RAN: Remote Area Nurse

The Gardens of the Torres Strait (1x4)

Air date: Jan 26, 2006

Tensions flare when a white trawler fisherman goes poaching local crays. Solomon, Russ’ second son, is enraged. These white boats with their tide charts and their sonar systems have every advantage over the local fishermen, and still they take and take. A bloody confrontation out on the water strands two white boys in the clinic overnight, alert to the sound of the islanders sharpening their spears outside. Helen is pissed off at being aligned in the eyes of the islanders with the views of some of the people who happen to share her skin colour. Her friend Robbo doesn’t help matters by removing Solomon from the football team for the upcoming carnival after he fails to show up for practice. Helen is angry - it’s not as though it’s easy to blend in here. Robbo withstands her rage, clear and calm. He’s brutally honest. Helen is deluding herself. Try as she might, she’s never going to be one of them. There’s a hint that Robbo might be talking with more personal interest at stake. Through all of this, Lindy, Solomon’s white wife, feels increasingly distant from her husband who is busily mobilising support to get these whities out of their water once and for all. Where does this leave the one at home in his living room she wonders, and the daughter they have together? And Nancy, the chairman’s daughter, medical student and Helen’s sidekick, must also evaluate her future after an encounter with the trawler’s captain. Stranded on a nearby island overnight after the tide rises up around them, with an ocean between them and all of the politics and the social codes of Nancy’s birthplace, they forge a connection… but can it ever transcend the weight of their backgrounds?