http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/

Making the 'Floating Brothel'

By Mark Lewis

The feisty tale of the first all-female convict ship to be sent to Australia required the recreation of scenes from Georgian London to volcanic Tenerife. Timewatch writer-director Mark Lewis explains how it was done.

A reconstruction of Georgian London from 'Timewatch: The Floating Brothel'

The story

I picked up Siân Rees' book about five years ago in the Hyde Park Barracks Museum shop, in Sydney. A day later I had read it cover to cover. It read like a novel - a great bawdy romp with a gripping narrative and characters that leapt off the page.

'...it's rare to find a story that ticks all the boxes, a tale that has all the ingredients of a rip-roaring yarn and has something intelligent to say about a nation's history'

I have been making docu-dramas for some years now and it's rare to find a story that ticks all the boxes, a tale that has all the ingredients of a rip-roaring yarn and has something intelligent to say about a nation's history. I knew it would make a wonderful film.

The problem was how to make it relevant to a modern audience. Australians used to shun their convict past, but today many embrace it. That seemed to me to be the key. There is a thirst there not just for cultural identity but also for a more deep-seated understanding of one's own roots and what it can tell us about ourselves.

The ancestors

A reconstruction of Georgian London from 'Timewatch: The Floating Brothel'

Finding the descendants of the feisty women of The Lady Juliana, I was pretty sure would give us a modern day connection to the story, as well as a reason to unearth it. And, if we were lucky, we might get a glimpse of the old family spirit. We weren't disappointed.

'They truly felt a connection that we as filmmakers never expected and could locate traits of their ancestors in the women of their families today...'

The three descendants we found, Meagen Benson, Helen Phillips and Delia Dray, displayed an extraordinary empathy with their forebears of two centuries ago. They truly felt a connection that we as filmmakers never expected and could locate traits of their ancestors in the women of their families today - resourcefulness, tenacity and the need to soldier on whatever the crisis are characteristics that run as high in the present as they did in the past.

Filming

A reconstruction of Newgate Prison from 'Timewatch: The Floating Brothel'

The next challenge was to pull off the drama part of the film. This was not a feature-film budget, so we would never be able to fly our actors all over the world. We always knew we would have to 'recreate' not just the Sydney Cove of 1788, but Georgian London street scenes, the Thames Estuary, the orlop deck of the ship, Newgate Prison and even Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

The women of The Lady Juliana went on an incredible journey that hauled them out of the horrors of Newgate to a liberation of sorts in Australia. We had to pull every trick out of the hat to create a variety of different worlds for our characters.

'We had to pull every trick out of the hat to create a variety of different worlds for our characters.'

We scouted for the very best locations we could find - Old Sydney Town, near Gosford, an hour from Sydney, Manly Dam (a reservoir a few miles from the city centre) and the harbour itself for Sydney Cove. You would think that filming Georgian London would be the difficult one, but Melbourne has loads of Gothic arches and old stonework, so we had our location there.

CGI

Dramatic reconstruction of life on board the 'Floating Brothel'

We pumped a lot of resources into art direction and used old Hogarth illustrations and 18th century paintings to provide authenticity. We then invested heavily in different processing techniques to make those locations look and feel as different as possible.

Finally, with a judicious use of CGI (computer generated imagery), we were able to give the locations a sense of scale, whether it was placing St Paul's Cathedral into the back of our Melbourne location to create old London, or dropping the volcanic mountains of Tenerife into seascapes we shot in Sydney Harbour.

'We invested heavily in different processing techniques to make those locations look and feel as different as possible.'

It is testimony to the fact that bringing the right people and the right skills together in a film - camerawork, art department, location scouting, historical research and CGI - you can recreate compelling history in a documentary.

Find out more

Books

Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia by Joy Damousi (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

The Second Fleet: Britain's grim convict armada of 1790 by Michael Flynn (Library of Australian History, 1993)

The First Fleet: The Convict Voyage That Founded Australia 1787-88 by Jonathan King (Macmillan, 1982)

The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner by John Nicol (Canongate Books Ltd, 2000)

The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an 18th-century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts by Siân Rees (Headline Review, 2002)

Damned Whores and God's Police by Anne Summers (Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1994)

Journal of a voyage to New South Wales by John White (Angus & Robertson, 1962)

Links

PBS: Interview with Siân Rees [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_courtesans/interview.html]

PBS: Voyage of the Courtesans [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_courtesans/index.html]

Making the 'Floating Brothel'

The story

The ancestors

Filming

CGI

Find out more

Links

Related Links

Articles

Multimedia Zone

BBC Links

External Web Links