As promised, some more Hugo Weaving for you. Before he was in V For Vendetta, before he was in Lord of The Rings and The Matrix trilogies he was an Australian pioneeir.

Weaving played Richard Eastwick in the greatest mini-series I've ever seen, The Dirtwater Dynasty. This is the story of one man, Eastwick, from his life as a homeless urchin in England to the ancient patriarch of a vast Australian empire.

It is the first DVD disk, the first two episodes that impress me the most. Here Eastwick is the perfect Ayn Rand hero, he is the Howard Roark of The Outback. One individual, determined to stand up for himself against the forces of nature and the forces of other men.

He arrives in Australia with enough money to live for a week (which is more than I could say for myself...) and faces despair on striking out to the country to find no work, only abandoned dust and unimagined heat (been there too, done that). But Richard never gives up, he learns how to survive and his curious reasoning mind and determination allow him to gain and fight to keep advance after advance. When everyone else has given up he keeps going, proving his belief in himself well placed.

Eastwick embraces new technology, battles missionaries, droughts, family tragedy, and corrupt lawmen. This is just in the first two episodes. The remaining are about his family in changing times, the World Wars and the Great Depression. Richard the young hero seems to loose sight of his true goal in his fixation with building an empire, an Eastwick dynasty that his family can believe in as much as he. By the end of the series it seems that his origional ideal has decayed into a corruption, except that there is an unexpected final twist that saves the show.

Highly recommended.