louise homfrey in division 4 episode 'hide and seek' 20 september 1972

A lot of interesting things going on in this episode of Division 4 which only goes to show - scratch the surface, you'll find a whole treasure trove of people and places and things. This is the episode where Marg tells Vickers she's not going to make his coffee for him (apparently women police have laid down the law on making of tea and coffee for their male counterparts because they feel it takes them away from proper police work!). His response, incidentally, is to give her some actual police work to do. 

Lionel Long is in this episode, three years after his departure from Homicide, and weirdly his character's name is 'Alan Hunt'. I say 'weirdly' because that was the name of the recently-appointed Minister for Local Government in Victoria. Wikipedia won't tell me precisely when Hunt was given this role (his first after a long time as a Liberal politician in part, rumour has it, because he objected to the planning rules being bent on behalf of Reg Ansett in the 1960s) but he was certainly a Minister by mid-1971. The shooting on this episode was under way by 8 October 1971 - there's a scene in which Vickers brandishes a newspaper with that date - but presumably Hunt wasn't particularly famous when the script was written by ex-policeman Monte Miller; Hunt rose to a certain degree of prominence in the Hamer government and I thought/think he was opposition leader for a short time in the 1980s but Wikipedia (once again: not always our friend) doesn't say anything about that and I cbf looking into Liberal history if they're not going to do it for themselves.* Anyway, weird to have a criminal called Alan Hunt here. 

It's not weird but nice to see Louise Homfrey in a minor role as the plucky, betrousered, belligerent Mrs Malton (IMDB doesn't list her as a cast member, btw). 

God only knows how old Homfrey was by this stage but presumably mid-70s. She had a long career as a radio presenter and was one of those media personalities who had no problem acting but it was probably just a thing you needed to be able to do to keep working in amongst the things you were remarkably good at and notable for. Note the extreme similarity between the second 'still' above and the image below, which you'd have to admit even in 1929 must have been a super-weird publicity shot. 

World's News 23 October 1920 p. 19

* And yes, he was the father of the awful Federal Liberal politician Greg Hunt, Minister for Health during the pandemic.