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McLeod’s Daughters – Welcome Home (2001)

Synopsis

After the death of her father Jack, Claire McLeod (Lisa Chappell) is trying to get on with running the family cattle station, Drover’s Run. But the business is in serious debt and the men on the station are not taking well to having a woman in charge. To throw another spanner in the works, Claire’s half-sister Tess (Bridie Carter) arrives from the city. Claire and Tess have not seen each other since they were children – but Jack has left a half-share in the property to each of them.

Curator’s notes

by Kate Matthews

McLeod’s Daughters was an Australian television success story, screening in 200 territories worldwide as well as enjoying ratings success at home for eight years. The concept started life as an earlier telemovie of the same name, with a different cast (see McLeod’s Daughters, 1996).

Welcome Home is the first episode of the series and covers some of the ground of the telemovie, with significant changes. There is the same central premise of self-reliant women working the land and similar music-driven set-piece montages of farming work, horseriding and romantic, landscape painting-inspired rural vistas. There is the same storyline of half-sisters, one from the city and one from the country, becoming reacquainted after many years and being forced to work together by their father’s death.

However, Jack McLeod and his death exist only as backstory, rather than forming part of the plot as they did in the telemovie. Where the earlier production paints country girl Claire as timid and downtrodden and city girl Tess as fierce and independent, the series does a switch of sorts. Lisa Chappell’s Claire is a tough, laconic farm girl, while Bridie Carter’s Tess starts out seeming like a bit of an airhead, though she shows her mettle as the story progresses.

The series also tones down the outright melodrama of the telemovie and gives parts of the story a lighter touch. Episode one is spent establishing situations and characters that have the potential to carry a long-running series. In the telemovie, the majority of male characters are sexist and badly behaved, sparking the women’s journey to self-reliance. Welcome Home is careful to put in place some decent men who create the possibility for future romantic tension and ongoing storylines.

Most of the series was filmed on location at Kingston, a property in South Australia where actors were trained in horseriding and mustering. The Nine Network purchased Kingston for the purposes of the series; it was then run as a working farm, with its own stock.

Welcome Home is the first episode of McLeod’s Daughters, which screened from 2001 to 2009, for 224 episodes and 8 seasons. The show earned multiple Logie Awards including Most Popular Australian Drama Series (2004 and 2005), Most Popular Actor (Aaron Jeffery, 2004 and 2007) and Most Popular Actress (Lisa Chappell, 2004). McLeod’s Daughters screened widely internationally, including on the Hallmark cable network in the UK and Asia.