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Home and Away

Home and Away (H&A) is an Australian television soap opera. It was created by Alan Bateman and commenced broadcast on the Seven Network on 17 January 1988. Bateman came up with the concept of the show during a trip to Kangaroo Point, New South Wales, where he noticed locals were complaining about the construction of a foster home and against the idea of foster children from the city living in the area. The soap opera was initially going to be called Refuge, but the name was changed to the "friendlier" title of Home and Away once production began.

The show premiered in what Bateman classified as a ninety-minute telefeature (subsequently in re-runs and on VHS titled as Home and Away: The Movie), as opposed to a pilot. Since then, each subsequent episode has aired for a duration of twenty-two minutes. Home and Away has become the second longest-running drama series in Australian television, after Neighbours. In Australia, it is currently broadcast from Mondays to Thursdays at 7:00 pm.

Home and Away follows the lives and loves of the residents in Summer Bay, a fictional seaside town in New South Wales. The series initially focused on the Fletcher family – Tom (Roger Oakley) and Pippa (Vanessa Downing), and their five foster children, Frank Morgan (Alex Papps), Carly Morris (Sharyn Hodgson), Lynn Davenport (Helena Bozich), Steven Matheson (Adam Willits) and Sally Fletcher (Kate Ritchie) – who moved from the city into the Summer Bay House, where they assumed the new job of running the caravan park, and eventually took in a sixth foster child, Bobby Simpson (Nicolle Dickson). Home and Away was not without controversy. During the first season alone, it featured several adult-themed storylines such as teen pregnancy, rape, drug and alcohol addiction, drug overdose and attempted suicide. The series has dealt with similar storylines over the years which have often exceeded its restricted time slot. Palm Beach in Sydney's Northern Beaches district has been used as the location for Summer Bay since 1988. The exterior scenes are filmed mainly at Palm Beach, while the interior scenes are filmed at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern.

Home and Away has been sold to over eighty countries around the world, making it one of Australia's most successful media exports. In the UK, it and Neighbours, another Australian soap opera, are the most popular of the genre that are filmed internationally, with them both airing on Channel 5. It is one of the highest-rating shows on RTÉ Television in Ireland and TVNZ 2 in New Zealand. In Australia, Home and Away is the most awarded program at the Logie Awards, with a total of forty-nine wins, including Most Popular Drama Program. Some cast members have won several other awards such as the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television, Silver Logie for Most Popular Actor, and Most Popular Actress. In 2015, Home and Away was inducted into the Logie Hall of Fame.

Conception
After the Seven Network cancelled their soap opera Neighbours on 12 July 1985 due to low ratings, rival Network 10 picked it up and turned it into a success. A couple of years later, Seven's head of drama, Alan Bateman, became desperate to get back into the soap market and began to work out how to launch another soap that was not a copy of Neighbours. While on a trip to Kangaroo Point, New South Wales with his family, Bateman began talking to locals who were "up in arms" over the construction of a foster home for children from the city. Seeing the degree of conflict the "influx of parentless children on a tight-knit community" was having, Bateman came away with the idea for a new serial. He explained "Nobody in the community wanted them to move in and I began to wonder how streetwise city kids would adapt to the new lifestyle. Suddenly I thought, there is my slice of life in a community." Bateman began outlining the storyline and set the serial in the fictional town of Summer Bay. While Seven Network executives were unconvinced by the idea, audience research was positive. The soap opera was initially called Refuge, but the name was changed to the "friendlier" title of Home and Away once production began.

Home and Away has since become the second-longest drama series in Australian television after Neighbours. In 2002, several former characters such as Frank Morgan (Alex Papps), Carly Morris (Sharyn Hodgson), Steven Matheson (Adam Willits), Blake Dean (Les Hill) and Sophie Simpson (Rebekah Elmaloglou) returned for a special storyline to mark the 150th anniversary of settlement in Summer Bay. The storyline featured a majority of the cast boarded onto a ferry boat for a night cruise; however, a massive storm ruined the celebrations, leading the boat to sink. In July 2005, Home and Away celebrated its 4000th episode, which saw many former cast members return for Alf Stewart's (Ray Meagher) surprise 60th birthday party. In March 2007, the commercial television industry's Annual Code Complaint Report revealed that Home and Away was the eighth most complained about show on Australian television, and the only drama series in the top ten complaint list. From 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2006, there were 23 written complaints about the show as viewers thought it was inappropriate for it to be shown in its 7:00 pm timeslot.

Home and Away celebrated its 21st year in production in Sydney on 23 July 2009. The mayor of Sydney's Pittwater Council presented cast members with the key to Palm Beach, the exteriors setting filming location for the show. At the end of 2011, Cameron Welsh left his role as the series producer. Welsh previously played the character Mitch McColl from 1999 until 2001 and then became the series producer for Home and Away in 2007. Former All Saints producer Lucy Addario took over as series producer in January 2012. In August 2012, Home and Away's official Australian Facebook page reached one million likes, becoming the first Australian television show to reach this milestone. The Facebook page was established in November 2009 and is followed by fans mostly in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom. In 2013, Home and Away celebrated its 25th anniversary and former cast member Kate Ritchie (Sally Fletcher) returned for a special storyline to coincide with the celebrations. For the first time in the show's history, Home and Away aired a two-hander episode, featuring only the characters Ricky Sharpe (Bonnie Sveen) and Darryl "Brax" Braxton (Steve Peacocke), on 14 February 2016.

Location and sets
Home and Away is set in Summer Bay, a fictional seaside town in New South Wales. Locations within the town include the beach, a high school, diner, bait shop, garage and a surf club, which includes a gym, small kiosk and an upstairs restaurant. Characters in the show live at surrounding neighbouring areas such as the Summer Bay House, Summer Bay Caravan Park, Beach House, The Farmhouse, Pier flat, and Saxon Avenue. Other fictional towns mentioned and sometimes seen in Home and Away are Mangrove River and Yabbie Creek.

Palm Beach in Sydney's Northern Beaches district has been used as the location for Summer Bay since Home and Away began in 1988. It has since become popular with tourists, and tours to the show's exterior sets at Palm Beach run throughout the year. The exterior scenes are filmed mainly at Palm Beach and at Fisherman's Beach in Collaroy. Interior scenes for the show were filmed at the Seven Network's Sydney studios in Epping until 2010. Following the closure of these studios in early 2010, the interiors are now filmed at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern. The Jackeroo Ranch estate in Kenthurst had been used for the exterior sets of the Summer Bay House and Caravan Park since 1988. After both sets were destroyed by a bushfire in December 2002, the caravan park set was moved and filmed at other locations such as the Waratah Park Earth Sanctuary between 2007–09 and the Lane Cove River Tourist Park between 2010 and 2014. A replica of the Summer Bay House was rebuilt in its original location at the Kenthurst estate several years later, with the exception of a grey roof instead of a red one. The caravan park set moved back to the estate after the house was rebuilt, and both exterior sets made their on-screen returns in 2015. The Summer Bay House is the only house to still be seen on screen since the pilot episode.

Aside from New South Wales, Home and Away has also filmed scenes in other states of Australia. In May 2012, the show filmed scenes at Flinders Ranges and Nilpena Station in South Australia for a storyline in which Casey Braxton (Lincoln Younes) was kidnapped and taken to the outback by Kyle Braxton (Nic Westaway). The following month, Home and Away filmed scenes in Melbourne for the second time. In November 2014, the show filmed an episode at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra with several cast members, as a tribute to the Anzac Centenary. The episode centred around Alf Stewart (Ray Meagher), "who becomes upset with the younger generation's perceived lack of respect for Anzac Day, and joins the school trip to Canberra to visit the War Memorial." Outside of Australia, Home and Away has filmed in Hawaii once and in the UK three times.

