The creative team which was largely responsible for the evocative SeaChange television series got together again in 1997 to create this 1960s yarn of Aussies in London.
We follow the fortunes of four of them. There's bush-girl Heather Randall (Rebecca Gibney) who is seeing the sights before returning to be married - and she mainly just wants to get laid. And there's your quintessential Ocker, Jack Gill (Jeremy Sims), the type of Aussie who should be shot on sight - loud, morose, drunk and violent and with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Albert Hall.
Then there's Richard Turner (John Polson), a young and unbelievably naive, even doltish Australian would-be journalist who wants to make it in the big-smoke. And, finally, there's Heather Randall's bushie buddie Catherine (Jacqueline McKenzie), who sees around her the ruins of her mother's wasted life and is determined to make something of her own.
So into London this quartet stumbles, falling straight into a drop-out squat of unbelievable squalor, the 'Kangaroo Palace' of the title, which is presided over by an English toffy-sounding reject from a casting call for Withnail and I, Terence Foster-Burrowes (Jonathan Firth). The wildly anarchic upper-class Terence is in fact hiding a couple of secrets - but they're for the viewer to find out.
Unlike SeaChange, in which every character seemed sharply pointed and utterly at home in the context of the script, this is comparatively awkwardly managed.
This is partly because of mis-casting. Rebecca Gibney just looks totally out of place in this context. Old fashioned, yes -plenty of country girls who visited London in the late 1960s looked as if they'd walked straight out of a 1950s nightmare. But she just looks and acts a decade older than everyone else in the story.
And Jeremy Sims' character Jack Gill is just too awful, without any redeeming features at all. There were plenty of Barry Mackenzie characters around London in this period. But none were quite as objectionable in every detail as this assemblage of 'ugly Australian' cliches.
John Polson's journalist Richard is just too downtrodden and naive to have become a Fleet Street journalist. I'd travelled from Australia to England the same time as this, and also became a Fleet Street journalist. And, sadly, Richard just doesn't pull any bells of recognition. He wouldn't have made it in those ultra-competitive days.
But Jacqueline McKenzie's character Catherine is an absolute triumph, and she manages to almost single-handedly redeem the show. Hers is an utterly convincing portrayal of a girl who sets out to carve a career, and do it regardless of the cost. The cost is very high. But she impresses with her quiet strength, dignity and acceptance of the penalties that come with her quest.
This isn't great television, it certainly doesn't show the professionalism or durability of SeaChange. I think only people who had made this journey would be willing to sit out this long saga of Aussies in Pom-land. Had the story been centred more completely around the character of Catherine Macaleese, then this might well have become one of our better mini-series creations. But it ends up being just too diffuse, with attention centred on people who should have stayed firmly on the periphery.
The worst failing of this mini-series is that it fails to set convincingly the social context of just why Australians clamoured to be part of London in the Swinging Sixties. We're missing any taste of the rich social and cultural life that made London at that time the centre of the known universe. We're simply not there, and there's no real attempt to put us there. Instead, we seem to stay stuck in the squalor of the squat, ignoring the brilliant life and light outside.
