Hilda (Nellie Lamport) serves tea to Dr and Mrs Gordon, seated, (Queenie Ashton and Gordon Grimsdale) and Peter Frobisher (Max Osbiston). (ABC Blue Hills publicity photograph from 1949) 

Blue Hills, written by Gwen Meredith (1907-2006), was an Australian radio serial about the lives of families living in a typical rural Australian location. The serial was set in a fictitious town called Tanimbla. Blue Hills is the name of the residence of the town’s doctor.

Blue Hills was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for 27 years, from 28th February 1949 to 30th September 1976. It included a total of 5,795 episodes, and was at one time the world's longest running radio serial.

The famous opening theme tune was taken from an orchestral piece called "Pastorale" written by Ronald Hanmer. Some of the actors who played long-running roles in Blue Hills included:Queenie Ashton, Nigel Lovell, Rod Taylor, Nellie Lamport, Gordon Grimsdale, Gwen Plumb, Philippa Baker and Max Osbiston.

Blue Hills was the Australian equivelant to The Archers, a British radio serial from the same era that is at the present 'world's longest running soap opera' (its 15,000th episode was broadcast in Britain in November 2006). Originally billed as an "everyday story of country folk", it is recorded in the heart of Birmingham, the UK's second largest city. The Archers is the most listened to Radio 4 programme, and holds the BBC Radio programme record for the number of times listened to over the internet, with over 750,000 listeners .

Before the avent of television and well into the 1960s, radio content was different to today. In radio's earlier days, it typically included a balance of comedy, drama, news, music and sports reporting. Radio soap operas began in the US in 1930 with Painted Dreams. Other nations, including Britain and Australia, followed with their own daily or weekly serials, which were themed similarly to the television programmes of today - variety entertainment, situation comedy, family drama (soap opera), adventure, science fiction, thriller etc.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, television began to erode the popularity of radio comedy, drama and variety shows. By the late 1960s, radio broadcasting began to take on much the form it has today - strongly focused on music, news and sports.

Right: Gwen Meredith

The creator of Blue Hills was born Gwenyth Valmai Meredith  on 18th November 1907 in Orange, New South Wales. She was educated in Sydney, first at Sydney Girls High School then the University of Sydney from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929. Her father believed that, with the Depression, there were too many people needing jobs and that she should stay at home. She therefore managed the housekeeping and, from 1932 to 1939, owned and operated a bookshop.

Meredith married Sydney engineer, Ainsworth Harrison in December 1938. He proved to be "a devoted and supportive husband" and travelled around Australia with her as she researched her serials. They also travelled overseas several times. She retired in 1976 when the last episode of her most famous serial, Blue Hills, went to air, and she and her husband moved to the Southern Highlands in New South Wales, where she took up watercolour painting. Her other interests were gardening, bushwalking and flyfishing. She died at her home at Bowral on 3rd October 2006, aged 98.

From 1932 to 1939, with her father's financial backing, she was the owner of the Chelsea Book Club, which she soon expanded to include a drama club that performed her earliest plays. From 1939 to 1943, she worked as a freelance writer, before commencing a 33-year career with Australian Broadcasting Commission for whom she wrote radio plays, serials and documentaries.
She entered a play competition in 1940 but was not selected as a winner by the judges. She did, however, win the listeners' poll. As a result of this, she was chosen to create the ABC's new radio serial in 1944, The Lawsons, a highly successful drama that ran for 1299 episodes from 1st February 1944 to 5th February 1949. It chronicled a family living on a property, their battle to survive and to cope with sons being away at war. When the final episode was announced, the Sydney Morning Herald remarked that "to many people throughout the Commonwealth this will be almost a national day of mourning. The complicated affairs of the Lawson family, their friends and their enemies have made the serial the most popular in the history of Australian radio".

This serial was replaced by the even more popular Blue Hills which comprised 5,795 episodes, all written by Meredith, and which ran for over 27 years. Her method of writing Blue Hills was unusual. She dictated the words for the script into a tape recorder and this was transcribed by ABC typists for the actors to read. Blue Hills made her a household name in Australia.

Besides these two long-running serials, Meredith wrote several plays, some of which were performed by the Independent Theatre, Sydney, and novels, based on the serials.