Queanbeyan born and raised writer Tommy Murphy is celebrating a significant career achievement - a television series he created is debuting on ABC TV on Sunday night.
The six-part series Significant Others is a mystery about grief and family dynamics that looks dark and brooding, but is actually full of humour and true-to-life characters, with an ultimate life-affirming message.
Murphy, 42, who was educated at St Edmund's College in Canberra, is thrilled to see his project finally come to fruition.
"I've been an episode writer, collaborating in writers' rooms, most recently with The Twelve that was on Foxtel. This one is the first one where I am the head writer or showrunner so this is an idea I conceived and I was able to assemble a team of writers," he said.
"I was really lucky that quite a lot of my mentors ended up on that team. Wonderful writers like Sue Smith who wrote Brides of Christ and Louise Fox who wrote Glitch and also Broachchurch in the UK and Blake Ayshford, who was most recently on Mystery Road."
The series starts with a woman's disappearance in the sea and then subsequently brings together estranged family members as they try to find out what happened to their mother and sister.
Murphy said giving his voice to the work and having one director - Tony Krawitz - on every episode, led to a unique creative experience for him.
"It was an opportunity to create really distinctive characters, and to have a distinct tone and voice of the show all the way through," he said.
"That's something the ABC really encouraged, for it to be bold and unconventional."
Murphy said it was "really exciting" for the series to debut on the small screen, not least after some filming challenges.
"We shot this series in record rain in Malabar in Sydney. It's never rained more in Sydney ever," he said.
"It ended up looking beautiful on screen. This story starts with a vanishing in the ocean and then we have these ferocious seas all the way through it. So, you always make good on the opportunities you're given. That made a more cinematic show, but it also made everyone work very, very hard."
Murphy was motivated to write the series after the loss of his sister Bridget who died from breast cancer six years ago and then, 11 months later, the shock death of his partner of two decades, Dane Crawford, who died, without warning, from a sleeping disorder.
"I really had the ambition to write the story about grief and how our lives are reconfigured after a catastrophe. And I had the ambition to write that with as much personal insight as possible," he said.
"And my experience of grief, having lost several members of my large family recently, including my partner, was that grief motivates you. I have seen grieving characters previously portrayed as being stuck in heavy emotion.
"And, actually, grief unlocks a desire to live life to the fullest. So that's how the lives of the characters in Significant Others are reconfigured. They are made to reassess, reconfigure their relationships with each other."
Then, during the making of Significant Others, Murphy's nephew Jyle Molloy Murphy was killed by a hit and run driver near the Canberra airport on Pialligo Avenue. He said the family were still "waiting for answers" on his death, with no one yet charged with his death.
"That was confronting, for so many reasons, to lose a 27-year-old nephew, on the brink of many great things," Murphy said.
"I also saw my community in Queanbeyan come together with such incredible and support for my brother and all of Jyle's family.
"I don't think I've ever seen the Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery more packed than on the day of his funeral. Full of his young friends. Utes. And people coming from their work to be there to celebrate Jyle.
"It did strike me that I went back to production on a story that is, uncomfortably, about a family demanding answers from the police and some things that aligned with that story and were quite a coincidence."
Murphy is the seventh of eight children in a big Catholic family.
"When you're from a large, loving family, you know you're going to experience loss, it's just there in the numbers," he said.
"But I've also seen in my family and in my community, the resilience and the way that community holds people who are grieving. I know that my brother and all of Jyle's immediate family are experiencing that right now. I experienced it before. It happens in a really beautiful way in a place like Queanbeyan."
Murphy says Significant Others is "about romance and sex and desire and, also, about family".
And there is a lot of humour in the series. Murphy's dialogue is cutting and on-point; real and never affected.
"Significant Others really wants to make you laugh, because that's true to life," he said.
"It wants to defy genre. It's not just a mystery, it's an intriguing story. But, really, it's about the scramble of these characters and it really is life-affirming.
"I think that's the perspective I wanted to bring to this story - an encounter with death, surprisingly, makes you re-embrace life."
Now living in Sydney, Murphy said he was definitely embracing life.
"Life is going great. I'm busy. Engaged with a lot of projects. And feeling fabulous about all of that," he said.
"I don't like the run of luck that I've had, but I'm certainly taking heed of it."
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Significant Others starts on Sunday 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview
