Australian film crew visits Hanover

Claudia Gardner, Assignment Coordinator

WESTERN BUREAU:Members of a film crew from the Australian version of the television series "Who do you think you are?" were in sections of Hanover last week preparing for one of the 2014 season's episodes which will feature movie star Richard Roxburgh of the Australian Television series 'Rake'.

Roxburgh, the lead actor in 'Rake', stars as attorney-at-law Cleaver Greene. He has also appeared in movies such as Moulin Rouge and Mission Impossible II. The film crew, which was hosted by the Hanover Parish Council, shot some of the scenes at historic sites, including Fort Charlotte and the Hanover Museum in Lucea as well as some sections of St Ann.

"We are here shooting the Australian version of the TV series, which is also made in the US and the UK," field producer and researcher Mathew O'Donnell told Western Focus during a break from filming at Fort Charlotte in Lucea. "It is a series about family history. We take a well-known person and look at their ancestors and then you take that person on a journey to kind of revisit what happened in their family's past.

"He (Roxburgh), until a couple of weeks ago when we started filming this programme, had no idea that his family had a connection to the Caribbean. In fact, his great-grandparents moved to Australia from Jamaica, so he's finding out his family history in Jamaica for the first time," O'Donnell added.

One of Roxburgh's ancestors was the Reverend James Watson, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who founded the Lucea United Church. The church still has a plaque mounted in his honour.

O'Donnell said the Registrar General's Department, the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town, the National Library, online history websites, and Jamaican historians and academics were key elements in his research ahead of filming. He said journals logged by Watson, who was Roxburgh's great-great-grandfather, were also helpful.

"We are very lucky because as a missionary, he wrote reports back to Scotland about things like the Sam Sharpe Rebellion as he was caught up in those events. He wrote about emancipation as he preached on that day, and about the Sam Sharpe Rebellion, as well as about the schools that he started. He left this amazing archive of his thoughts," O'Donnell said.