Frequently described as an 'Australian western', Five Mile Creek was based on Louis L'Amour's 1982 novel The Cherokee Trail, with the action moved wholesale to Australia.
A co-production between the Seven Network and the Disney Channel, the program, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'revolved around two women, Kate Wallace and the American Maggie Scott, who ran a stage way station at Five Mile Creek in New South Wales.' Moran also notes that it 'was the most expensive series ever filmed in Australia up to that time, costing Disney $12 million for the first two series, although this was still thought to be about half of what it would have cost in Hollywood.'
The series did poorly on Australian television but extremely well on the Disney Channel in the United States. According to Moran,
Five Mile Creek was a kind of stunning confirmation that Lew Grade was right all those years earlier in thinking that the Australian outback could be adapted to the genre demands of the western. Indeed in Five Mile Creek the reciprocal parallels and symmetries between America and Australia are pushed in a deliberate and warmly calculating way. The Australian bush is, as it were, transfigured so that it seems intrisically like part of the Old West.
In contrast to this Australian/American fusion that Moran notes in the program's sensibility, he also notes that it had the Disney Channel's 'cultural/commercial values written all over it.'
