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When Michael Kingley, a successful retired businessman, starts to see images from his past that he can't explain, he's forced to remember his childhood and how, as a boy, he rescued and raised an extraordinary orphaned pelican, Mr. Percival.

Mike is a lonely Australian boy living in a coastal wilderness with his reclusive father. In search of friendship he encounters an Aboriginal native loner and the two form a bond in the care of orphaned pelicans.

Back Roads is taking viewers to some of Australia's most interesting and resilient communities. The towns chosen for the programnme are full of colourful characters whose grit and good humour continues to uplift and inspire.

A woman doctor Dr. Kate Munro migrates to Gannet Island off South Australia in 1927. Conflict between traditional religious values and modern scientific medicine ensues as she forms a relationship with two men who are brothers, one a grazer and one a priest. This television mini-series is in the tradition of _"Thorn Birds, The" (1983) (mini)_ and was filmed on Kangaroo Island where December Boys (2007) was shot.

JOHN, his wife EMILY, and their small son EDWARD leave the city for what they believe will be a brief foray to the countryside to claim John's inheritance - a small shack. They find themselves in a strange back-woods rural setting. Nothing is what it seems, and JOHN's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre as he crosses paths with the unusual inhabitants of the area, some of whom he knows from a distant past. As his connections to the area are gradually revealed, we are shown a puzzle and a tapestry of our hero and his life before he moved away. To his wife's horror we witness a man who belongs to a long lineage of disaster and mishap and rural weirdness. As the realization sets in of what has happened, the specter of the next-in-line, his son EDWARD, becomes spookily evident.

The most baffling question facing the early explorers was the destination of the inland rivers of NSW. They seemed to flow into the centre of the continent, perhaps to an inland sea. Bill Peach traces the career of the Captain Charles Sturt who solved this great mystery in an epic whaleboat journey to the mouth of the Murray River and back again.

It is often suggested that outsiders provide the sort of objectivity and rigour lacking in even the most robust self analysis. Professor Andrew Fearne is an expert in food supply chains, marketing and consumer behaviour. He's normally based at the University of Kent in England. However he's just finished a stint as Adelaide's thinker in residence during which time he had a detailed look at just how effectively Australians add value to food and wine.

Neil Oliver takes to the air on an RAAF training mission to seek and destroy submarine invaders and Emma Johnston dives deep into the stunning underwater caverns of the Limestone Coast to understand their formation.

John and Tim undertake the last leg of their adventure, travelling down the lower reaches of the Murray. To make good time they often rise early and power along the glossy waters before the wind gets up.

Heather Ewart visits The Coorong, an area spanning 130kms of South Australian coastline. It's a stunning mosaic of wild ocean beaches, lagoons and wetlands, but in many ways it's become the forgotten end of the Murray River.