The making of the mini-series kicked off when he enlisted the help of fellow AFTRS graduate Marcus Cole. Writer Ken Kelso, a West Australian himself, optioned the screen rights when it was still a virtually unknown ‘memoir’. Marcus Cole, who directed parts two and three, remembers that Copping ‘was wonderful and never faltered, never disappointed me and always gave more than he promised’.įacey’s autobiography was published in 1981 (nine months before his death). Henri Safran, director of parts one and four, remarked that in three weeks of shooting on the Cave Rock set (see clip one) he never once had to put the camera down in the same place, a tribute to the visual possibilities created by the design team.

With his skilled and hardworking team he re-created gold diggings, country towns, frontier farms, steam railways, drovers’ camps, even the battlefields of Gallipoli, not to mention interiors of everything from a cottage to a fairground bare-knuckle prize-fighting venue. In many ways the star of the show is its production designer, the late David Copping. It’s a broad canvas, one on which close attention has been paid to detail. The years between Bertie’s arrival in 1899 and his marriage in 1916 saw the arrival of independent state government the expansion of the Kalgoorlie goldfields, still considered to contain the richest square mile in the world the opening up of the fertile south-west corner of the state to settler farmers the building of the railway between Perth via Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta in South Australia, thereby connecting Australia’s newest and most isolated state capital with the rest of the continent the difficult birth of the union movement in a part of Australia that still celebrates eccentric individualists and the advent of the First World War, during which the enduring mythology of the Anzac was formed. On another level the mini-series is a pictorial history of a period of great economic, social and industrial change in Western Australia. The first is in telling the deeply personal story of a life lived with quiet, almost self-effacing courage. To put it in perspective, this series of eight commercial hours is the equivalent in length of four feature films and in production terms at least as challenging. The mini-series of A Fortunate Life was more than two years in the making, with much time and care having been spent on the adaptation of book to screenplay, and in pre-production on getting the historical detail, locations and scheduling right.

A fortunate life by ab facey