Theme song
The theme song to Home and Away was written by Mike Perjanik. There have been nine different versions of the theme song used throughout the years. The lyrics remained the same since the show's inception, but a number of verses were gradually cut back over the years due to time restrictions. The original version was sung by Karen Boddington and Mark Williams, and was used from 1988 until mid-1995. Their version was released as a single in the UK in 1989 and peaked at number 73 on the UK Singles Chart. A new version performed by Doug Williams and Erana Clark debuted in 1995 and the opening theme was shortened in 1996; this version remained until 1999. From 2000 to 2003, the theme song to Home and Away was sung by The Robertson Brothers and it was the first version to use only male vocals. A 30-second updated version by The Robertson Brothers was used from 2004 to 2006. In January 2007, a new version was introduced and performed by Israel Cannan, who played the character Wazza in the show. After Cannan's version received many complaints from fans, the Seven Network decided to re-record the theme song in April 2007 with vocals provided by Luke Dolahenty. A shorter, 15-second version sung by Dolahenty and Tarryn Stokes debuted in 2009.

From 2010 until 2017, the Home and Away theme song was not used in the opening titles and was replaced by a short instrumental version. However, Dolahenty and Stokes' version was still used in the closing credits for international broadcasts. In 2018, two new eight-second versions of the theme song made a return to the opening titles after an eight-year absence. One version is sung by a male vocalist, while the other version is sung by a female vocalist; in the opening titles, both only sing the last two lines of the theme: "closer each day, Home and Away". An extended 30-second version by the male vocalist was uploaded onto the Home and Away website.

Opening titles
The Home and Away opening titles sequence was initially used to introduce the regular characters in the show. The sequences often featured the characters in couple shots or with family and friends, and showed them in familiar settings around Summer Bay such as the beach. The titles for the show's earlier years featured black brush stroke cutouts around the character shots. 2004 saw Home and Away introduce new picture frame-style opening titles, with characters shown posing in and out of large picture frames in front of beach backgrounds. In January 2007, the show debuted new opening titles along with a new version of the theme song. The picture-frame style was still used, but this time the titles featured framed pictures of the characters. In 2009, the opening was reduced to 15 seconds and the characters were removed from the titles for the first time in Home and Away's history. They were replaced by a large photo collage showing various locations around Summer Bay. The decision to remove the cast and shorten the titles was due to time restrictions. Since then, many viewers in Australia and the United Kingdom have wanted the full-length title sequence with the cast to return.

From 2013 until 2017, Home and Away used a series of five-second opening titles, which changed every week. The various titles mostly featured scenes of bikini-clad women and shirtless men with surfboards at the beach. In 2018, a new series of eight-second titles were introduced along with the return of the show's theme song. The new titles, which currently change during each week, mostly feature two men or two women running down to the ocean for a surf. A 30-second version of the titles, not aired on Australian television, was released on the Home and Away website.

Cast and characters

When Home and Away began in January 1988, it initially focused on the "Fletcher" family – Tom (Roger Oakley) and his wife Pippa (Vanessa Downing), and their five foster children, Frank Morgan (Alex Papps), Carly Morris (Sharyn Hodgson), Steven Matheson (Adam Willits), Lynn Davenport (Helena Bozich), and Sally Fletcher (Kate Ritchie) – who relocated from the city to live in the seaside town of Summer Bay. At the end of the first episode, Tom and Pippa take in their sixth foster child Bobby Simpson (Nicolle Dickson).

The Fletchers bought the Summer Bay Caravan Park and moved into the Summer Bay House. They quickly built strong friendships with the locals, shopkeepers Alf Stewart (Ray Meagher), Ailsa Hogan (Judy Nunn) and retired carnival workers Neville (Frank Lloyd) and Floss McPhee (Sheila Kennelly), and town locals including surfer Matt Wilson (Greg Benson) and local yobbos Lance Smart and Martin Dibble, (Peter Vroom and Craig Thomson), whilst having a bitter rivalry with school headmaster Donald Fisher (Norman Coburn).

They were joined in the third episode by Alf Stewart's rebellious daughter Roo Stewart (Justine Clarke) and within the first month by his sister Celia Stewart (Fiona Spence), who portrayed a similar busybody role to what Gwen Plumb played as Doris Peters in the pilot. While Home and Away features a mix of young cast members and older, more experienced actors, the show has always had a definite youth focus, with the younger characters dominating much of the storylines. Many of the cast have spent several years on Home and Away, including original cast member Judy Nunn who left the series in 2000 after 12 years playing the co-owner of Summer Bay's diner. Other original cast members Norman Coburn played high school principal Donald Fisher until 2003, and Kate Ritchie departed in 2008 after 20 years playing Sally Fletcher. Both Coburn and Ritchie along with Ray Meagher (Alf Stewart) entered the 2002 Guinness World Records as the longest-serving actors in an Australian drama series. Meagher now holds that record alone and he is the only remaining original cast member in the show. Meagher along with Lynne McGranger (Irene Roberts), Ada Nicodemou (Leah Patterson-Baker) and Emily Symons (Marilyn Chambers) are the longest-serving cast members currently in Home and Away. In 2010, Georgie Parker joined the cast of Home and Away as Alf's daughter Roo Stewart, originally played by Justine Clarke in 1988–89. Alf and Roo are currently the only two original characters in the series.

Celebrity guest appearances
Throughout the years, Home and Away has featured several guest appearances from celebrities such as John Farnham, Johanna Griggs, Sia, Michael Palin, Ian Thorpe, Lleyton Hewitt, Paulini, Nick Grimshaw, Eliza Doolittle, Ed Sheeran, Jessica Mauboy, Atomic Kitten, and Sunrise presenters Matt Shirvington and Natalie Barr.

Broadcasting
In Australia, Home and Away currently airs on the Seven Network at 7:00 pm from Mondays to Thursdays, going up against rival current affairs shows A Current Affair on the Nine Network, and The Project on Network Ten. The show is on air for approximately 45 weeks each year. Each season is usually broadcast from late January, and concludes with the season finale in late November (sometimes early February to early December), as it goes off air for two months during the Christmas and New Year period. It is typically commissioned at 230 episodes per season, but have sometimes commissioned less episodes in a season due to years where the Olympic games have aired on the Seven Network, putting the show into a mid-season break. All aired episodes shown during the week are available to watch on the Seven Network's 7plus app, as part of their catch up TV service. They are also broadcast in an omnibus edition each Sunday on Seven's digital multichannel 7Two.

When the show first began in 1988, it aired at 5:30 pm in Adelaide, at 6:00 pm in Melbourne and Sydney, at 6:30 pm in Brisbane, and at 7:00 pm in Perth. In January 1992, Seven moved Home and Away to the 7:00 pm timeslot across the network. On 3 November 2009, 7Two began airing repeat episodes of the show from the very beginning at 9:30 am, before moving to 9:00 am. Since its premiere, the show had been screened as a 22-minute episode each weeknight. However, beginning in March 2013, Better Homes and Gardens began replacing Home and Away on Fridays to make way for Seven's AFL coverage. Friday's episodes of Home and Away began airing on Thursdays at 7:30 pm. By 2018, the Home and Away schedule often varied from week to week. Some weeks saw four episodes aired, with Thursdays often featuring two or three episodes back-to-back.

Since 2000, Home and Away has ceased broadcast mid-season for two weeks during the Olympic Games and the episode to screen prior to this is referred to as an 'Olympic cliffhanger'. An Olympic cliffhanger episode would usually involve increased drama, with the peak of a storyline, similar to a season finale episode, and the outcome of the cliffhanger to conclude after the Olympics. Olympic cliffhangers have been broadcast in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2016, with the exclusion of 2012, as the Seven Network did not have the rights to televise the 2012 London Olympics; the most recent one was in 2021 due to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics taking place in that year after being postponed in 2020. In addition to this, Home and Away took a transmission break on 3 April 2018 in order to broadcast the 2018 Commonwealth Games, and returned on 16 April 2018.

