He’s been responsible for some of the most iconic storylines on our television screens, but Ray Harding’s own life enjoyed a dramatic plot twist this Australia Day.
The Springwood resident was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to the broadcast media, particularly as a script writer and producer for television.
Mr Harding, 70, has worked on some of Australia’s most-loved shows including Home and Away, Neighbours and A Country Practice, both as a writer and story producer.
Most of the 282 episodes of Home and Away he penned were written on the train while commuting between his Springwood home and Sydney.
“I did an awful lot of writing on trains,” he said. “The good thing about being on a train is that you can’t get up and go and make a cup of tea, you can’t get distracted.”
The train commute was also a litmus test to see if his soapie storylines were hitting their mark – if school students on the train were talking about last night’s episode he knew he was on a winner.
Mr Harding was responsible for one of Home and Away’s best-known moments when paralaysed bride Angel Brooks dramatically rose from her wheelchair and staggered down the aisle on her wedding day to Shane Parrish in the mid-1990s.
While Mr Harding had meticulously researched the medical likelihood of the feat, some fans, particularly in the UK, found the moment a little hard to swallow.
“Thank God we didn’t really have the internet then,” he said. “[The reaction] was almost like this is something that will have to be carved on my tombstone, that I plotted that episode!”
Mr Harding got his start as a writer on the short-lived Australian series, Holiday Island, in 1981. One of his plays, The Weekenders, was produced in London’s West End and he won an AWGIE award for a 1986 episode of A Country Practice that dealt with the treatment of Vietnam War veterans. He was also a scriptwriter for the 1990s children’s series, Mirror, Mirror, and acted as a consultant on the ABC drama series, MDA.
After stepping back from full-time television work, Mr Harding lectured in writing and theatre at Charles Sturt University for 13 years.
“All writers to some extent feel they have a responsibility to young people who are trying to do it because it is just so bloody hard. It’s even harder now than when I started out,” he said.
His advice to his students was often not about writing at all. “Go and live”, he would tell them; get life experience by working in a bar in New York or London and it will make you a better writer.
Mr Harding’s own life has borne this out.
He grew up around hotels in New Zealand where his father was a publican – an environment he proudly describes as being “as rough as guts” at times. He saw much of the world after joining the British Army, before moving to Australia in his mid-20s where he met his wife, Carol, and started a family.
The award-winning writer made his first attempt at fiction aged just 11 when he wrote a novel after reading the children’s classic, The Silver Sword, by Ian Serraillier.
“I did my own 11-year-old’s cheap knock-off. It ran to 100 pages,” he said.
