Whereas the miniseries, most often based on revered literary texts, has been a staple of British television for fifty years, I could count on the fingers of a dismembered hand its Australian counterparts. In fact, the miniseries in general, as distinct from serials that run for a longer or shorter period, seems never to have been as common here, though The Dismissal (1983) remains an Australian small-screen highlight. (As for those derived from novels, the count is even sparser.)

However, last year delivered the goods in Rake, and2011 may just be about to lift the miniseries score significantly: we have had the excellent Paper Giants, ostensibly about the founding of Cleo magazine, but in fact an incisive study of changing cultural mores; we are promised a lavishly cast version of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap; and now comes Cloudstreet. For my money, this may be the most adventurous miniseries ever made here.