On 22 March 2020, Home and Away suspended production over the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it was initially stated that the show would continue filming, the decision was later made to halt production, despite neither the cast or crew testing positive for the virus. Furthermore, on 23 March, the show was removed from Seven's schedule to make way for extended coverage on the pandemic. Home and Away returned in its usual timeslot on 13 April. On 12 May 2020, it was announced that the show would recommence production following the nine-week suspension. Filming was limited to the studio and resumed on 25 May. Storylines were rewritten to limit close contact between the actors. On 19 July 2021, Home and Away was forced to postpone scheduled filming due to new COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Sydney. The show was already on a two-week production break, which was then extended. In early August, a spokesperson for the show confirmed filming had resumed.

International
Home and Away has been sold to over 80 countries around the world, making it one of Australia's successful media exports.

In the United Kingdom, Home and Away was first broadcast on ITV from 11 February 1989 until 8 June 2000. (LWT and Yorkshire started the series a day later) Home and Away was shown twice a day on ITV, with a lunchtime showing and a tea time repeat; many regions aired it at around 5:10 pm, while others at 6:00 pm or even 6:30 pm. The show attracted up to eight million viewers, making it one of ITV's top 30 rated programs. It also helped boost audiences for ITV's regional and early evening news bulletins. During the show's last year on ITV, Home and Away attracted an average audience of 4.4 million for its early-evening repeats. In February 2000, it was announced that Home and Away would be moving to rival Channel 5 after they bought the rights to the show in a £40m auction deal. ITV reportedly offered twice the amount by Channel 5, but the Seven Network in Australia were swayed by Channel 5's commitment to the long-term future of the show in a deal of more than five years. After ITV's contract ran out in July 2000, Home and Away went off air for 12 months as ITV had an exclusivity clause that prevented any other broadcaster from airing the show for a year. After a delay in screening, Home and Away made its debut on Channel 5 on 16 July 2001.

Channel 5 started airing new episodes of Home and Away at 6:00 pm with a repeat showing the following day at 12:30 pm. On 16 October 2006, the newly-established digital channel Five Life (now 5Star) introduced follow-up episodes at 6:30 pm after Channel 5's broadcast. Channel 5 later started airing episodes at 1:15 pm each week day, with a repeat at 6:00 pm. The programme was also repeated on 5Star at 3:00pm and shown online via Demand 5. From July 2018, Home and Away was shown on Viacom's Paramount Network, a channel operated in the UK by Channel 5, which has now ceased. On 24 September 2021, Ofcom approved Channel 5's decision to broadcast their hour-long news show 5 News from 5pm. The change led to Neighbours being moved to Home and Away's usual 6pm slot, with the early evening repeat scrapped altogether. The 6:00 pm broadcast is now moved to 5Star in the same time slot, with the "first look" episode continuing to air at 6.30pm on the channel. Home and Away is currently exactly eight weeks behind the Australian broadcast as of February 2024.

In September 2019, the pilot episode and the first 199 episodes of the first season were made available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom. In November 2019, the final 29 episodes of the first season, and the first 171 episodes of the second season were added to the service, however, they are listed as "Season 2".

In Ireland, Home and Away debuted on Monday, 3 October 1988 (with the pilot episode) as part of RTÉ's re-launch of RTÉ2 as Network 2 - their secondary channel. Episodes screened at 6.30pm and in September 1997, a daytime episode was added at 1.25pm on RTÉ One with the 6.30pm episode becoming the replay of the daytime broadcast. A repeat of the week's episodes is aired on Saturdays and Sundays on RTÉ2. Viewers in the Republic of Ireland are also able to catch up with episodes on the RTÉ Player. Home and Away is one of RTÉ's most popular drama series. It was the most watched program of 2014 on the RTÉ Player with over four million viewers. As of 2014, the show is available to view in Northern Ireland on 5STAR daily at 3.30pm and 6.30pm as well as the regular Channel Five airings. The show is geo blocked in Northern Ireland via the SKY platform on both RTE1 and RTE2, yet it remains available on Irish platform Saorview for both Irish and Northern Irish viewers. RTE television airs episodes exactly as shown in Australia. Home and Away is consistently RTÉ's most-watched soap opera, and in 2021, the series was streamed by 4.9 million viewers.

In New Zealand, Home and Away is broadcast on TVNZ2, with five episodes aired between 3.30pm to 6pm broadcasting every Sunday. A repeat of the episodes are spread across Monday to Friday, shown at 11:00 am each weekday. The TVNZ website also offers viewers the chance to watch episodes online with its OnDemand service. Home and Away is one of New Zealand's most popular TV series and is one of TVNZ 2's highest-rating shows. The show had previously aired on TV3 since 2002, where it consistently won high ratings for TV3 and helped boost audiences for their 6pm news bulletin. However, on 5 July 2013, the show's European distributor Endemol cancelled its agreement with TV3, causing them to lose the right to broadcast Home and Away.

In the United States, Home and Away was first shown briefly on the FX cable network from the channel's launch on 1 June 1994 to February 1995. Over two decades later, the show began streaming on the subscription service Hulu on 2 March 2015, beginning with the 2015 season. The service no longer receives new episodes, although the complete twenty-eighth season is currently available.

In Lithuania LNK at 1995 started with first season. Later it was broadcasting on BTV with breaking. At 2023 started with season number 25 at TV1 until March same years. At juni LNK was broadcasting further on.

In Kenya, Home and Away was broadcast on the NTV network Monday to Friday at 6:00 pm.

Storylines
Home and Away's storylines have ranged from mild to serious issues throughout its run. While the central stories revolve around fostering children, family and teenage problems, school problems and romances,  the series has covered several controversial, adult-themed and detailed issues not suitable for young audiences, despite its early evening time of 7:00 pm. Storylines covered include abortion, accidental death, adultery, adoption, alcoholism, amnesia, amputation, arson, autism, bereavement, brain aneurysm, bullying, cancer, cage fighting, career problems, child abuse, cults, cyberbullying, domestic violence, depression, drink driving, drug overdose, drug trafficking and drug use, eating disorders, gambling addiction, health problems, hit-and-runs, HIV and AIDS,  homosexuality, Huntington's disease, incest, imprisonment, kidnapping, marriage problems, miscarriage, murder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), paedophilia,  phantom pregnancy, pole dancing, post-natal depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, prostitution, racism, rape, revenge porn,  robbery, self-harm, sex, sexual grooming, shootings (including drive-by shootings), stabbings, stalking, stroke, SIDS (cot death), stillbirth, suicide, surrogacy, teacher-student relationships, teenage pregnancy, terminal illness, and witness protection.

The show has also featured many natural disaster storylines, including a cyclone, storm, flood, landslide, earthquake, and bushfires. There have also been several storylines involving car, bus, plane and boating accidents. Furthermore, in addition to the show featuring scenes of moderate to strong violence in past episodes, the special episode, Home and Away: All or Nothing, which became available for online streaming in January 2017, was intended for "adult-only" viewing as it was described as the most violent episode of the entire series, as it contains scenes of strong violence.

Rating and restrictions
Since 1988, Home and Away has dealt with some controversial issues, despite being broadcast in a G-rated time block. Since 2008, every subsequent episode has been broadcast under the PG classification and often continues to exceed the rating. 7two aired the repeated early episodes under the PG rating, as do the streaming service 7plus. In New Zealand, the show was originally aired on TV3 in an edited 5:30 pm timeslot under the G classification. The series now airs uncut at 6:30 pm under the PG classification. In the UK, when the show aired on ITV, it was heavily edited for content that was deemed to be unsuitable for pre watershed viewing. Many episodes were edited to the point that some continuing storylines would not have made sense to UK viewers, with some episodes lasting barely 15 minutes to fit the timeslot. One episode was completely dropped, the school siege, and the 1996 season finale was very heavily edited. The closing credits were also dropped from around 1994 for timing reasons, leaving only the final scene in the closing credits, which meant that UK viewers never got to see the closing credits to the show at all. This all changed when the show moved to Channel Five in 2001, although very minor edits to some scenes remain, and the closing credits to the episodes were also reinstated. Home and Away is rated PS (recommended for a mature audience) in Ireland and has always aired with no edits. A 2023 episode was given an MA rating (18 certificate) for mature content on RTE Player.

