Are television dramas set in rural Australia, good or bad for the image of the bush?
I’ve just finished watching “A Place to Call Home” (recorded on digital TV).
Quality in every respect. Excellent story and cinematography, interesting characters and top actors. The icing on the cake? It’s 100% Australian.
Set in the 1950s, it hints at what it was like to live in rural Australia in the post-war years, so it’s useful on the history front as well.
However from a rural point of view – anyone unfamiliar with rural Australia during that era would ideally be reminded of the conservative nature of the general population as well. Instead they may mistakenly believe that the racial, marriage, homosexuality, religious, social status and other prejudices featured, were specific to regional Australia. When in fact these views were the norm throughout Australia.
Ideally it would be clearly mentioned too, that not everyone lived in magnificent historic pastoral homes with a bevy of maids, a cook and a chaffeur. I grew up amongst merino sheep and in fact I don’t know of a single Australian pastoral family that lived like that, despite the 1950s being the most prosperous farming period of last century, for anyone who ran sheep. Watching how the primary characters live on “A Place to Call Home” is more like viewing the tiny upper echelon many decades earlier. I do know people who rattled around in big old homesteads; and their reality was scratching around for big wads of cash to pay huge bills for repairs of such unexciting essentials as plumbing, electrical wiring, roof repairs and brick mortar. Household staff consisted of a cleaning lady visiting for a few hours a week to help battle the dust and cobwebs, if they were lucky. Posie Graeme-Evans did an excellent job on this front, when writing the long-running McLeods Daughters television series. Viewers were left in no doubt as to the financial realities of preserving a historic homestead, and running a farm, and could justifiably feel they learned more about the realities of farm life. Despite criticism from the bush that it was a romantic view of rural Australia, I know many girls who tried working on farms as a result, and though some were starry eyed, others took to it like ducks to water.
Excellent entertainment that it is, unfortunately “A Place to Call Home” will probably just shore up the stereotype beliefs some Australians hold, regarding farming families being ultra conservative, spoilt rich silver-spooners.
But it’s still a ripping yarn.
Series writer Bevan Lee had written the third series but unfortunately Channel 7 axed the plan to film the third series of “A Place to Call Home”, despite it being the top-rating TV drama in 2013, and reaching around a million viewers per episode in 2014. And despite presumably good prospective income from overseas viewing rights – it would be extremely popular in the UK, parts of Europe and presumably NZ, Canada and USA.
If “A Place to Call Home” is revived, it would be fantastic to see Bevan Lee weave in some more details to make it a ‘meatier’ story; as was done McLeods Daughters. Such as a few scenes of daily farm life, the end of the wool boom, more average farming families, and the typically straightjacketed 1950s suburbia. Film & television dramas are so much more useful for prompting thought on rural realities than so-called reality television shows, such as “Farmer Wants a Wife“, “Keeping up with the Joneses” and “Outback Truckers”, which are all such distorted versions of the truth. There is huge curiousity about what day-to-day farmwork actually entails, so writing in little bits and pieces into the storyline would make “A Place to Call Home” even more satisfying viewing than it already is.