Cirrus@Austlit

'Well after the end of the Culture Wars, the televisual representations of The Petrov Affair continue to flourish. `The Petrov Affair' profoundly changed the Australian ideals of modernity and conception of Communism, political espionage and migration in the 1950s. The 1987 miniseries The Petrov Affair (Michael Carson) was released at the height of the 1980s promotion of multiculturalism and the historical miniseries boom. It is not a spy thriller, nor a courtroom drama about the Royal Commission. The Petrov Affair is a delicate character study of the difficulties of deciding to immigrate and the ambivalence that lies at the nexus between modernity and migration. This article seeks to rehabilitate this forgotten docudrama and examine the relationship between modernity, mobility and migration in the cultural production that explored emerging multicultural policies. (Editor's abstract)