Set in the goldfields city of Ballarat, Victoria, in the late 1950s, The Doctor Blake Mysteries follows Dr Lucien Blake, who returns home after a thirty-year absence to take over his late father’s general medical practice — and, with it, his father’s role as the town’s police surgeon. A maverick, impulsive risk-taker unafraid to upset the status quo, Blake uses his medical expertise to investigate suspicious deaths, whilst confronting long-buried secrets from his own wartime past.
The Doctor Blake Mysteries is an Australian period crime drama created by George Adams and Tony Wright, produced by December Media for ABC TV. The series premiered on 1 February 2013 and ran for five series and 45 episodes plus a concluding telemovie, through to 2018, becoming one of the ABC’s most popular and enduring drama exports. Craig McLachlan stars as Dr Lucien Blake, who returns to Ballarat in 1959 after decades away — including time spent as a prisoner of war in the Ban Pong camp in Thailand — to take up both his father’s medical practice and his unofficial role investigating the town’s suspicious deaths as police surgeon.
Blake is a complicated protagonist: outwardly a risk-taker with little patience for social convention or procedural caution, he’s shaped by wartime trauma that surfaces gradually across the series, giving the show’s murder-of-the-week format genuine emotional undertow alongside its period charm. His household is anchored by housekeeper Jean Beazley (Nadine Garner), whose own story develops significantly across the show’s run, and his investigations regularly bring him into contact — and occasional conflict — with a succession of local police superintendents, including Frank Carlyle (Rodger Corser) and Matthew Lawson (Joel Tobeck).
Each episode presents a self-contained mystery — poisonings, staged accidents, wartime secrets resurfacing decades later — set against Ballarat’s distinctive mid-century civic life: the Begonia Festival, the Town Council, the local newspaper, and the golf club all provide backdrops for murder. The series is celebrated for its meticulous period detail, filmed almost entirely amid Ballarat’s genuinely preserved Victorian-era streetscapes, giving the show an unusually authentic sense of time and place among period detective dramas.
Production was suspended in 2017 following sexual misconduct allegations against Craig McLachlan, which halted a planned continuation by the Seven Network; the story was instead concluded via a series of follow-up telemovies (The Blake Mysteries) shifting focus to Nadine Garner’s Jean Beazley. Despite this troubled coda, the original run remains fondly regarded, with Ballarat itself embracing the show as a genuine tourism asset — the city hosted a dedicated “Doctor Blake Mysteries” exhibition and self-guided walking tour of its filming locations following the series’ conclusion.
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