Into the Never-Never

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 660, 29 February 1952, Page 16

Into the Never-Never

HE ‘closing episode of the ZB serial Hagen’s Circus-which has _ continued now for three and a-half years and approximately five hundred per-formances-is drastic in its finality. For when the big-top comes down for the last time it does so in a raging fire that destroys everything John MHagen has built up so carefully during his long career as a showman. But tragedy is averted in time and the only unhappy people involved will be those listeners who have grown used to sharing the episodic excitement of circus life with the Hagen family. For even fictional characters must fold up their tents (or have them folded) eventually, and so, come Wednesday, March 5, the sawdust ring of Hagen’s circus will give way to the spacious North Australia setting of Hart of the Territory. This Australian serial features the Northern Territory in a_ present-day role. Robert, the first of the Hart family to enter the picture, is the founder of the prosperous cattle station "Chanticleer," but his prominence in the drama is short-lived and his heir, Gil, takes over the lead role. An artist by vocation, Gil prefers city life to the rigours of the Northern Territory, and his girlfriend Felicity Wynne reveals every intention, backed by strange methods, of

keeping him in the city without losing the valuable property his father has willed him. Clauses of the will requiring Gil to live on the ranch and actively manage it for five years cue the entrance of a shady lawyer and his accomplices. These latter introduce the representative of the Northern Territory Mounted Police, and the cast is more or less completed with the entrance of Lesley Winters, the young lady appointed manager of "Chanticleer" by the first Hart. Thus one Australian drama is replaced by another, and John Hagen and his performers bow out to Gil Hart and his friends and enemies. But in actuality the distance between the sawdust ring and the wild backblocks of the Northern Territory is not so great at all, being traversed by the imagination of a receptive audience as quickly as the voice can describe the change. And those who have accustomed themselves to the emotional climate of the Big Top may even discover that the acclimatisation serves them just as well in the Never-Never. Hart of the Territory will be heard on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings at 8.0 o’clock, beginning at the ZB stations on Wednesday, March 5, and at 2ZA on Thursday, March 13.