The 1950s. Boring? Hardly. An influx of European refugees, stirrings of feminism, and the threat of a third world war were remaking Australia. As the Cold War chilled, inside a Melbourne house a young girl was caught in the crossfire of domestic conflict amid the clashing political and social values of her autocratic grandmother, her self-denying mother, and her glamorous aunt; three women who presented very different models of womanhood.