Blue Hills, written by Gwen Meredith, was an Australian radio serial about the lives of families in a typical Australian country town called Tanimbla. "Blue Hills" itself was the residence of the town’s doctor.
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The photo above was set to promote the serial.
Blue Hills was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission for 27 years, from 28 February 1949 to 30 September 1976. It ran for a total of 5,795 episodes, and was at one time the world's longest-running radio serial. Each episode lasted 15 minutes.
The famous opening signature tune was taken from a short orchestral piece called Pastorale by the British composer Ronald Hanmer. Until Hanmer moved to Australia in 1975, he had no idea that his work had been used by the ABC and had become so famous in Australia (although few Australians could have identified its composer). He later re-worked this short piece into a longer orchestral work titled Blue Hills Rhapsody, which he recorded with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
Its listeners so identified with the characters on the show that ABC had to hire more staff to deal with fan mail sent to the show's fictional characters.
Peter Wilkinson poured thousands of cups of tea as the sound effects man on Australia's longest running radio serial Blue Hills.
Peter Wilkinson spent 17 years providing live sound effects for Blue Hills.
Every time someone had a "cuppa" (and they had plenty on the show), opened a door, answered a phone or caught a train it was Peter's sound effects wizardry that generated the sound, live on stage, not the prerecorded post production "SFX" of the digital era but real hand made sounds.
People sent in birthday cards, get
well soon cards, baby clothes and even ration stamps for characters who were struggling, Ingrid says.
Blue Hills kicked off in February 1949 and ran for almost 30 years until its creator, Gwen Meredith, stopped writing because she'd 'simply had enough'.
Gwen Meredith was born in
Orange, New South Wales to George and Florence Meredith, and was their only
child. She was educated in
Sydney, first at
Sydney Girls High School then the University of
Sydney from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929. Her father believed that, with the Depression, there were too many people needing jobs and that she should stay at
home. She therefore managed the housekeeping and, from 1932 to 1939, owned and operated a bookshop.
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She married
Sydney engineer, Ainsworth Harrison, on 24 December 1938. He proved to be "a devoted and supportive husband" and travelled around Australia with her as she researched her serials.
She retired in 1976 when the last episode of her most famous serial, Blue Hills, went to air, and she and her husband moved to the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where she took up watercolour painting. Her other interests were gardening, bushwalking and flyfishing. She died at her
home at Bowral on 3 October 2006, aged 98.
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