Safe Harbour, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, written by Belinda Chayko and directed by Glendyn Ivin

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0002j52

This four-part Australian drama is a big budget production. A morality play, a kind of J.B. Priestly An Inspector Calls set in Brisbane and the Timor Sea. There’s lots of angst and gnashing of teeth. In An Inspector Calls class is the card played. Here it’s class and race, and religion in a toxic mix, as wealthy westerners in a yacht meet immigrants in a sinking ship on the Timor sea. Safe Harbour is a metaphor for everything that happens.

They want what we have and we’re not for giving.  There’s another story, of course, that when we die we must pay the ferryman with a coin. Usually, it’s taken to be the coin that cover the dead’s eyes, or a coin of great value, usually gold, but the coin we pay the ferryman before travelling over the River Styx is the coin of our worldly losses. And in some religions, when a soul is reborn and travels in the other direction we shake off all we have known, all we have been. Loss is a tide that sweeps in and out of Safe Harbours.