Controversies
During the show's first season in 1988, a rape storyline for the character Carly Morris (Sharyn Hodgson) outraged the public and a protest erupted, as viewers deemed it an inappropriate subject to be covering in an early evening time slot.

In March 2007, the commercial television industry's Annual Code Complaint Report revealed that Home and Away was the eighth most complained about show on Australian television, and the only drama series in the top ten complaint list. From 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2006, there were 23 written complaints about the show as viewers thought it was inappropriate for it to be shown in its 7:00 pm timeslot.

In 2007, the show breached broadcasting rules when they aired a number of episodes featuring Martha MacKenzie (Jodi Gordon) involved with pole-dancing in the G classification, as the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said that these episodes should have been rated PG as they contained sexual scenes and references.

In March 2009, it was alleged that Seven had agreed to censor a then-upcoming lesbian kiss scene between Charlie Buckton (Esther Anderson) and Joey Collins (Kate Bell), after receiving many complaints from conservative groups and mothers who did not want their children exposed to same-sex relationships in a family show. Seven's head of creative drama, Bevan Lee, later confirmed that the censorship allegations were in fact false and that the scene would still go to air as planned.

A 2010 episode which featured Martha McKenzie engaging in a sexual scene with Liam Murphy (Axle Whitehead) on a kitchen table was deemed "too raunchy" by a television watchdog in New Zealand, where, at the time, the series was aired in a G-rated timeslot.

In December 2023, fans of the serial branded a marketing campaign for a missing character as "disrespectful" and "gross". The show's series finale featured the kidnapping of Eden Fowler (Stephanie Panozzo). Channel Seven then launched a "Bring Eden Home" campaign featuring on-air promotions, a 1800 number to hear Eden's last phone call, and the promotion of a missing person poster across social media. The campaign proved divisive among viewers, with some branding it "epic", but others pointing out that it is insensitive to people going through a similar situation in real life.

Popularity and viewership
The launch of Home and Away in 1988 was hoped to help boost the Seven Network's early evening ratings which had been underperforming in previous years. However, the show struggled to attract high ratings, particularly when compared to rival soap opera Neighbours, which was a huge ratings success at the time. By the end of 1988, Home and Away's ratings had improved. In January 1992, when Neighbours' high-rating era was over, Seven moved Home and Away to the 7:00 pm timeslot, putting both shows up against each other. This caused Network Ten to move Neighbours to the 6.30 pm timeslot two months later. During the early 2000s, Home and Away was averaging 1.3 million viewers and in 2007, viewing figures rose to 1.4 million. However, by the end of the decade, the ratings had dropped to an average of 1.1 million viewers. During the early 2010s, viewing figures had further decreased to between 800,000 and 1 million an episode. In 2012, Home and Away was averaging 981,000 viewers, down from 1.039 million in 2011 and 1.021 million in 2010.

In 2015, the show began going through a serious ratings decline. A July 2015 report revealed that the ratings were down 14% compared to the first six months of 2014, which translates to about 140,000 fewer viewers per episode. On 6 July 2015, Home and Away ranked 16th in OzTAM's overnight ratings with 750,000 viewers. The following night, the show fell to an even lower figure of 701,000 viewers. A writer for the Australian Associated Press stated that one of the reasons for the ratings decline could be "the viewing habits of Gen Y, which the show is aimed at, have changed dramatically in recent times thanks to the launch of streaming services, Netflix, Stan and Presto. The exact age demographic that Home and Away targets are the same people who do not subscribe to appointment viewing. They prefer to watch shows when they want and don't want to be dictated to by the commercial networks." A Seven spokeswoman commented that Home and Away was still performing well on digital and social platforms and that the overnight ratings were not the only measure of the show's success.

In 2019, Home and Away returned at the later date of 18 February, after the summer series of cricket concluded. Pippa Doyle of 96FM reported that declining ratings in 2018 and Seven's decision to push the show back had created doubt about its future on the network, and whether or not a timeslot change or a move to a multichannel was likely. The season returned to a series low of 620,000 viewers and ranked 13th for the night. The following night, the viewing figure fell to 581,000 and the show ranked 10th for the night. The first triple bill on 21 February pulled in 577,000 viewers and ranked 8th for the evening. The ratings for the triple bill episodes continued to fall from 524,000 to 414,000 viewers, and on 28 March 2019, the triple bill pulled in a series low of 383,000 viewers and ranked 14th for the night. April 2019 saw a slight rise in the viewing figures; the first episode of the month drew in 740,000 viewers and ranked 9th for that night.

The triple bill episodes continued to receive low ratings until the Thursday, 9 May episodes, which improved with 617,000 viewers. The following week's triple bill saw a further rise with 627,000 viewers, while the episodes broadcast on 30 May received 638,000 viewers and ranked at 7th place for the evening. The 2020 season return saw a series low for a premiere with only 548,000 tuning in. The opening episode of the 2021 season saw a rating of 597,000. The 2021 season has seen an increase in ratings with most episodes attracting over 600,000. June saw a rise in viewers when the month peaked at 650,000 for episode which aired on 22 June, while in July, the show continued to receive steady ratings, and again saw a further rise in ratings with 657,000 viewers tuning in on 7 July. The 2021 Olympic return episode, which aired on 9 August 2021, attracted the highest rating in over two years, with 710,000 viewers, with an even higher increase of 733,000 viewers tuning in on 10 August. On 31 March 2022, two episodes achieved new series lows of 382,000 and 364,000 viewers respectively.

The 2023 season return was watched by an audience of 519,000 and was ranked 6th for the evening. The 8000th episode, which aired on 27 March 2023, drew an audience of 512,000 and ranked 10th for that night. The 2023 finale triple bill was coded by Seven into one figure which was an average of 395,000.

The opening episode of the 2024 season, which aired on 8 January, drew 411,000 viewers. From 29 January 2024, the show's ratings began to increase rapidly; the episode airing that evening garnered an viewing figure of 804,000, while ratings rose to 902,000 on 6 May 2024. The highest rated episode of the season so far drew in an audience of 950,000, on 15 July 2024.

Awards and nominations
Home and Away has received many awards and nominations throughout the years. The show has won 48 Logie Awards from 168 nominations, making it the most awarded program in Logie history. In 2015, Home and Away was inducted into the Logie Hall of Fame. The show has also won twelve Australian Writers' Guild Awards and five Australian Directors' Guild Awards.

Merchandise and spin-offs
Since 1988, Home and Away has generated a range of merchandise, including books, magazines, VHS tapes, DVDs and soundtracks. Various annuals and books about the show and its cast and characters were released in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Between 2003 and 2005, several fictional books by Leon F. Saunders and Jane Anderson were released and based on characters from Home and Away. Episodes of the show have been released on several VHS and DVDs. Home and Away: The Movie was the first VHS released in 1989 and contained the 90-minute pilot episode. Another VHS tape, Home and Away: The Official Summer Bay Special, was released in 1996. It celebrated 2,000 episodes of the show and looked back at memorable moments throughout its earlier years. Home and Away: Secrets and the City and Home and Away: Hearts Divided were the first DVDs released in October 2003, and both contained exclusive episodes that were never aired on television. Two further DVDs, Home and Away: Romances and Home and Away: Weddings were released in November 2005 and March 2006, respectively, and featured clips from the most popular romances and weddings in the series' history. Romances featured the pilot episode, while Weddings featured two episodes containing Leah and Vinnie's wedding as a bonus feature. Four soundtrack albums were released between 1996 and 2003 that featured music used on the show as well songs from some of the cast members.

