Critical analyses of Australian adaptations, which celebrate adaptation as a specific creative (and critical) practice, are relatively rare, but ‘literature to screen’ discussions of various sorts have been a common feature of Australian scholarship since the 1980s. Increasingly diverse adaptation choices made by Australian film and television industries since then reflect shifting assumptions about the status of literary texts in relation to screen culture, changing practices and platforms for funding, consumption and marketing, as well as an increased demand for adaptation as a category in its own right. This chapter starts from the premise that studying Australian adaptations teaches us something about narrative journeys, national culture and Australian studies in an era of wider on-demand access to productions old and new through commercial streaming services. The chapter provides a snapshot of select Australian adaptations over the last thirty years, identifying tendencies which raise important questions about the impact of adaptation in relation to the ways contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed. It concludes that studying Australian adaptations in the streaming era affords a nuanced and challenging perspective of changing Australian self-definition, and the multiple cultural and educational uses to which Australian adaptations are put.

The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen confirms the fact that Literature on Screen has finally arrived. Always a “hybrid” subject, literature on screen was too literary for film studies and too film-based for Literary Studies, and has tended to occupy an uneasy place between the two, perhaps tending towards departments of literature in the main. Literary adaptations have been the subject of much academic discourse in both fields (auteur studies, and Shakespeare on Screen texts are two obvious examples), but until the last decade there have been few attempts to evaluate the process of adaptation itself and even then only some of these investigations attempt to theorize the textual transactions that occur in the process - whether in the mind of the adaptor, the critic, or the reader/viewer.

As early as 1936, Renaissance scholar Allardyce Nicoll, in Theatre and Film, considers the potential of film to merit the same status as theatrical texts, while conversely reflecting on how film fails to achieve its potential when it simply copies, or “culls” from literature. Like Nicoll, George Bluestone in 1957, in the first book-length study of adaptation, Novels into Film, alludes to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay The Laocoon (1766), on the differentiations between poetry and painting.

Andrew Davies is, undoubtedly, one of the most successful and prolific writers and adaptors for television and cinema; included in his oeuvre are A Very Peculiar Practice (1986, 1988), Pride and Prejudice (1995), Tipping the Velvet (2002), The Way We Live Now (2001), Bridget Jones's Diary (1996), and Bleak House (2005). Although best known for his work in television and cinema, Andrew Davies is also a writer for both adults and children and has written for the stage and radio. He spoke to Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan twice; over lunch in Birmingham and in a public conversation at De Montfort University, Leicester. Speaking about authorship, fidelity, audiences, casting, and his past and current projects, Davies offers insight into his distinctive “televisual” aesthetic.

When examining popular fiction and its metamorphosis into film it is immediately clear that we are not just concerned with the relationship between an individual book and its cinematic interpretation, but with the history of genre fiction in the two media, and the place it is accorded in literary and film studies respectively. Popular romantic fiction is assigned the position of a “debased” genre and most commonly spoken about in terms of the mass market romance, which nonetheless claims its inspiration from some canonical classics, including Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. In commercial terms it is a lucrative market, but critics regard its content as predictable, ideologically conservative, and undemanding of its reader. With very few nods to historical change, it has a formula which requires little adjustment to maintain its momentum; it has not matured into a literary form with active defenders (such as the fields of science fiction or the crime novel), and even now very few readers are keen to publicize their love of the genre. Romance assumes women are its readers and at the “bottom end” of the market - Mills & Boon or Harlequin - the publishers' market research has allowed them to consistently produce bestsellers, albeit those where the author's name is of little consequence. Critical attention was mainly negative until feminist critics reviewed their initial hostility to the manipulativeness of the form and turned their gaze on the woman as reader. From this perspective, and represented by pathfinding texts such as Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance (1982) and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1987), there evolved some acute insights into the way women use popular cultural forms to negotiate their own life certainties and to endorse choices that can, without much interrogation, be shown to have little to do with the vicissitudes of relationships and romantic love.