Against The Wind

"Against The Wind" was a 1978 Australian television mini-series. It is an historical drama portraying both the British occupation of Ireland, and the development of New South Wales and Australia. The series was filmed at Old Sydney Town (near Sydney), and at Warrandyte, Colac and Geelong. Jon English won the Logie Award in 1979 for "Best New Talent" for his role in the miniseries as "Jonathan Garrett".

Producers: Bronwyn Binns, Ian Jones and Henry Crawford.
Directors: George T. Miller and Simon Wincer.
Scriptwriters: Bronwyn Binns, Ian Jones, Peter Kinlock, Paul Davies and Cliff Green.


Cast:
Mary Larkin as "Mary Mulvane / Mary Garrett"
Jon English as "Jonathan Garrett"
Kerry McGuire as "Polly McNamara"
Frank Gallacher as "Will Price"
Gerard Kennedy as "Dinny O'Byrne"
Hu Price as "Jonas Pike"
Warwick Sims as "Ensign Greville"
Lynn Rainbow as "Louisa Wiltshire"
Frederick Parslow as "Captain Wiltshire"
Bryan Brown as "Michael Connor"

Support Cast:
Rod Mullinar
Chris Haywood
Sean Scully
Frank Thring
Wallace Eaton
Vincent Ball
John Stanton


Episodes:
01. The Seeds of Fire
02. The Wild Geese
03. A Question of Guilt
04. The Flogging Parson
05. An Agreement Between Officers and Others
06. A House on the Hill
07. The Tree of Liberty
08. When Kings Go Forth to Battle
09. The Farmer's Friend
10. A Matter of Life and Death
11. The Spirit of Enterprise
12. The Whip Hand
13. The Windfall Summer


Technical Info & Acknowledgements:

Thanks to "Knã™" for the original bulk of the episodes. These are the DVDrip versions that are out there and came in at 350MB per episode, not the cruddy YouTube versions that were whittled down to 200MB and had awful movement problems. Even though they were not captured at high screen resolutions, thay are still watchable, and movement is smooth. The trouble with the "Knã™" stuff that's around is that Episode 8 is doubled up and Episode 13 is missing altogether, so after more searching around I found Ep 13 on a Polish movie site (would you believe it), removed the double-up, renamed all the mis-named ep's and included the new one. So, thank you to that site that had it for allowing me to obtain it to complete this collection. I won't mention the site for spam reasons.

Video:
Original DL's were XVID with variable frame sizes @ approximately 727kbps. When remuxed into MKV, then MP4 successively, I kept all of the original characteristics of the video component.

Audio:
Original downloads were MP3 @ 320kbps for the majority. I remastered the soundtracks (compressed for audio, levelled then amplified to -1dB) then re-rendered them at 448kbps AC3 to maintain the quality of the remaster.

As mentioned, I muxed them as MKV (in MKVMerge 'Nouages') at first, with XVID video and AC3 audio. I then remuxed them using MKVtoMP4 as people seem to like MP4 better, and it is more playable on more devices. Final files are MP4 containing XVID video and remastered AC3 audio, variable screen resolutions and weighing about 390 - 460 MB per episode.

All things considered, this is a very good, watchable (and complete) version of this very hard-to-get series. I wish I had access to the original DVD's and take it from scratch, but in the absence of those discs, I'm quite happy to watch this version and remember a great TV series from my childhood.

I thank all of those who seed when they are finished downloading. This is a big set of files and I'm on limited bandwidth, so all help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
MoofieMan.