Dangerous Remedies, Ned Lander’s ABC telefeature about Dr Bert Wainer, the swashbuckling abortion law reform crusader of the 1960’s in Melbourne, has really taken thirty years to bring to the screen. While it slowly became a period drama, the tension between history and fiction never disappeared.
According to the account in his book, Dr Bertram Wainer was already a colourful character when he became an inner-city doctor in Melbourne. He had been raised in terrible poverty after his father, a South African Jewish doctor, died suddenly in his surgery, leaving his Presbyterian wife to be repudiated by her family and eventually marry a rag and bone man in the depths of the Great Depression in Scotland.
