A former Inverell boy has written one of the most anticipated TV dramas in years, Blue Murder – Killer Cop, a sequel to the landmark 1995 series. The two-part drama, written by Inverell High School graduate, class of 1959, Peter Schreck, picks up the events in the life of notorious former policeman Roger Rogerson, and stars Richard Roxburgh.
“Even before high school, even as a primary school student in Warialda, I wanted to become a professional writer. But it seemed an impossible dream,” he said. Mr Schreck now lives at Balmoral Beach, in Sydney’s Mosman area, with somewhere between one and two hundred hours of produced film and television writing credits to his name. He’s lost count.
“But it all started in Inverell,” Mr Schreck said. “Just last night I heard a young woman use the phrase, ‘You have to see it to be it’. She was talking about the effect on her, and on her aspirations, of seeing Julia Gillard become Australia’s first female Prime Minister.”
“For me,” Mr Schreck said, “it was an old guy, a civil engineer, who came to town to supervise the construction of the Inverell Baths. I was doing my final year of high school, dreaming of becoming a writer and assuming it would be impossible.
“I was boarding with a pensioner lady named Mrs Jenkins. I’m not sure where, exactly, but probably down in Henderson St.”
“Anyway, this old guy came to stay with Mrs Jenkins. I wish I could remember his name, given the effect he had on my life. He was an engineer, but his real passion was writing short stories for fishing magazines.
“I watched him write them, I read them, I saw them published. As that young woman said last night, I had seen it – and now I knew I could be it.”
After graduating from high school, aged 17, Schreck hitched a ride to Sydney, lived in a converted garage, and got a job in advertising so he would be paid while learning to write.
He switched to full time freelance screenwriting in his late twenties and since then he has won five Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE awards, including the Gold AWGIE for the best screenplay in any category, and an Australian Film Institute AFI award. His writing credits stretch all the way back to Homicide.
He wrote the feature films We of the Never Never and Coolangatta Gold, he jointly produced and story-produced the series Young Lions, he wrote the bible for and co-created the television series Man From Snowy River and wrote episode one.
He wrote episodes one and two of the series Police Rescue, and he co-developed and wrote episodes one and two of Wildside, which won an AFI award for best mini-series.
Mr Schreck is currently writing a feature film set in Afghanistan for Tristram Miall, who produced Strictly Ballroom.
His most recent work is Blue Murder – Killer Cop, based on the life of NSW police detective Roger Rogerson, a poster boy of good policing who came to notoriety after alleged crimes. Convicted of the murder of Sydney student Jamie Gao during an alleged drug deal, Rogerson has always protested his innocence.
Q and A:
You wrote Blue Murder. If your upbringing in Inverell were a colour, what colour would it be and why?
Tough question, and I probably can’t answer it – unless sunshine has a colour. Maybe yellow. Whatever the colour, they were happy times. Formative years.
What was it like for you growing up in Inverell and how did it affect your writing?
I did a lot of my growing up on a farm out near Graman – that was the part that had the biggest effect on my writing. I talked about this one time with another writer, Bob Ellis, who pointed out that a lot of the successful writers we knew had country backgrounds. It makes sense. If you spend ten or twelve hours a day as a kid, going around and around a ploughed paddock on a tractor, you either develop a rich inner life or you go crazy with boredom. Those hours were money in the bank for me. I’m probably still drawing on them.
Is there something that audiences in Inverell would particularly appreciate in Blue Murder?
I hope not just in Inverell. Everything I write, I try to find the humanity in it – the human condition that applies to everyone, everywhere - even if I’m writing about a convicted murderer like Roger Rogerson, a man who killed at least three people, with rumours of others. When Mike Jenkins, the Director, first approached me to do this project, there was talk about Rogerson being a psychopath. I rejected that at the outset. I mean, maybe he is a psychopath – but for dramatic purposes, that’s boring. It doesn’t tell me, or the audience, anything at all about the universal human condition. There was a Roman writer twenty six hundred years ago, a slave, called Terence, who said, “Nothing human is alien to me”. That has to be true for every writer, and so I had to find some Roger in me, and I had to find the humanity in Roger. I hope I did – but the audience will decide if I was successful.
What are the difficulties when writing a sequel to such a successful miniseries, one of the best shows in Australian TV history?
It was scary. You’re right, the original Blue Murder still stands as a benchmark in Australian television, and it’s a high bar. Mike Jenkins directed that as well, and we’ve worked together a lot over the years, including on Wildside, and that used some of the same techniques. But the original Blue Murder relied on very high energy, hand-held violence, compressed into just a couple of years – the energy of a young, corrupt detective. In this mini-series we’re spanning over thirty years and Rogerson becomes an old man. He still has that same lethality to him – one journalist I spoke to told me that when he first interviewed him thirty five years ago, Roger pinned him with his eyes and the hairs on the back of the journo’s neck still stand up a bit when he thinks about it. So Roger has the lethality, but Mike and I decided it would be silly to try to copy the exact energy of the first Blue Murder when we’re dealing with a thirty year timespan and an older man. We’re relying on a different ‘glue’, and for me that glue is the humanity of striving, the nobility of endurance and defiance. Sounds crazy, talking about nobility when I’m writing about a multiple killer. But he’s also human.