Tim Burstall (20 April 1927, Stockton-on-Tees, UK – 19 April 2004, Melbourne) was an Australian film director, writer and producer, best known for the motion picture Alvin Purple.
Burstall was a key figure in Australian postwar cinema and was instrumental in rebuilding the Australian film industry at a time when it had been effectively dead for years. He created groundbreaking Australian films including Stork, Alvin Purple, End Play, Eliza Fraser, The Last of the Knucklemen and the 1986 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo.
Burstall also launched the film careers of many well-known actors including Bruce Spence, Jacki Weaver, Graeme Blundell, Jack Thompson, John Waters and Judy Davis. His wife Betty, an important figure in her own right, founded the pioneering La Mama Theatre in Melbourne in the late '60s. Many leading Australian 'new wave' playwrights including David Williamson had their first successes there, and Burstall was an integral part of the fertile creative scene that centred on the theatre.
Eliza Fraser was a Scottish woman whose ship was shipwrecked on the coast of Queensland, Australia, on 22 May 1836, and who was captured by Aborigines. Fraser Island is named after her.
She was the wife of Captain Fraser, captain of the Stirling Castle. There were 18 people aboard the ship and a cargo mainly of spirits, which may have been involved in the accident. They struck a reef hundreds of kilometres north of Fraser Island. They then launched a boat and landed at Waddy Point on Fraser Island. It was here that she was captured by Aborigines; her husband either died from starvation or was killed by an Aborigine because he was unable to carry wood. They were stripped of their clothing.
She was found by John Graham, an escaped convict who had lived for six years with the Aborigines, and is said to have gone naked to get the confidence of the Aborigines. Eliza later married another sea captain (Captain Greene) and returned to England. Controversy followed when she requested from the Lord Mayor of London funds for herself and her children as she was left penniless after her husband had died, not mentioning her marriage to Captain Greene or the £400 received in Sydney by a fund set up to help her. A sensationalised account of the incident was sold in London.
Dorian Leon Marlois Le Gallienne (19 April 1915 – 27 July 1963) was an Australian composer, teacher and music critic.
Dorian Le Gallienne was born in Melbourne in 1915. His father, an actor, was born in France, and his mother, a pianist who had studied with G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, was the daughter of the Assistant Astronomer at the Melbourne Observatory. His parents separated in 1924, and his father lived in England thereafter. He attended Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. He was diagnosed with diabetes at age 16. After leaving school, he studied with A. E. H. Nickson at the Melbourne Conservatorium and with Arthur Benjamin and Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music in London in 1938. In 1939, he travelled in Europe with Richard Downing, a future Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), and with whom he later lived in Melbourne in a mud-brick house at Eltham.
He returned to Australia, where he worked for the Commonwealth Department of Information in the overseas broadcasting service, later joining the ABC. He was employed as music critic for The Argus and The Age, both Melbourne newspapers, from 1950 until his death. In an article called "Why Preference for 'Celebrities'?", he criticised the ABC for its lack of support for local music and musicians in its "Celebrity" subscription concerts. From 1951 to 1953 he undertook further study with Gordon Jacob in England. He taught harmony at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium between 1954 and 1960.