Home and Away has also produced several spin-off episodes. headLand was a spin-off series focusing on a university. It ran from November 2005 until January 2006, when it was cancelled due to low ratings. In 2013, the show launched their first webisode series titled Home and Away Extras, which introduced new characters Andy (Tai Hara) and Josh Barrett (Jackson Gallagher) before they appeared on-air. The four-part websisode series was released on the show's Yahoo!7 website from 7 August 2013. On 19 August 2015, it was announced that former cast members Dan Ewing (Heath Braxton) and Lisa Gormley (Bianca Scott) would be returning for a special spin-off episode titled Home and Away: An Eye for an Eye. The episode was commissioned specially for the local streaming service Presto and did not air on the Seven Network. It centred around the Braxton family and was a feature-length episode running for over an hour. Home and Away: An Eye for an Eye was made available to watch on Presto from 9 December 2015. Following the success of Home and Away: An Eye for An Eye, it was announced on 6 May 2016 that two more feature-length episodes had been commissioned. The first episode became available on 19 December 2016 and is titled Home and Away: Revenge. The second special, Home and Away: All or Nothing, became available for viewing on 26 January 2017.

From 25 November 2019, a web television series called Home and Away: Christmas in Summer Bay will begin airing weekly on video on demand and catch up TV service My5 in the UK, as the show takes its annual Christmas break. The series is presented by former Home and Away actor Jason Smith, who interviews the show's cast members at various Summer Bay locations. The series also features clips from past episodes and behind-the-scenes footage. The series consisted of six episodes – "The Summer Bay House", "The Morgan Family", "The Mangrove River Gang", "A Surf Club Celebration", "A Home and Away Family" and "Home and Away in 2020: New Decade, New Attitude".

title: Home and Away


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H.D.

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.

H.D. was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to wealthy and educated parents who relocated to Upper Darby in 1896. Discovering her bisexuality, she had her first same-sex relationship while attending Bryn Mawr College between 1904 and 1906. After years of friendship, H.D. became engaged to Pound and followed him to London in 1911, where he championed her work. Their relationship soon fell apart, however, and H.D. instead married the Imagist poet Richard Aldington in 1913. In 1918, she met the novelist Bryher, who became her romantic partner and close friend until her death. An associate literary editor of the Egoist journal between 1916 and 1917, H.D. was published by The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. During World War I, both her brother and father died, and she separated from Aldington. She was treated by Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, as she sought to address and understand both her war trauma and bisexuality.

H.D. was keenly interested in Ancient Greek literature and published numerous Greek translations.

Her poems routinely drew from Greek mythology and classical poets, from her earliest Imagist lyrics which depicted natural landscapes using Hellenistic motifs, to her 1950s long poem Helen in Egypt which reinterpreted the myth of the Trojan War. Raised Moravian by her family, and first introduced to occult and esoteric religious ideas by Pound in her youth, H.D. gradually developed a unique syncretic spiritual worldview. H.D.'s spiritual devotion intensified during and after World War II, and her syncretic ideas became the central focus of her later writing.

While H.D. wrote in a wide range of genres and modes over her career, during her lifetime she was known almost exclusively for her early Imagist poems. Following a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, the significance of her late long poems and prose works was increasingly recognized, and she has come to be understood as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.

Early life and education
Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, and her mother, Helen ( Wolle), was a member of the Moravian brotherhood. Hilda was one of six children, and had five brothers. When her father was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania to take charge of the Flower Observatory in Philadelphia, the family moved to Upper Darby.

She attended Friends' Central School in Philadelphia, and graduated in 1905. She delivered a commencement address, titled "The Poet's Influence". She enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature, where she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. After three terms of poor grades, H.D. withdrew from the college, and studied at home until 1910.

H.D. met poet Ezra Pound as a teenager in 1901. Pound became a lifelong friend and played a formative role in her development as a writer. In 1905, Pound and H.D. began an on-and-off relationship which included at least two engagements. Although his parents were in favor of the relationship, her parents strongly objected. In 1907, Pound gave her Hilda's Book, a handmade vellum binding of twenty-five of his earliest love poems, which he dedicated to her.

In 1910, Doolittle began a relationship with Frances Josepha Gregg, a young female art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Inspired by Gregg, H.D. wrote her first published poems, modeled after the work of Theocritus. Some of her early work, including some children's stories about astronomy, was published in New York newspapers and Presbyterian newsletters.

Imagism
In May 1911, H.D. traveled to London on a vacation with Gregg and Gregg's mother; Gregg returned home, but H.D. stayed to develop a career as a writer. Pound introduced her to his friends, including English writer Brigit Patmore. Patmore introduced her to Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. The three lived in Church Walk in Kensington; Pound resided at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and H.D. at no. 6, and they gathered to work daily in the British Museum Reading Room.

Pound began to meet with other poets in London to discuss ideas for reforming contemporary poetry. Like most modernists in different artistic fields, she sought to "make it new", which they accomplished by incorporating free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of unnecessary verbiage. Pound, H.D. and Aldington became known as the "three original Imagists" and published a three-point manifesto proclaiming the edicts of Imagism. According to Pound: "We were agreed upon the three principles following:
 * 1) Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
 * 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
 * 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose poetry in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome."

During a 1912 conversation with Pound, H.D. told him that she found "Hilda Doolittle" to be an old fashioned and "quaint" name; he suggested the signature H.D., an abbreviation she kept for the remainder of her career. After he "scrawled the name H.D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page of her poem "Hermes of the Ways", she adopted H.D. as a pen. Privately he called her "Dryad".

In October 1912, under the rubric Imagiste, Pound submitted a selection of H.D.'s poems to Harriet Monroe, founder of the magazine Poetry, which was founded that year. In the January 1913 issue, three of her poems were published, "Hermes of the Ways", which Pound described as "this is poetry" after reading, "Priapus: Keeper of Orchards", later renamed "Orchard", and "Epigram". Three poems by Aldington were also published in the issue. These early poems are informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho, an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound. Her Imagist poetry is characterized by sparse language and a classical, austere purity, exemplified by one of her earliest and best-known poems, "Oread" (1915):

"Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir."

The style was not without its critics. In a dedicated Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, Harold Monro, an English poet, labeled H.D. the "truest Imagist" but dismissed her early work as "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint". In contrast, a 1927 review by the British modernist author and critic May Sinclair described "Oreads brevity as a "miracle" and criticized Monro for not recognizing it.

World War I and after
In 1913, H.D. married Richard Aldington. The following year, Pound married the English artist Dorothy Shakespear. H.D. and Aldington's only child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1915. He enlisted in the British Army, and she took his place as assistant editor of The Egoist, serving for the next year. In 1916, H.D.'s first book, Sea Garden, was published. Meanwhile, H.D. and Aldington drifted apart; he reportedly took a mistress in 1917, and she started a close but platonic relationship with the English writer D. H. Lawrence.

In 1918, H.D.'s brother Gilbert was killed in action. She moved to Cornwall that March with the Scottish composer Cecil Gray, a friend of Lawrence. She became pregnant with Gray's child, but by the time she realized she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to London. H.D. learned that her father died, having never recovered from Gilbert's death. Despondent and sick with the Spanish flu, she came close to death during the birth of their daughter Perdita Aldington in 1919.

H.D. and Aldington tried to salvage their relationship but failed, in part because of his post-war post-traumatic stress disorder, but especially because of her pregnancy with Gray. They became estranged, and later divorced in 1938.

