ABC’s Back Roads reveals Fish Creek

FISH Creek welcomed ABC television’s highly acclaimed program Back Roads last week.
Presenter Heather Ewart made her traditional entrance into town with her brown leather bag, this time atop an old jinker cart belonging to Fiona Mottram and local penny farthing rider Ross West.
The Fish Creek and surrounding areas are slated for a mid-2019 program airing and the program will include Alison Lester’s Gallery and Bookshop, Roland Harvey’s Fishy Gallery, Andrew McPherson’s Ride the Wild Goat Gallery, Bill and Lorraine Gurnett’s Gurneys Cidery of Foster, Dan and Amelia Bright’s Amber Creek Farm and Sawmill, Tim and Janet McRae’s Tullaree Homestead with the infamous, unsolved mystery disappearance of Margaret Clement – ‘the Lady of the Swamp’ – and a profile on the Fish Creek Tea Cosy Festival with Fish Creek Kindergarten students.
To celebrate Alison Lester’s most popular book, Magic Beach, the Back Roads crew filmed on location at Walkerville Beach last Wednesday. They filmed Roland Harvey’s Fishy Gallery and Andrew McPherson’s gallery Ride the Wild Goat last Tuesday and filmed kindergarten students at the tea cosy display last Monday week.
“Fish Creek is a whimsical and story book town. I love profiling towns like this with a strong artistic and creative emphasis on offer,” Ms Ewart said.
“Time and time again, themes of ‘we are the strongest community’ surface wherever we go. Each township portrays itself in a similar vein and they all have a red hot go with an incredible level of resilience.
“Outback towns previously steeped in traditions seem on the rise nowadays. For example, (the small rural NSW town) Nyngan reinstated sheep counting and they even erected a Big Bogan to celebrate its Bogan River. (The central-west rural Queensland town of) Windorah, with a mighty six student school, brought back their much loved yabby races.
“If I had to pick a favourite story we covered, it would be the Queensland mobile hairdressers we covered along the Oodnadatta Track. Themes of belonging and isolation all hit a nerve in areas without what most people would take for granted: the humble hair salon.”
She never tires of the persistent themes uncovered whilst on assignment throughout rural Australia. Her early days shaped her future reportage role, growing up on a sheep and wheat farm near Benalla and attending boarding school near Murchison.
She covered politics for the 7:30 Report and later made a documentary covering the Nationals Party. It was from this that ideas sprouted and lead to the creation of Back Roads due to the popularity of her documentaries.
Back Roads enters its fourth season and is an ABC ratings hit. It attracts about 1.5 million viewers per episode and boosts the local economy of local towns immediately following on-air coverage by about 30 percent, according to Ms Ewart.

Roland Harvey profiled: ABC’s Back Roads presenter and reporter Heather Ewart visited Roland Harvey’s Fishy Gallery at Fish Creek last Tuesday, November 20.

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Posted by Tayla Kershaw on Nov 27 2018. Filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry