The novel of 1915 began with two country boys in their teens and told of their quarrels and their friendship during their formative years. This posed a problem. It is almost impossible to cast boys of thirteen and fourteen, who then continue to the age of twenty-one. It is equally difficult to find two sets of actors similar enough to make this transition with any degree of authenticity. We settled on a brief scene when the boys were about ten years old, using two young actors who resembled Scott McGregor and Scott Burgess, who eventually played the roles of Walter Gilchrist and Billy Mackenzie. We then jumped time to 1913, when the boys are twenty years old, and the war is only a year away. Throughout the first two hours of the television series, they are unconcerned with the coming conflict, except as a series of rumours received long after the event. But gradually the whole town becomes aware a war is coming, and Billy and Walter and their friends regard it as an adventure, a chance to escape from their fairly ordinary lives. And their elders, of course, encourage them, full of sentiments like … ‘If l was a young man, I’d be in it like a shot’. Only Mrs Gilchrist, Walter’s mother, dreads what is happening. ‘Suddenly’, she says, ‘they’ve all become experts on places like Serbia and Sarejevo, places we’ve never heard of. But hers is a lone voice. Even the local padre exhorts the youth of the town to go and fight the good fight against the heathen foe.

If the idea of two boys going off to war and ending up at the Dardanelles sounds like the film Gallipoli, nothing could be further from the truth. Roger had written his book while David Williamson and Peter Weir were working on the script of their film, and I was writing the screenplay of 1915 while Gallipoli was in production, but at no stage does either story resemble the other. I saw the film after completing the final version of 1915, concerned in case there were similarities, but they are as different as say, From Here to Eternity and Tora, Tora, Tora, which were both about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

There are always omissions and alterations made in any screen adaptation of a novel, and so it is with 1915. Certain scenes and characters do not easily transpose to the visual medium. Other incidents in the book, dismissed in a line or two, appeal to the screenwriter and are developed. As an example of this, we learn in the novel of 1915, long after the boys are on Gallipoli, that Billy Mackenzie worked for a farmer the year before the war, and found the body of his murdered wife … The farmer bribed Billy to keep quiet about it. This seemed to me a good dramatic sequence, and ideal for the rebellious character of Billy, and so became a major incident in the first episode. Similarly, in the book the period of training and waiting to go overseas was glossed over, whereas I felt it was an important time, containing both the rough humour of the training camp and the rising anxiety of the trainees that the war would be over by Xmas and they would miss out.

This period also involves the love affairs of both boys. Most of the incidents I used were in fact in the novel, but interwoven later on, among their thoughts and memories while they were under fire in the trenches.

We were fortunate with our casting, and with two fine directors, Chris Thompson and Di Drew.

Finally, I would like to thank Roger McDonald for his novel. It is often an uneasy relationship between the novelist and the screenwriter. But from the first day we met, Roger was helpful and understanding of the problems, accepting the necessary changes and my assurance that the spirit, and indeed much of the content of 1915, remained unaltered. It was at a seminar in Canberra, where we discussed the book and its adaptation, in front of about a hundred people, that I broke the news to him of some of the changes. I felt there was safety in numbers. But Roger took it with professional equanimity, and for that, too, I thank him.