In July 1918, she met the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Cornwall, and the two began a relationship. Bryher was several years younger than H.D., a lesbian, and equally non-conformist. Both women were unusually tall, a fact that made H.D. self-conscious. The two lived together on and off until 1950. Both had numerous other partners, but Bryher was H.D.'s lover for the rest of her life. Bryher entered a marriage of convenience with the American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, allowing him to use some of her wealth to fund his Paris-based Contact Press publishing house. In 1923, H.D. and Bryher traveled to Egypt for the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, before settling in Switzerland.

She wrote one of her few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, in 1919, although it was not published until 1982. In it, she speaks of poets (including herself) as belonging to a kind of elite group of visionaries with the power to "turn the whole tide of human thought". During this time, she incorporated feminist ideas into her poems.

Poetry cycles, novels and psychoanalysis
Poetry and novella cycles are a feature of H.D.'s early 1920s writing. The first, "Magna Graeca", consists of the poems Palimpsest (1921) and Hedylus (1928), which use classical settings to explore the role of a poet, particularly a female poet's value in a patriarchal literary culture. The following cycles, "HERmione", "Bid Me to Live", "Paint It Today", and "Asphodel" are largely autobiographical and preoccupied with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire. The novellas Kora and Ka and The Usual Star from the Borderline cycle were published in 1933, followed by Pilate's Wife, Mira-Mare and Nights.

In 1927, H.D.'s mother died. Bryher divorced McAlmon that year to marry Kenneth Macpherson, then H.D.'s male lover. Bryher, Macpherson and H.D. lived and traveled together through Europe together in what the New York School poet Barbara Guest termed a "menagerie of three". Bryher adopted H.D.'s daughter, Perdita, while still married Macpherson: leading to the change of name to Perdita Macpherson. Later, Bryher named Perdita as heir to her will. They moved to the shores of Lake Geneva where they lived in a Bauhaus villa. H.D. became pregnant in 1928 and got an abortion.

In 1927, Bryher and Macpherson founded the monthly magazine, Close Up, as a venue for the discussion of cinema. That year the independent film cinema group POOL or Pool Group was established (largely funded with Bryher's inheritance) and was managed by all three. In the 1930 POOL film Borderline, the actors were H.D. and Bryher and the couple Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the latter appearing as wife and husband. The film explores extreme psychic states, racism, and interracial relationships. H.D. wrote an explanatory pamphlet to accompany the film.

In 1928, H.D. began psychoanalysis with the Freudian Hanns Sachs. In 1933, she traveled to Vienna in 1933 for analysis with Sigmund Freud. Her interest in Freud's theories began in 1909 after she read his works in its original German. She was referred to Freud by Bryher's psychoanalyst because of her apparent paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler. World War I left her feeling shattered; she lost her brother in action, her father died in reaction to the loss of his son, her husband was traumatized by combat, and she believed that the shock at hearing of the sinking the RMS Lusitania indirectly caused the miscarriage of her child. H.D. undertook two series of analysis with Freud from March to May 1933 and from October to November 1934. At Freud's suggestion, H.D. wrote Bid me to Live, which was not published until 1960, and in which she details her traumatic war experiences. Writing on the Wall, an impressionistic memoir of the sessions and a reevaluation of the importance of his psychoanalysis, was written concurrently with Trilogy and published in 1944; in 1956, it was published together with Advent, a journal of the analysis, under the title Tribute to Freud.

World War II
Hilda and Bryher spent World War II in London. While there, her daughter Perdita became a secretary of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Between 1941 and 1943 H.D. wrote The Gift, a short memoir of her childhood in Bethlehem that details the people and events that shaped her. She began the Trilogy series in 1942, comprising three long, unrhyming, and complex volumes of poems: The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). H.D. wrote the first while living in London and details her reactions to the Blitz and World War II. The following two books compare the ruins of London to those of ancient Egypt and classical Greece; the former of which she had seen during a 1923 visit. The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal her break with her earlier work:

"An incident here and there, and rails gone (for guns) from your (and my) old town square."

H.D.'s relationship with Bryher ended just after the war, although they remained in contact. She moved to Switzerland where she had a severe mental breakdown in the spring of 1946 and took refuge in a clinic until the autumn of that year. She lived in Switzerland for the rest of her life. In the late 1950s, she underwent further treatment with the psychoanalyst Erich Heydt, who supported her while she wrote End to Torment, a memoir of her relationship with Pound.

Later work and death
H.D.'s later work drew heavily from her eclectic blend of Christianity, Ancient Greek and Egyptian religion, Spiritualism, Hermeticism, Martinism and Cabala via the works of Robert Ambelain, alchemy,  tarot,  astrology, and Freudian psychoanalysis. She used the medium of the long poem to explore and communicate this mix of spiritualities.

Between 1952 and 1955, while in her 60s, H.D. wrote her longest poem, Helen in Egypt. It was not published until just before her death in 1961. It is based Euripides' trilogy drama Helen, but imagines Helen of Troy's life after the fall of Troy and her relocation to Egypt. The poem reconstructs the source material into a feminist reinterpretation, and has thus been described as "exploring ... [but] ... concluding" the themes as her earlier work. Helen in Egypts long form and wide historical span has been seen as a response to Pound's Cantos, which she admired. In End to Torment she approved of Norman Holmes Pearson's labeling of Helen in Egypt as "her 'cantos.

A compilation of her late poems were published posthumously in 1972 under the title Hermetic Definition. The book takes as its starting points her love for a man 30 years her junior and the line "so slow is the rose to open" from Pound's Canto 106. "Sagesse", which she wrote in bed having broken her hip in a fall, serves as a coda to Trilogy, being partly written in the voice of a young female Blitz survivor who finds herself living in fear of the atom bomb. "Winter Love" was written during the same period as End to Torment and uses as narrator the Homeric figure of Penelope to restate the material of the memoir in poetic form. At one time, H.D. considered appending this poem as a coda to Helen in Egypt.

She returned to the U.S. in 1960, when she was the first woman to be recognized with the Award of Merit Medal for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Death
H.D was left gravely ill after a stroke in July 1961 and was taken to the Klinik Hirslanden in Zürich, where she died on September 27. She was survived by Bryher and her daughter Perdita.

Her ashes were brought to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they were buried in the family plot in Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28, 1961. Her headstone is inscribed with lines from her early poem "Epitaph":

"So you may say, Greek flower; Greek ecstasy reclaims forever one who died following intricate song's lost measure."

Appraisal
During her career, H.D. wrote a large number of works in a variety of styles and formats. They evolved from lyrics written in the 1910s, such as Sea Garden, through her early period Imagist poems and free verse, to her complex long poems Trilogy (written 1942-1944), Helen in Egypt (1952-1955), Vale Ave (1957), and the 1971 collection Hermetic Definition, consisting of the title poem (1961), "Sagesse" (1957), and "Winter Love" (1959). During her lifetime, her later poems, novels, and numerous translations of classical works were rarely studied or taught, and only her early poems, "Oread" and "Heat", appeared in anthologies. For decades, her reputation was as an Imagist who peaked in the 1920s; a consignment the literary critic Susan Friedman believes placed H.D. as "a captive and in prison". In 1972, Hugh Kenner wrote that assigning her as just an Imagist poet was similar to evaluating "five of the shortest pieces in Harmonium [as equal to] the life's work of Wallace Stevens". Although Pound claimed in the 1930s that he formed the Imagist movement "to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume", several key poets within the group, including Amy Lowell, viewed H.D. as the main focal point and innovator in achieving the group's "revolution in taste".

