From Strength to Strength meets The Bean Patch as a city girl turned bush wife faces a battle to survive in an alien land she grows to love. When she is six, Anne Gorman's family falls apart. Her mother has a breakdown - the fallout of thirteen pregnancies, the death of two children and the struggle to survive during the Great Depression. When her devout Catholic mother smashes a statue of the Virgin Mary, her punishment is to be locked up and given shock treatment. Her children are placed in a convent where they wait in vain to be rescued by their parents. Anne doesn't see her beloved father again until years later when he is dying. After his death, her mother is released to mend her broken family. Anne's determination to escape her fate fires her ambition to find a better life. Education is her passport to freedom and after graduating from university, she is ready to take on the world. But her grand plans come unstuck when she falls in love. Marrying a farmer and becoming a mother to five children is a life she had never imagined. Yet in this alien landscape she finds love and a sense of belonging. But when Anne's husband becomes suddenly gravely ill, she has to battle to keep the property afloat and bring up her children alone. Against a backdrop of historic change, from the Second World War to Vietnam to the sexual and political revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, a uncertain young girl becomes a women of substance.
