AustLit

Historical mini-series following a single family through eight years of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War: Douglas Goddard, a senior public servant working in Canberra; his dillusioned wife Evelyn; his son Phil, who is first conscripted to Vietnam and then returns as a regular soldier; and his daughter Megan, whose love for the son of a migrant worker leads her to Sydney and the anti-Vietnam movement.

Moran argues, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'Vietnam has a wonderful complexity, majesty and sweep in its treatment of the years 1964-72'. While praising the compexity and elegiac nature of the program's treatment of inter-personal relationships, he adds,

The sweep of Vietnam is equally impressive -- the ability to narratively marshall a long series of events into a chain that connects history and the personal, a chain that begins in 1964 behind closed doors but increasingly could not be contained there, bursting out into the public arena of the media, the streets, the judges and finally the ballot box. And equally, Vietnam is a majestic document that fills an important space in the Laborist view of Australian politics created by the mini-series in the 1980s.

The mini series enjoyed enormous popularity when it was screened on Australian television.

The first of two 1980s' mini-series on Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, both of which, as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, follow very similar plotlines, in terms of tracing the tension between the war and the peace movement. Whereas Vietnam explored this tension through sibiling relationships, the ideologically opposed protagonists in Sword of Honour are lovers.

Though Sword of Honour aired the year before Vietnam, Moran considers it inferior to its (independently developed) successor:

Andrew Clarke is particularly wooden in the central role, a mixture of poor casting, writing and acting, and although Tracy Mann is rather better, characters seem stiff compared with the characters in Vietnam. However, in justification of this series, it is worth noting that it is eight not ten hours in length, and therefore there is less narrative space available here to develop the dense historical and referential textures of the other series.

The series cost $5 million to produce over twenty weeks, and received good ratings when it aired on Australian television.

Based partly on real incidents, Anzacs is a fictional account of the lives of a dozen Australian soldiers serving in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) during World War I. The narrative follows them from the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli to the brutal trenches of France during the 1916 Somme Offensive, the 1917 Battle of Arras and Battle of Vimy Ridge, and the 1918 German offensives and the final drive to victory. It also focuses on the hardships, mis-adventures, and casualties experienced by Australia's soliders.