Who are you?My name is Erwin. You can read a bit about me
right here.
Were you on the show?No, I'm just a fan.
Is this an official ABC website?No, this is an unofficial fan site. It is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
How do I contact you?You can use the
contact form to send me a message. If you include a working e-mail address, I'll respond to you. There's currently no way to submit materials using the contact form; if you wish to share documents or photos, please contact me first. I'll reply using an e-mail address that you can use to send files.
How come you know so much about the show?Credits for most of the facts you read here, go to
Olivia Wenholz (née Harkin), who played Elly Barton on the show, and
Rosemary Smith, who played Anita McPherson; they've helped a great deal by telling me everything they could remember. Both Olivia and Rosemary kept scrapbooks with pretty much every newspaper and magazine article that was published on The Bartons back when it was in production and aired. Some of those articles are not available online anywhere, and have been an awesome source of information.
Olivia and Rosemary also gave me lots and lots of documents; ranging from character descriptions to letters sent to parents and schools, from taping schedules to taxi schedules, from the invitation letter for the auditions to the invitation letter for the going away party. You name it. it's there. There's even a scan of one of the pay out cheques (…!).
I also owe a lot to Jocelyn Moorhouse, not just because she created the show, but she also gave me some pretty valuable insights in the interview I did with her. She recommended I'd also read her memoirs (
Unconditional Love13); which I of course did. A lot of what happens in The Bartons, is based on her own (and her husband PJ Hogan's) childhood, and reading the first chapters of Unconditional Love you'll recognise a lot of that. It's a lovely book and I really recommend reading it.
In addition to that, I did my own research. Compared to everything I've received from cast and crew, that seems almost trivial.
Do you know anyone who worked on the show personally?I didn't when I started working on this site, but I've become friends with some since. Due to the distance I've never met any of them in person though.
Can you give me [favourite cast member's] e-mail address or phone number?
No, that would not be an appropriate thing for me to do. The people involved have given me their contact information in the confidence that I won't share it with anyone. They do have private lives and families and many of them are no longer in the lime light. If you leave a comment on one of the pages on
Bartonsontheweb.nl they might read it though.
Will there be full episodes to watch on this site?Sadly, no. I did reach out to the ABC for a licence, but they've explained that the contracts with everyone involved restrict them in the ways they can release the programme to the public. Everyone involved would have to be renumerated for online streaming to be included in those contracts. Not to mention the costs involved with that, they told me the licence itself would be rather expensive. This made me decide not to pursue this any further.
Where can I watch full episodes instead?At the moment, you can't. All we can hope for, is some sort of 80's revival happening which makes ABC either repeat the show (they still have that right) or maybe, just maybe, release it on DVD or Blu-ray like they did with other shows of the era. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it though.
Have you seen the film/How can I see the film?
I have seen the film, after searching for a way to do so for years. It's difficult to go see it if you don't live in Australia (and even then, really only if you live close enough to Melbourne). Read more about how to see the film
here.
Read more about the film in general
here.
Why aren't there more pics on the site/where have all the pics and clips gone?Thanks to Olivia and Rosemary, I have access to a large amount of photos related to The Bartons, both official (made by the ABC) and unofficial Polaroids taken "backstage" by parents, crew members or cast members. At the request of the ABC, the site only has the Polaroids on them, as well as a few images published under the Creative Commons licence. This is nothing to scoff at, as the Polaroids are a brilliant and fun way to look at the show and its production. And there's plenty of them too!
What do the official photographs look like?During the production of the show, ABC held photoshoots with much of the cast. There's a couple of family portraits with all the Barton family members on them, various pics of Olivia (or Elly, I guess) posing in a tree alone or with her brothers or father, portraits taken on set of Ben Toovey, Frank Webb, Rosemary Smith and Jennifer-Jarman Walker. There's also a pic of Elly and Anita at the beach, various billycart related images and of course the one photograph you actually witnessed being taken: the group photo at the bird feeder in
The Bartons League of Bird Lovers. Elly, mum and dad and Anita also all have individual portraits. For a full list of the photos (and other things) in my
Bartons collection, please take a look
here.
What's your quibble with Emmerdale?Nothing really! To be honest, I've never seen it…
Emmerdale comes up when you Google "the Bartons" or "Bartons television series" instead of
C/o The Bartons, so I thought I'd make it clear this site is not about
Emmerdale. (note: this question refers to a tongue-in-cheek "anti-Emmerdale rant" on the place holder site before BOTW fully launched).