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SeaChange
1998 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Andrew Knight, Deb Cox
SeaChange is a popular Australian television show that ran for 39 episodes from 1998 to 2000 on the ABC. It was created by Andrew Knight and Deborah Cox and starred Sigrid Thornton, David Wenham, William McInnes, John Howard, Tom Long and Kerry Armstrong. The director was Michael Carson. Filming was based at Barwon Heads, Victoria and St Leonards, Victoria, both locations being on the Bellarine Peninsula. A number of streets in the St Leonards Sea Change Estate have since been named to acknowledge some of the characters of the series. Many scenes were also filmed in Williamstown, including the exterior of the Williamstown Life Saving Club, which became the court house of Pearl Bay.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I live in an unusual town. Trades here at least are flourishing.
20ish years ago this was a working class satellite to a small industrial city, just a few shops and a petrol station. Most of the houses were fibro-cement and most of them empty except for a few weeks in summer when tourists came, but even then it wasn't really thriving, too flat for ocean views, the ocean was on the other side of a enormous dune. There had been a fishing industry here once but that was gone. Nearby Torquay launched the companies quicksilver and rip curl and a surfing culture. This town started to attract student doctors working in the city teaching hospital who wanted to be near the ocean, more than half of them are women, and many of them met young tradies who lived here for the surf. And then a momentous event, the town was used as the set for a tv show about people leaving the city for the coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaChange
A really common story in this town is a couple where one partner works in the hospital as a health professional, which meant they had a steady income to borrow for a cheap block of land, and the other partner is a builder or a carpenter or an electrician, who sub divided the block and built a couple of units.
These couples who have combined the low risk well paid and regular income of a health professional in Australia's public health system, with the higher risk irregular income of small scale property development have mad astonishing amounts of money, all while surfing a couple of days a week.
> If we didn't do that, we'd be completely inundated with American shows flogged off on the cheap
Absolutely. I deleted it from my post, but I was going to mention that on non-primary Australian TV stations that don't have the same content restrictions, we get 2 hours of non-stop Big Bang Theory reruns, or endless repeats of Frasier, Sex And The City, Charmed & Becker.
> What kind of tv show do you consider 'culturally significant'?
Glitch is my favorite recent Australian TV show, started on ABC but apparently Season 2 has been sold as a Netflix exclusive. Back in the 90s it would have been shows like Seachange, Frontline, Kath & Kim. Maybe Offspring & Packed To The Rafters are recent equivalents.
(Outside Australia, I'd think of shows like The Bridge, Springfloden, The Killing & Occupied, that have exported Scandinavian culture onto Australian TV.)