Harp In The South + Poor Man's Orange

Welcome to 12 1/2 Plymouth Street, in Sydney's Surry Hills. This is the home of the Aussie Irish Catholic family, The Darcys. The Harp In The South and Poor Man's Orange tells the trials and tribulations of growing up in a Sydney slum in the years immediately following the Second World War.

In The Harp In The South, we first meet The Darcys, a poor, working-class family of tough Irish stock - Mumma (Anne Phelan, Winners & Losers), dad Hughie (Martyn Sanderson, An Angel At My Table), Roie (Anna Hruby, Fireflies), Grandma Kilker (Gwen Plum, A Country Practice), and younger daughter Dolour (Kaarin Fairfax, West of Sunshine), through whose eyes we hear their story. A tale that centres on the bittersweet first and last loves of Roie, who becomes a woman too quickly living among the tenement houses, razor gangs, brothels and sly-grog shops of inner Surry Hills.

Poor Man's Orange continues the ever-changing story of The Darcys in the 1950s. The narrow-gutted, dirty old house is now home to Mumma, Dad Hughie, Dolour and Roie who lives in one of the upstairs rooms with her husband, Charlie Rothe (Shane Connor, House Husbands) and their little girl, Moira (Emily Nicol, A Country Practice), who calls herself Motty. Instinctively Dolour comes to realise that only the second-best is hers - the "Poor Man's Orange" with its bitter rind and paler flesh and it's stinging, exultant, unforgettable tang. so she will have it that way and wish it no other way.