Boney is an Australian television series produced by Fauna Productions during 1971 and 1972, featuring New Zealand actor James Laurenson in the title role of Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.
The casting of Laurenson, a white man who performed in dark make-up, was strongly criticised by the Australian Aboriginal community.
A loner who never failed to crack a case, he was impatient with authority, charming, arrogant and an expert burglar, moving in a world of sunbaked claypans and the most distant reaches of the Outback, where only the Aboriginal people could survive.
There he met actor and theatre businessman John McCallum and Bob Austin (a legal expert), who used their local knowledge to gain financing from Australian backers.
By 1970, John McCallum, Bob Austin, and veteran Australian producer Lee Robinson had set up Fauna Productions.
They engaged various international sources (American investors had shown enthusiasm, but pulled out when the producers refused their demand that Bony be reframed as white rather than multiracial).
Ideally, of course, the part should have been played by a half-Aborigine, and we saw hundreds of people, but it needed someone with very considerable acting experience and expertise.
[3] Bob Maza said, "I could have guaranteed John McCallum ten articulate, sophisticated black people to play that part.
"[3] Upfield had told McCallum that he'd always intended to call his detective "Boney", but a printer's error had changed it to "Bony".
[4] Although Upfield's novels featuring Bony were more popular in the United States than Australia, the series was not shown in the US.
According to John McCallum, several attempts to sell the series to distributors in the US were rejected as the Americans could not accept that a police detective, along with most of the criminals he hunted, did not use firearms.
Striking images were filmed: a white-haired Aboriginal chief touring his lands in a rusty car pulled by camels; a car pushed into the path of a train by a combine harvester; a ghostly Aboriginal revenge squad implacably hunting a murderer, hoping to spear him.
[1] Reviewing Boney and the Black Opal, The Age said Laurenson's "talent is wrapped in a tall frame and dark, rugged good looks that should make him Australia's newest TV sex symbol".
He turns in an extraordinary performance, with not even a drop of Maori blood, he looks completely the part of the half-caste Aboriginal detective".
Starring 26-year-old actor and singer Cameron Daddo, the Bony pilot film was about Inspector Bonaparte’s grandson David, who also became a police detective.
With partial funding by the West German broadcaster ZDF, which had put money into the 1971/2 series, the producers had bought the name Bony.