Rain Shadow, Series 1 (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2007, Acorn Media, 2008)
In our house, DVDs come and go pretty fast. We watch the ones that look interesting, write reviews if they arrived as review copies, and then pass them along, usually to the local media store that turns them into credit for (what else?) more DVDs. Rare is the DVD film or TV series that deserves to be kept for future re-viewing. Rain Shadow is one of those exceptions. The series title refers to the climatic condition of large parts of South Australia, including the fictitious Paringa district in which this story is set. It's a flat plain on the leeward side of a mountain range. Residents of the area can see the rain falling on the mountains, but by the time the air mass arrives over their heads, all the water has been used up and they get no rain. Although the terrain has always made this condition likely, global climate change has apparently made it inevitable and possibly irreversible -- only time will tell. The land gets drier and drier until pretty much nothing will grow at all. For an agricultural region, this means disaster, plain and simple. The story itself is about a veterinary practice located in Paringa. Middle-aged vet Kate McDonald (played by Rachel Ward) has kept the practice going for years since the mysterious death of her husband and partner. A very hard-boiled eccentric, she has learned to get along with the locals (she emigrated to Australia from England) but goes through assistants at the rate of at least two a year. Primarily focused on large farm animals (sheep and goats), the practice demands long hours and lots of solitary overland travel, not to mention the need for flexible payment plans from farmers with little in the way of ready financial resources. Oh, and Kate isn't very nice. She's brusque and impatient. At the start of the first episode of the series, Kate's newest assistant, Jill Blake (played by Victoria Thaine), arrives to join the practice. Although she is by no means as crazy as Dr. McDonald, she has that strong-willed arrogance that often afflicts newly-minted professionals, so of course she and Kate have relationship issues from the get-go. A city girl, Jill also has a lot to learn about life in the outback. She clashes with some of the locals by getting involved in disputes before she even knows the arguments behind the conflicting sides. In six hour-long episodes, writer-creators Tony Morphett and Jimmy Thomson tell the tale of the evolving relationship between the two women, as well as the interwoven stories of several other characters including struggling sheep farmers, the sleazy veterinarian in the closest major town, a shady but lovable guy named Larry who probably deals drugs (never mind that no one in this part of the world has money to buy drugs), a recluse named Steve who usually hides behind the curtain in his house, and Ahmed, an Iraqi agronomist who actually stops to do his prayers at the proper times of the day. At an earlier point in my career I did quite a lot of research on rural health and mental health service issues, and the stories I saw depicted in these episodes rang very true to my own memories of similar places in the upper Midwest. But Rain Shadow isn't just about people, it's also very much about place. I think the last show I saw that used scenery and sounds from the natural world so effectively was Terence Malick's Days of Heaven -- and that came out in 1978! Also noteworthy is the soundtrack, which features vocals and instrumentals by Aussie blues-roots band The Audreys. It's rumored that a second season of this series is in the works. I hope that's so! In the meantime, I have to decide whether to loan this DVD set first to our veterinarian or to my former colleagues at the Maine Rural Health Research Center. All of them will love it!
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