Ross Napier was an Australian radio and TV writer best known for his work on the radio drama, The Castlereagh Line and the TV seriesSkippy the Bush Kangaroo, for which he wrote a large number of episodes and served as a script editor. Napier was one of Australia's leading novelists, radio and TV writers from the 1950s to 1990s He began working for Associated Programs on the half-hour drama series Address Unknown. He lived for a time in London, then returned to Australia in the 1950s and went to work for American-born Australian radio producerGrace Gibson, working on most of her dramas, particularly Portia Faces Life. When television arrived in Australia, Gibson combatted it by making five-minute dramas, and Napier was one of her main writers of these until the 1970s.
Early life
Born in Sydney in 1929, Ross Napier began writing short stories for magazines while still in high school, selling his first script at 17. Shortly after, he became a staff writer for Grace Gibson Radio Productions, and during the 1950s and 1960s his radio serials were broadcast Australia-wide and internationally. This firmly established him as one of Australia's leading drama writers. Whilst at Gibson's Ross met Ann Fuller, then a script typist, and they married in 1953.
Career
Over the course of his career, he spent much of his time in television, notably as script editor of the classic Australian series Skippy, for which he wrote most episodes. Skippy was sold to 128 countries, dubbed into 25 languages and watched by a global audience of over 300 million viewers. Ross was also a script editor and regular writer on the ground-breaking Number 96, and head writer/script editor of The Restless Years, another TV ratings winner. In 1982, he came up with a new format for radio called The Castlereagh Line, which can be best described as Poldark meets Outlander set in Colonial Australia. Originally contracted for 65 episodes, it ran for 910 and was aired by more stations than any Australian serial ever. At a time when radio drama had long been put out to pasture, 2WS saw its potential. The program was so popular that factories downed tools to enable the staff to listen to it. According to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1984 "Devotees are continually ringing the station to find out what will happen in the next three weeks as they have to know, or they can’t go on holiday". The radio serial has been re-run nationally several times over and continues to run to this day. Ross loved the Castlereagh project. He and wife Ann researched all the locations where the story took place, driving around Tamworth and Glen Innes and visiting all the old coaching stations. During the course of ‘The Line's’ initial broadcast from 1982 to 1986, Ross wrote the first three Castlereagh novels: The Castlereagh Line, The Castlereagh Way and The Colours of Castlereagh. The books were sold in all major and most independent bookstores nationally, including Angus & Robertson, Dymocks and Collins, with 'Line' and 'Way' going into reprint due to popular demand. Over the next few years came four more Castlereagh novels: The Castlereagh Heritage, The Castlereagh Rose, The Castlereagh Crown and The Castlereagh Cross. The never-before-published grand finale, The Castlereagh Requiem, was drafted before Ross died in 2004. The manuscript is currently being edited by his daughter, Linzi who has formed Castlereagh Publishing and Productions with good friend Jacqui Law-Smith. They plan to re-release the novels and turn the phenomenally successful radio series into an 8 season television series.
