Sharon Higgins

Class of '74 was a secondary school-based, daily soap opera produced by the Reg Grundy Organisation and screened on the Seven Network in Australia starting March 1974. The main characters were a mix of teachers and other school personnel, and students. The series was aimed at a teenage audience. Each episode was 30 minutes; five episodes each week were broadcast, stripped across week nights in an early evening timeslot. The series was renamed Class of '75 for its second and final year. It also switched from black and white to colour during its second year on air.

A group of Australian SAS regiment soldiers are deployed to Vietnam around 1967/8 and encounter the realities of war, from the numbing boredom of camp life and long range patrols, raids and ambushes where nothing happens, to the the terror of enduring mortar barrages from an unseen enemy. Men die and are crippled in combat by firefights and booby traps, soldiers kill and capture the enemy, gather intelligence and retake ground only to cede it again whilst battling against the bureaucracy and obstinacy of the conventional military hierarchy. In the end they return to civilization, forever changed by their experiences but glad to return to the life they once knew.