AllMovie

Made for television, A Place to Call Home is based on fact, incredible as it seems from first scene to last. Linda Lavin stars as a Houston mother of eleven children, whose husband decides to move one and all to an Australian sheep ranch in 1970. Lavin drags her kids the requisite 17,000 miles to the Aussie outback--but when she arrives, her husband is nowhere to be found. In fact, except for a couple of fleeting appearances, we never see Lavin's spouse again; she is obliged to forge a life for herself and her huge brood in this forbidding new environment. The woman upon whose life A Place to Call Home is based eventually had herself ensconced in a cloistered convent--and we're hard pressed to blame her.