Little Australians

Seven Little Australians is a classic Australian children's novel by Ethel Turner. Set mainly in Sydney in the 1880s, it relates the adventures of the seven mischievous Woolcot children, their stern army father Captain Woolcot and flighty stepmother Esther.In 1994 the novel was the only book by an...

) on the Image record label in 1974. The single made number 5 in the Australian national singles chart

Kent Music Report

The Kent Music Report was a weekly record chart of Australian music singles and albums which was compiled by music enthusiast David Kent from May 1974 through to 1998...

 in December 1974.

The original television series has not been commercially released, because the talent was contracted for broadcast rights only.

Later parody

In the early 1990s the ABC comedy program The Late Show

The Late Show (Australian TV series)

The Late Show was a popular Australian comedy show, which ran for two seasons on ABC from 18 July 1992 to 30 October 1993.-Cast:The Late Show has its roots in the 1980s comedy group, The D-Generation...

featured a parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

-overdub of Rush entitled The Olden Days. The collected segments were later released on VHS

VHS

The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

 tape. In 2007, they (along with Bargearse, based on Bluey, a similarly overdubbed TV show from the 1970s) were released on DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

. On the commentary track Santo Cilauro

Santo Cilauro

Santo Cilauro is an Australian television and feature film producer, screenwriter, actor, author, comedian and cameraman, a co-founder of The D-Generation...

revealed they discovered a missing episode, mislabelled in a film can.

External links

• TV Eye - Classic Australian Television
• Rush at the National Film and Sound Archive (documentation and soundtrack only)
• Collection of 1970s newspaper clippings about "Rush" on a John Waters fan site.