This was the second year in a row that Austrian actor Christoph Waltz played a character called Stefan in a filmed production as he had played a character with the same first name in the previous year in the German film 'Das andere Leben' (aka 'The Other Life') (1987). Both titles were made for television.
This mini-series won an AWGIE Award for Best Original Drama.
This Australian mini-series won a Pater Award in 1989.
Writer of many numerous television mini-series, 'The Alien Years' (1988) was the final mini-series written by Peter Yeldham for about six years, until Yeldham's 'The Battlers' (1994) adaptation was produced.
'The Alien Years' (1988), an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television mini-series, followed ''hard on the screening of SBS's 'Always Afternoon' [1988],'' according to 'Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series' (1993) by Albert Moran. Both ''dealt in part with the imprisonment of Germans in Australia during World War I''. Both were 1988 releases on Australian television and both debuted their first episodes only about six weeks apart.