C/o The Bartons
Australian television series
C/o The Bartons (also called Care of The Bartons, or The Bartons in the UK and The Netherlands) is an Australian television drama series aimed at older children and young teens, which first aired in Australia in 1988.
History
The series was based on a 16-minute short film Jocelyn Moorhouse had made in 1986, after receiving a grant from the Australian Film Commission in 1985, called The Siege of Barton's Bathroom. She based the plot on something that happened to her in her youth, and named the Barton boys after her house mates she lived with at the time.
The ABC was looking for a new children's drama and Moorhouse decided to send in her short film. Revcom producer Jenifer Hooks saw it, and commissioned Moorhouse to create the series. The first episode of the series is basically a remake of the short film, but with the cast of the series.
Description
The series affectionately portrayed a suburban Australian family through the eyes of eleven-year-old Elly Barton, the only girl in a family of four children. Elly struggles with the way her authoritarian parents and her brothers treat her and prefers to retreat to the calm and peace of the old tree in her backyard. Elly herself behaves bossy and sometimes down right mean towards other children in the neighbourhood, including her best friend Anita, which sometimes gets her in unpleasant situations. The lessons that Elly learns from this, and the way they change her behaviour towards others for the positive, are a recurring theme in the series.
“C/o The Bartons” enters the record as australian television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bartons, Australian and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“C/o The Bartons” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Bartons, Australian and television provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23661664. VIAF identifies the subject as 307028792. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1986 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “C/o The Bartons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.