Nigel Buesst

A film about Darwin, exploring the events that led to the establishment of Australia’s main northern city. Images from the past and present reveal the early struggles to establish a permanent settlement. Culminating in the untold story of the epic voyage of the Forlorn Hope.

A study of the short films made in Carlton during the Sixties, when film makers like Graeme Cutts, Peter Fisher, Geoff Gardner, Antony I. Ginnane contributed to a kind of Australian New Wave to match the revolution in theatre at La Mama. The influence of Jean Luc Godard is very evident.

When singer and clarinetist Gerry Humphrys moved from Britain to Australia in 1957, he quickly became one of the most popular and influential musicians in his adopted homeland. Humphrys' jazz combo, the Red Onion Jazz Band, was widely regarded as Australia's finest trad jazz outfit, and when rock & roll became the dominant sound in pop music in the early 1960s, Humphrys embraced the new style as lead vocalist with the upbeat R&B ensemble the Loved Ones, which won him legions of new fans.

A girl recalls three generations of the family history, how mother was conceived in the year of the Yarra floods and how life in the 1920's was no less a soap opera that it is today. Unique footage of early Melbourne.

The life and times of a legendary Melbourne musician who lived life with the brakes off. Arguably the first notable Australian jazz improvisor, he mastered many instruments - trumpet, trombone, clarinet and piano. But most of all he was and excellent drummer. Throughout the thirties Benny played hot jazz in a multitude of bands, inspired perhaps by hearing the " hot Harlem rhythms" of the Ellington and Armstrong bands in London during a 1933 visit.

Arf Arf is a sound poetry (voice and gesticulation) group. They describe their first film together as 'songs nailed together in a film'. The film is not given over to simply recording a performance of sound poetry but is worked out as a filmic combination of images and sound, each member of the group having individually previously made experimental films.

Compo is a comedy set in a government unemployment-compensation office.

Filmed on location in Melbourne this is a tale of justice and revenge when two cops decide that the court system has failed and it is now up to them to take the law into their own hands. Cast includes Ian Scott, Elizabeth Huntley, Jan Friedl, James Clayden, John Howard, Stephen Cummins, Barry Dickins, Joe Dolce, Nigel Buesst, Neil Gladwin. Music by Chris Knowles, Stephen Cummins, Ollie Olsen. Director of photography, Laurie McInnes.

The only doco to record the early years of Australian jazz. This lovingly compiled celluloid history of the Melbourne jazz scene is a fascinating study of an era and a social milieu, as well as a music documentary. Revisit Melbourne's early years with Benny Featherstone, the Early Conventions, jive with Frank Johnson's fabulous Dixielanders at Collingwood Town Hall, a riverboat trip up the Yarra, Dave Dallwitz, Graeme Bell in Czechoslovakia in 1947.

Ken, a dithering aspirant to the counter culture, returns from an abortive trip to Bali only to find things worse in Melbourne. A tragi-comedy detailing a young man's humiliation and inability to communicate.

Documentary about the First World War hero and later St. Kilda Mayor. Today Albert Jacka is almost forgotten, yet his heroic feats captured the imagination of a generation. In the early decades of the century he personified the archetypal Australian.

Aboriginal boxer Al Dawson is torn by the demands of fight promoters and aboriginal protestors. He eventually decides to reject them all and gives away his chance at a world title.

Kevin leaves a job in insurance to start his own magazine. As his debts mount, Kevin’s prospects begin to look brighter in the criminal world.

Sympathy in Summer tells the story of young student Lenny's (Vincent Griffith's) first affairs of the heart, starting out with a weekend at the beach, but then ending in betrayal and tears.

As the wreckers ball lays waste to a fine set of old building in East Melbourne a visiting professor considers the value of our national identity.

A student of criminology is completing a thesis on Melbourne mass murderers. With the aid of a German professor he visits the scenes of the crimes of Frederick Deeming, Norman List, Arnold Sodeman and Edward Leonski and reconstructs them.

About the life of the notorious 1920s Melbourne Australian gangster Squizzy Taylor including interviews and re-enactments.

In December 1965 there was a jazz convention in Sydney. This attempt to record the event has lain unseen ever since, but the passing of the decades reveals the significance of change.

This 1963 kaleidoscope of our culture, both its energy and its tawdriness, rolls out in a never ending babble from radio station 3UZ, and in particular their top DJ at the time - Don Lunn.