Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This is no masterpiece but it is coming from so far away both in space and time that for its time it was a marvelous gem. The episodes are short, just under 30 minutes each. There are two main characters: a major main one, Christopher Cobb, and his main chief driver Dan Ledward. It is supposed to be a real retrospective of that adventure after the 1851 gold rush in Australia. Cobb was a Boston-born Texan (if we can say so) who had experienced the Californian gold rush in 1849. He had to build "roads" that rather were flattened up trails and train people to drive the stagecoaches and then guarantee security against natural odds and bush rangers, the Australian highwaymen of the time. Do not expect great adventure and action. Just nice episodes here and there with bank robberies, ambushes on the road, murders, and all kinds of grotesque people attracted by the gold rush and the wilderness. The adventure came to an end when the telegraph was installed since communication could be in the real time of this invention. But transporting goods and people had still to use stagecoaches, waiting for trains to come still of course.The nicest moments of this series are both the opening and closing credit sequences with song and kangaroos, jumping and leaping everywhere, a few koala bears and some other animals from the area, all more or less dangerous like water snakes, crocodiles or alligators, and sharks. Birds are also funny though they are mostly signals of something happening in the brush. We could of course mention the Aborigines who are shown within a rather narrow cliché though not systematically hostile. But they are only men. No women and no children. I guess the children were already taken away to be educated in white colonial school in the 1950s. They are shown as very black, only dressed with feathers and leaves, though they wear briefs under the feathers, I guess for decency. They are always painted up and they constantly dance and chant with boomerangs and other stone- age weapons. Some are integrated with pants and shirts, and some whites are manipulating them to get some hostility from them to slow down some project or to create some fear in order for them whites to make a profit out of it.The series is wrapped up in a rather fast and funny ending. Christopher Cobb falls in love with a Parisian artist invited by the bandit Quicksilver to paint his house before he gives away his loot and goes back to England as a respectable person to rejoin his son who is educated there. It is obvious Christopher Cobb has new cats to take care of with this Woman who has to go back to France anyway. I guess Christopher Cobb will have to move to Paris too and he could try to install some underground stagecoach system in this city for both local rats and local people (people could be rats and rats people, such things are never very clear in Paris). He could call that transportation system the Métro(politain). I am pretty sure this invention could work, even today: nostalgia always has it strong in the minds of Parisian people and elites.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

