‘It is necessary in each situation,’ Jacques Derrida stated in 2007, in one of many instances of writing on writing, ‘to create an appropriate mode of exposition … to take into account the presumed or desired addressee.’ This was the phenomenon I sought while reading Susan Lever’s book on screenwriting for Australian television drama.

The various bookends among which to stack the text’s potential readers – writer, academic, student, and sentimental Australian of a certain age – are the disciplines of creative writing, media, culture, and history, and the purposes of knowledge and entertainment. It is a book for wannabe scriptwriters, television buffs, and Australian-nostalgia tragics. As a tragic myself, among the shows I immediately looked up were Pastures of the Blue Crane (1969), Bellbird (1967–77) and Sea Change (1998–2000).