H.D. was aware early on that both the strictures of Imagism and Pound's controlling temperament would constrain her creative voice, and by the mid-1920s her work had developed beyond Imagism. In 1990, the feminist scholar Gertrude Reif Hughes described her as "physically fragile-looking in a traditionally feminine way". H.D. understood the danger of objectification, particularly as the only woman in a group of men in her circle. She worried about being perceived merely as their private muse, which she feared affected her public image and standing as a poet and prominent intellectual in her own right. Female objectification is explored in "HER", where she writes of "a classic dilemma for woman: the necessity to choose between being a muse to another or being an artist oneself". Although Pound was a lifelong champion, a number of other early Imagists, including Aldington and Lawrence, attempted to diminish her importance and consign her to a minor role. Similarly, while her mid-period poems and writings explore mysticism, esotericism and the occult, in a similar manner to poets such as W. B. Yeats (with whom she was personally acquainted), H.D. was rarely read before the 1970s.

Although the critic Linda Wagner wrote in 1969 that one of the "ironies of contemporary literature [is] that H.D. is remembered chiefly for her Imagist work given that few contemporary writers have written so much in their maturity"; her reappraisal only began in the 1970s and 1980s. This coincided with the emergence of feminist interest in her work, followed by queer studies scholars. Specifically, critics such as Friedman (1981), Janice Robertson (1982) and Rachel DuPlessis (1986) began to challenge the standard view of English-language literary modernism as based on only the work of male writers, and gradually restored H.D. to a more significant position in the movement. In 1990, Hughes wrote that H.D.'s mid-century poems, like those of Gwendolyn Brooks, anticipate second-wave feminism, and explore issues raised in Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex. According to Hughes, H.D.'s work challenges patriarchal privilege and seeks to "revise the mentalities that sponsor them". She notes in particular how in Helen in Egypt, H.D. positions Helen as "the protagonist, instead of the pawn", in such a way as to counter the "conservative and often misogynistic" tendencies which Hughes finds in the modernism of Pound and T. S. Eliot.

H.D.'s writings have served as a model for a number of more recent female poets working in the modernist and post-modernist traditions, including Barbara Guest, the Black Mountain poet Hilda Morley and the Language poet Susan Howe. The Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov wrote of her deep appreciation for H.D., particularly for her long poems on mystical themes, writing that H.D. "showed the way to penetrate mystery, [...] to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced". Her influence is not limited to female poets; many male writers and poets, including Robert Duncan, have acknowledged their debt. Duncan placed H.D. at the center of his lengthy study of modernist poetry in general, titled The H.D. Book, and frequently lectured on her work. The Dutch poet H.C. ten Berge wrote his 2008 "Het vertrapte mysterie" ("The Trampled Mystery") in memory of H.D.

Passages from Trilogy were widely shared across electronic discussion lists in the days following the September 11th attacks.

During World War II, H.D.'s daughter Perdita was involved in breaking codes at Bletchley Park, and later worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the OSS, she served with Graham Greene and James Angleton. H.D.'s grandchildren include the author and Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner.

Works
Works are listed by date of composition, where known.

Plays
Both texts are loose verse translations of Greek dramas by Euripides.
 * Hippolytus Temporizes: A Play in Three Acts (1927)
 * Ion (1937)

Prose
H.D.'s fictional and nonfictional prose writings are difficult to distinguish with much certainty. Her novels and short stories are often romans-a-clef, and her memoirs and essays are often experimental.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: H.D.


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Progressive Democrats

The Progressive Democrats (An Páirtí Daonlathach, literally "The Democratic Party"), commonly referred to as the PDs, was a conservative liberal political party in Ireland. The party's history spanned 24 years, from its formation in 1985 to its dissolution in 2009.

Launched on 21 December 1985 by Desmond O'Malley and other politicians who had split from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats took liberal positions on divorce, contraception and other social issues. The party also supported economic liberalisation, advocating measures such as lower taxation, fiscal conservatism, privatisation and welfare reform. It enjoyed an impressive début at the 1987 general election, winning 14 seats in Dáil Éireann and capturing almost 12 per cent of the popular vote to temporarily surpass the Labour Party as Ireland's third-largest political party.

Although the Progressive Democrats never again won more than 10 seats in the Dáil, it formed coalition governments with Fianna Fáil during the 26th Dáil (1989–1992), the 28th Dáil (1997–2002), the 29th Dáil (2002–2007) and the 30th Dail (2007–2009). These successive years as the government's junior coalition partner gave the party an influence on Irish politics and economics disproportionate to its small size. The party was credited with shaping the low-tax, pro-business environment that contributed to Ireland's Celtic Tiger economic boom during the 1990s and 2000s; however, it was also blamed for contributing to the post-2008 Irish financial and economic crisis.

Mary Harney became party leader in 1993, the first woman to lead any major Irish political party. She stepped down in 2006 and was succeeded by Michael McDowell, who led the party into the 2007 general election, where it lost six of its eight seats in the Dáil. The party never recovered from this electoral collapse. On 8 November 2008, delegates to a special conference in Mullingar voted to disband the party, which was formally dissolved on 20 November 2009. The two Progressive Democrats elected to the 30th Dáil, Harney and Noel Grealish, continued to support the government as independent TDs. Harney continued to serve as Minister for Health and Children until January 2011.

Foundation
The party was founded in 1985 by Desmond O'Malley, a former senior minister in Fianna Fáil governments under Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey. O'Malley was a strong opponent of Haughey and was involved in a number of leadership heaves against Haughey, who was popular and controversial in equal measure. O'Malley had lost the Fianna Fáil whip in the Dáil in 1984 because of his support for the New Ireland Forum report and was finally expelled from Fianna Fáil early in 1985 for "conduct unbecoming" a member when he refused to support Fianna Fáil's opposition to the introduction of contraception.

O'Malley joined with Fianna Fáil members Mary Harney, Bobby Molloy and Pearse Wyse, Fine Gael TD Michael Keating and former Fine Gael activist Michael McDowell to set up the new party. The breakaways were dissatisfied with the policies of existing parties, which they viewed as being insufficiently liberal, both economically and on social issues such as divorce and contraception. In Ireland in 1985, when personal income above £7,300 per annum was taxed at 60 percent, the country's national debt was 104 percent of GDP, unemployment was 17.3 percent, the Progressive Democrats' liberal reformist agenda was considered especially radical.

McDowell suggested a number of names for the party, including New Democrats, New Republic, National Party, Radical Party; Progressive Democrats was not among his suggestions. O'Malley declared that the party ought to be pro-enterprise, in favour of economic participation by all, liberal and pluralist, hostile to institutional dependency, favourable to incentives, pro self-reliance, deregulating where possible, anti-monopoly and pro-competition, low-key on nationalism, stressing "real republican" values rather than "nationalistic myths".

Electoral breakthrough and coalition
In the 1987 general election the new party won 14 seats and 11.9% of the vote, becoming the third-largest party in the Dáil. The Progressive Democrats formed the second-largest opposition party under difficult circumstances. The minority Fianna Fáil government introduced some of the economic reforms that the Progressive Democrats had recommended. Fianna Fáil was however largely supported by Fine Gael where the economy was concerned, and so the Progressive Democrats had difficulty being effective in opposition.

After the 1989 election the party had only six seats but formed a coalition government with Fianna Fáil, with Charles Haughey as Taoiseach, which was the first time Fianna Fáil entered coalition. PD leader Desmond O'Malley served as Minister for Industry and Commerce.

In 1990, a scandal broke surrounding Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Brian Lenihan Snr's role in pressuring President Patrick Hillery not to allow then-Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to dissolve the Dáil in 1982. The Progressive Democrats gave Haughey an ultimatum—unless Lenihan was removed from cabinet, they would pull out of the coalition and support a no-confidence motion in the government. Haughey tried to force Lenihan to resign, and sacked him when he refused. A year later, after former Justice Minister Seán Doherty claimed that Haughey had authorised tapping journalists' phones in the 1980s, the PDs told Haughey that they would tear up the coalition agreement if he remained Taosieach. With O'Malley's approval, Haughey stood down as Taosieach in February 1992 and retired from politics. He was replaced by Albert Reynolds, and O'Malley retained his cabinet post.