FilmFlaneur Whiplash is a little known, largely forgotten ITC television series, a co-production from the 60's. It features Peter Graves – more famous through his later association with the original Mission Impossible – as hero Christopher Cobb. He's an American immigrant in 1840-50's Australia who owns and manages a stage line - a life apparently very loosely based on an actual business which ran between Melbourne and the Victorian goldfields. Each 30 minute episode of Whiplash deals with the travails and tribulations surrounding his endeavour, in which Cobb frequently has to fight for his business and his life.Whiplash was a result of ITC seeking new entertainment fields to conquer after the success of such earlier programmes as William Tell, The Buccaneers and The Aventures of Robin Hood, all of which had fared well in the important American market. No doubt this was allied to encouraging familiarity with successful 50's stateside western shows, such as Wagon Train. Shot as a co production at Australia's Atransa Studios as well as on location, Whiplash tried the interesting step of appealing to the transatlantic audience in particular by setting what, in effect, is a western scenario in the Antipodes. This was not the first time it had been tried, in The Sundowners (1960) for instance, Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr starred as sheep drovers down under, perhaps was another inspiration for the 1961 TV show.Interestingly, the stories making up the 34 episodes of Whiplash steer clear of what would seem an obvious choice of subject: that of Cobb's initial arrival and earliest attempts at making his way in the country. Instead we join the hero with his enterprise already fairly well established. In the first episode for instance, 'Convict Town' we see Cobb first encounter the young friend Dan (Anthony Wickert) who was to make a regular appearance in support on the show. Dan – who wears for the first and only time a distracting hick-style straw hat – after some initial doubts proves himself and is offered regular employment with a company that's already opening roads, and with more than one office and employees.The effect of this 'pre-establishment' of Cobb & Co is to remove the main source of drama away from the birth pangs of a fledgling, civilising business and place it elsewhere, noticeably in the free-ranging Cobb's various encounters which may, or may not prove closely connected with his stagecoach line. But throughout such latitudes Cobb himself is always beyond reproach, remaining a strong and reliable outsider in a small community someone who, although an outsider, has the ability to see things afresh and offer a unique input. Watching Whiplash today one is reminded sometimes of another, highly successful series from just a couple of years before: The Rifleman. This too featured a strong man fighting for his right to settle in and then make his way in a small (western) community, and one who had a trademark weapon at his skillful disposal. But Cobb's whip makes fewer appearances than The Rifleman's famous, modified, firearm and it has to be said that Graves brings to his central role none of the dangerous rectitude so ably demonstrated by The Rifleman's Chuck Connors. In one episode, 'Episode in Bathurst' (aired very early on and one of 4 written by one Gene Roddenberry) Cobb even goes out of way to deny the mystique and allure of firearms. calling them "ugly stupid and vicious".That's Whiplash attempting to have its prairie oyster and eat it, and points up the serial's central creative dilemma. In attempting to be a western and yet on such occasions overtly denying some of the genre's key pleasures, there's a danger of it being neither fish nor fowl. This is a problem exacerbated by the American scriptwriters' treatment of early Australian society, with pace and drama but often no real research behind each episode. Allied to the difficulties in finding suitable stock footage, admitted at the time, and the creators found things awkward. One week revelling in those familiar elements expected out west, or its equivalent, next time the programmes will deny many of those some pleasures, featuring story lines that take matters far away from the traditional American frontier. (A degree of this uncertainty is shown at the start of each show when the episode is put into context for the audience by a few words on screen.) In 'Sarong' for instance, a story line about pearl divers and their exploitation - a show incidentally including some mild titillation which the more morally austere Rifleman might have blanched at or that of 'The Adelaide Arabs'. Aimed squarely at a younger audience, and lacking the irony or sophistication found in other series of the time, Whiplash may have struggled to find its way amidst competing shows with less confusing inspirations, one reason why its run was relatively short.Today, with hardly any westerns airing on TV, and with the pleasant ring of nostalgia surrounding it, Whiplash poses audiences fewer problems. Indeed, its original aspects have much more going for it. Fresh from the now equally overlooked series Fury (1955-1960) Graves makes for a very watchable hero and, if in the event he seems slightly wary of giving his all to dramatic, violent action, ultimately this fits in nicely with the thoughtful character he portrays as Cobb. Other elements have dated less well: noticeably the treatment of the aboriginal peoples, highlighted in the striking episode 'Dutchman's Reef' (another Roddenberry effort) where, playing a missing heir 'gone native', an actor wears blackface.Taken as a group though, the shows make for consistently entertaining viewing and, as an overlooked track of early 60's British television juvenilia certainly worth a look, even if not of the top rank.

loreguy I loved this show, and it turned me on to Australia at a very young age. This was my first exposure to the trademark "Aussie" hat (aka "Akubra") with one side of the brim up, attached to the side of the crown. In Peter Graves' character's case, I believe it was some kind of animal tooth that held it in place.I pestered my mom and dad for YEARS to find me one, and finally we found a rough approximation in an Army surplus store, with a chain that would clip one side of the brim to the side of the crown. I wore it every day, and even after I got older I would wear it on camping trips.I too wish at least one or two episodes had survived. I'm sure it would be terribly dated, but I think it would be fantastic.

stephen_d67 Excellent TV from the 60s, this production was very interesting, it involved many styles from both countries the USA & Australia, it shows how close both cultures have evolved and have actually been one of the same through the past century. USA battled native Indians, Australia almost obliterated the aboriginal peoples, both countries had a gold rush, both countries had cowboys and outlaws, both countries made movies about its upbringing at the same time (Errol Flynn),and this TV show brings the closeness of the Australian culture and American culture as a culture born with many significant cultural ties. Both the USA and Australia have a common goal, that is to make everyone on earth feel they have made a contribution towards life as we know it. The great Peter Graves has added to this common goal, not only did he make Whiplash in 1960 in Australia he also made another Mission Impossible series in Australia in the 1980s.