A PLACE TO CALL HOME: THE STORY OF HOW A TV SERIES STIRRED PASSIONS AND CONNECTIONS

A Place To Call Home is an Australian TV series set in 1953. It describes the social changes sweeping the country in the aftermath of a devastating world war that endangered the homeland and opened the continent to new trends that challenged hierarchies based on class, ethnicity, and sexual identification. During its second season, the network cancelled the series, but a campaign to sustain the program proved successful as a streaming service helped rescue it and sustain it through six seasons. This collection tells two stories: one about the narrative presented in the program and the other about the impact of the program on the network of fans who organized to preserve it. But any accounting of this Program must ask why such a quintessentially Australian story about mid-twentieth century traumas has so much to say to people in the twenty-first and why it so deeply struck a chord with people living far removed from the land framing this series. A Place To Call Home speaks across time and space because it offers a mirror to people who see in it their own reflection. It enables them to draw their own map of dislocation and pain but also to chart their own way out. The book is simultaneously an Australian and an international story.