The Last Anniversary, Australian series from a novel by Liane Moriarty

The Last Anniversary is a new favorite for me. I always enjoy books and series from Liane Moriarty, and this one was outstanding. It’s a story about family, the resilience of women, and finding love.

The Last Anniversary features a large extended family who all live on an island in New South Wales. The family matriarch Connie (Angela Punch McGregor, with Elizabeth Cullen as young Connie) dies and leaves her house to a woman who only visited there once, Sophie (Teresa Palmer). The whole family is thrown into turmoil. Sophie is a disorganized journalist. At 39, she’s just realizing she desperately wants to be a mother, but she has no man.

Sophie’s looking for love, she needs a good story, and she lands in this place that is all about story but full of unavailable men.

Sophie first visited the island with Thomas (Charlie Garber) who is now married to someone else and has a child. While there, she clicked with Connie.

This family has lived for decades on the mystery story about an abandoned baby found on their island. They offer tours of the cabin where the baby was found and each year host a big anniversary party to celebrate the day the baby was found.

That baby, Enigma (Helen Thomson), is now a grown woman who leads the tours to her birthplace. She was raised as part of the family and has added a daughter Grace (Claude Scott-Mitchell) and a grandson named Ollie to the family group. Grace is married to Callum (Uli Latukefu). Grace is a children’s book author. She’s struggling with post natal depression.

Several years ago, Sophie had a hot thing with Callum in Thailand. They agree to pretend they don’t know each other now, but both remember the affair vividly.

Rose (Miranda Richardson and young Rose Josephine Blazier) was with her sister Connie when baby Enigma was found. Rose is part of the mystery but tries to stay removed from the whole thing. The only two people who really know what happened are Connie and Rose. Connie is gone and Rose is not talking. Miranda Richardson did such a beautiful job with this part. She had to be stoic and subtle with her emotions, but she conveyed so much.

Margie (Susan Prior) and Ron (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) are a couple. Their daughter Veronika (Danielle Macdonald) lives with them. Son Thomas is around temporarily, too. Veronika knew Sophie in college, but doesn’t especially like the idea of her having all Connie’s things. She wants to do a podcast on the family business, the mystery of the abandoned baby, so she warms up to Sophie because of her journalistic skills.

If you’re familiar with work by Liane Moriarty, you know she uses a lot of flashbacks to revisit the same events again and again. With each return look, some new detail, some new secret is revealed. In the flashbacks, we meet Alice (Ines English), who the family lore says gave birth to Enigma and then disappeared along with her husband Jack. This is the heart of the family mystery. What happened to Alice and Jack? There are many photos of Alice and Connie from those days, along with photos of baby Enigma as she was adopted into the family. Alice was beautiful. Exotic. One flashback shows her twirling seductively in a flowing white dress and provides the first hints as to the secrets in the story.

Thematically, the series deals with the crap women have to endure and how they survive in spite of it. There are also strong threads of belonging, family loyalty, and love. Finally, there’s a message of cherishing love in whatever form you find it.

This series only has six episodes, but manages to uncover a number of family secrets in that time. The characters were well written, the reveals were carefully controlled, and the pacing was perfect. Interest never flags in this series. I enjoyed every minute of The Last Anniversary.

I got a big kick out of the 10 second appearance in the story by a favorite of mine, Danielle Cormack. I liked how LGBTQ themes were brought gently into the story. The island and the river it sits in are beautiful. The music choices were excellent.

The next to the last scene in the series when Sophie returns to the island and all the women in the family are on the dock waiting for her really touched me, really spoke to me. Women’s solidarity and women supporting each other is the reason for this website and a key factor in my ability to live happily. I loved the ending.

The full series can be seen now on AMC+.