Harney leadership
After the collapse of Reynolds' first administration later in 1992, O'Malley retired from the leadership of the party. Following the 1992 general election, John Dardis (Agricultural Panel) and Cathy Honan (Industrial and Commercial Panel) were elected to Seanad Éireann as part of an election pact with their politically polar opposites Democratic Left. Mary Harney became the new leader after a bitter electoral contest with Pat Cox who later left the party. Harney was the first woman to lead any of the major Irish political parties. Harney served as Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) from May 1997 until September 2006 after a return to government in coalition with Fianna Fáil.

In the 2002 general election the party defied expectations by doubling its Dáil seats to eight, although its share of the vote declined slightly to 4%. In total the Progressive Democrats participated in coalition governments four times, on each occasion with Fianna Fáil (1989–1992; 1997–2002; 2002–2007; 2007–2009), and also with the Green Party from 2007 to 2009.

In 2005 Michael McDowell publicly took a firmly anti-republican position and named Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris as members of the IRA Army Council. The convention in Irish politics at this time was not to accuse Sinn Féin politicians of being members of the Army Council, in doing so McDowell broke with convention. He said that until the IRA disbanded Sinn Féin could not be involved in government, North or South.

McDowell leadership and demise
On 7 September 2006, Mary Harney announced that she was stepping down as leader of the Progressive Democrats. She expressed a wish to stay on as Minister for Health. On 10 September, Michael McDowell was elected unopposed as Party Leader, having been nominated by Tom Parlon and that nomination being seconded by Liz O'Donnell. Liz O'Donnell became Deputy Leader and Tom Parlon became Party President.

The 2007 general election was a disastrous one for the party. The Progressive Democrats lost six of their eight seats in the 166-seat Dáil. Among those to lose their seats were party leader Michael McDowell, deputy leader Liz O'Donnell and party president Tom Parlon. McDowell retired from public life after he lost his seat, and Mary Harney was asked by the party chairman to resume the role of party leader. The following month, Tom Parlon announced that he was also leaving public life and would take up the position of Director General of the Irish Construction Industry Federation.

A committee headed by former Senator John Dardis recommended in September 2007 that the role of leader be taken on by a senator or councillor (although the party rules then required that the position must be held by a TD). A meeting of the party's General Council on 16 February 2008 changed the rules to allow any senator, councillor or any party member with the support of 20 other members to stand for the party's leadership and on 17 April, Senator Ciarán Cannon was elected leader, defeating fellow Senator Fiona O'Malley.

The party's two remaining TDs, Mary Harney and Noel Grealish, entered into coalition government with Fianna Fáil and the Green Party in the 30th Dáil. The party never recovered from this electoral collapse. On 8 November 2008, with all parliamentary members (two TDs and two Senators) and founder Desmond O'Malley united in the opinion that the party was no longer politically viable, delegates to a special conference in Mullingar voted by 201 votes to 161 to bring the Progressive Democrats to an end. In January 2009 the party was still operating and in receipt of state funding, including a Party Leader's Allowance paid to Minister Mary Harney, but had ceased to receive funding by the following June. In March 2009, Noel Grealish became caretaker leader after Cannon's decision to join Fine Gael, and he retained the role for the remaining months of the party's existence.

The archives of the Progressive Democrats party were presented to University College Dublin on 10 June 2009. At least 20 former Progressive Democrats councillors won seats on county, city and town councils at the 2009 local elections. Some were elected as Fine Gael candidates, some as Fianna Fáil and others as independents.

Later events
At the 2011 general election 11 former Progressive Democrats members stood as candidates for the Dáil in a country-wide spread of constituencies. Subsequently, three former PD members were elected. Mary Mitchell O'Connor (PD Councillor 2004–2008) was elected in Dún Laoghaire for Fine Gael, Ciarán Cannon (PD Senator 2007–2009 / party leader 2008–2009) was elected in Galway East for the same party, while Noel Grealish (PD TD 2002–2009 / caretaker party leader 2009) was re-elected as an independent TD for Galway West. Several ex-PD members stood for election to Seanad Éireann in 2011. The only successful candidature was that of Councillor Cáit Keane (FG), who had served on South Dublin County Council for the PDs between 1991 and 2008, and had stood for election in the Dublin South-Central constituency for the PDs in 1992, 1994 and 1997.

Ideology and policies
The Progressive Democrats were described as conservative liberals, liberal,   and classical liberal.

The party's economic policies were based on neoliberalism. They supported the freedom of private enterprise and the lowering of taxes. They generally favoured privatisation; for example, they supported the privatisation of the previously state-owned airline Aer Lingus and communications company Telecom Éireann. They were also part of the break-up of airports company Aer Rianta and unsuccessfully lobbied for a private, competing second terminal in Dublin Airport. As acting PD leader and Minister for Health, Mary Harney was involved in the controversial extension of private-sector influence in health care. She pursued a policy of co-location of private hospitals on public hospital grounds and is seen as sympathetic to the privatisation of health insurance. However, they opposed their coalition partner's plans to privatise airports company Aer Rianta on the grounds that a private monopoly would be worse than a public monopoly.

The party was a strong supporter of low taxation. As the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) stated in 2002: "On balance, budgets over the past 10 to 20 years have been more favourable to high income groups than low income groups, but particularly so during periods of high growth". While the party was in government since 1997, the lower rate of income tax fell from 26% to 20% and the upper rate from 48% to 41%.

They supported low corporation tax because they believe it encouraged business growth and enabled private enterprise to be rewarded. The party often claimed these policies were in part responsible for the "Celtic Tiger" economy. Dermot McAleese, emeritus professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin, says that the emergence of the Progressive Democrats in 1985 may have had a more positive influence on the economy than some recognise. He argues the Irish low-tax, pro-business economy is based in large part on Progressive Democrat policies. "They proved that there was a constituency for this, and they gave the intellectual power to it."

The party leaders rejected the idea that they are ruled by ideology alone. Former party leader Michael McDowell has said that he sees liberalism as not being on the left-right spectrum as it is a mix of the ideals of both. Mary Harney, on becoming health minister said "I don't get my politics from any ideology, I get it from my experience and common sense". Yet Harney was a controversial minister who attempted to extend private influence in the health service and McDowell's campaign in the general election included particularly strong attacks on Irish left-wing parties.

Despite having in its ranks the openly gay Colm O'Gorman, the Progressive Democrats did not support same-sex marriage. Instead, they claimed to propose legislating for civil union; however attempts by the Labour Party to legislate for civil unions in the previous Dáil had been forestalled by PD Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell, due to his insistence that non-sex relationships be recognised too. The Progressive Democrats again voted down the same bill in the current Dáil.

Both Progressive Democrats and other commentators have suggested that the party had a greater influence on government policy since 1997 than might be expected from its size. This belief appears to have some basis – as of September 2004 the party controlled two of the most important cabinet positions (Justice and Health), despite having less than one-tenth of the seats of its coalition partner Fianna Fáil.

In a 2000 speech to the American Bar Association, the then party leader Mary Harney appeared to express a desire that Ireland become "closer to Boston than Berlin", adopting US free-market models for economic development, health, education, and other services rather than European Continental models because she believed that while continental countries (such as Germany and France) have more equality, they had bad economies and high unemployment.

However, in the midst of the ongoing Irish financial crisis, many opponents began to question the legacy of the Progressive Democrats. In a review of the Department of Finance Robert Wright, a Canadian economist, singled out the policies of the PD's and Fianna Fáil's 2002 election manifestos as contributing significantly to the 2008 property market crash.

Deputy leader

 * Michael Keating (1986–1989)
 * Pearse Wyse (1989–1992)
 * Pat Cox (1992–1994)
 * Liz O'Donnell (2006–2007)
 * Noel Grealish (2007–2009)

President

 * Michael McDowell (2002–2006)
 * Tom Parlon (2006–2007)

title: Progressive Democrats