Historical mini-series following a single family through eight years of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War: Douglas Goddard, a senior public servant working in Canberra; his dillusioned wife Evelyn; his son Phil, who is first conscripted to Vietnam and then returns as a regular soldier; and his daughter Megan, whose love for the son of a migrant worker leads her to Sydney and the anti-Vietnam movement.
Moran argues, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'Vietnam has a wonderful complexity, majesty and sweep in its treatment of the years 1964-72'. While praising the compexity and elegiac nature of the program's treatment of inter-personal relationships, he adds,
The sweep of Vietnam is equally impressive -- the ability to narratively marshall a long series of events into a chain that connects history and the personal, a chain that begins in 1964 behind closed doors but increasingly could not be contained there, bursting out into the public arena of the media, the streets, the judges and finally the ballot box. And equally, Vietnam is a majestic document that fills an important space in the Laborist view of Australian politics created by the mini-series in the 1980s.
The mini series enjoyed enormous popularity when it was screened on Australian television.
