From fried liver to Federation, Australia in the 1900s was a different place - or was it?

"We were kind of looking at each other going, oh well let's go get the newspaper," says Carol, matriarch of the Sydney family the ABC has sent back in time, as it were, for the second series of Back in Time for Dinner.

In 2018 we first met the Ferrones - Carol and Peter and their children Julian, now 19, Sienna, 16, and Olivia, 12 - when they were sent back to 1950, travelling in decades to the present day, experiencing life as a family in each relevant decade.

Now they've been sent back even further, starting in 1900 in a country where the white man rules to the exclusion of the indigenous population, horse-drawn vehicles rule the streets and male breadwinners rule the family.

And ironically, it's a decade that's eerily similar in a lot of ways to 2020.

One of the first things host Annabel Crabb hands over to the Ferrones is a handful of torn up newspaper to be used in the outdoor toilet; there's talk of bubonic plague which hit Sydney in 1900 and the family seeks shelter in the country outside of Sydney; second episode in and the Spanish flu is rampant; food, here rabbits and ice, is being home delivered.

"The parallels to how we're living now are just extraordinary," says Crabb.

"We filmed during the bushfire season over Christmas late 2019 and early 2020, we had it all in the can before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, we thought the bushfires were the big thing we were dealing with as a production.

"The show has seen a lot of bizarre world events but we had no idea when we were making jokes about toilet paper that within a couple of months of filming we'd see people selling it on ebay at an elevated price."

Ferrone says her typical suburban family felt well prepared for lockdown when it hit, thanks to their experience on the show.

"We had a chuckle about the toilet paper thing," she says.

"And there was this sense of deja vu when we went into lockdown here in Sydney, it was mid March, we got stuck into the garden, my garden looks fantastic at the moment, all the things we did at the country home we've taken a lot from that and used our time here together.

"Even to the details of board games, all the board games Olivia played on set were gifted to her so we've been playing Mousetrap and Scrabble ... a year ago she would just look at me and go, 'where's my iPad?'"

So what made the Ferrones think about a second series?

It's not the easiest of reality programs, if that's how it could be defined.

In the course of living each decade - the family actually lived in the house 24/7 - they're subjected to all sorts of things, facing issues they may have only read about in history books; eating foods such as minced kidneys, dripping biscuits and fried liver; having no access to modern-day household appliances, or indeed such things as mobile phones or social media or television, one of the biggest bugbears of the children.

"We kind of had no idea what was in store the first time around," says Ferrone.

"I just thought at the very least we're going to have a great seven part home video.

"But there was unfinished business. It's all well and good to live and educate the audience about the last 50-60 years but what happened before then, what happened to get Australia to where we are today?"

It was a question she admits she wasn't ready to hear the answer to in a lot of ways.

The second episode is the 1910s and as the family prepares to send son Julian off to fight in World War One, they get a visit from indigenous man Joe Flick who tells the harrowing story of his grandfather Mick and how he was treated when he returned home to Australia.

"I can't talk about that story without tearing up even now," Ferrone says.

"I really struggled through that whole scene, I struggle with people being treated differently because of the colour of their skin.

"These indigenous Australian boys went off to war thinking if I do my bit for the country we'll be treated better when we come home and they weren't."

Throw in the White Australia Policy, Federation, the suffragette movement, the Great Depression, the internment of Italians during the 1940s, a couple of world wars, and there's plenty to think about.

"You're always affected by things you didn't imagine in history or things that don't necessarily fit with how things were taught," says Crabb.

"The Australian notion of World War One is such a prominent one, the role Gallipoli plays in our assessment of who we are as people ... but to think there were soldiers who came back from that war to face a completely different treatment is repellent, it strikes very deeply at that notion of national self image."

Another scene Ferrone struggled with was sending Julian off to fight in the Great War.

Her 19-year-old son, who in real life studies business at university and is a self-confessed history buff, volunteers to fight; in the previous episode he struggled to ride a bicycle.

"It's not about acting," she says.

"I really tried to get into the mindset of a women of the time and ask myself how would she be feeling.

"That day we got up and I knew we were sending him away, the reality of it, the idea that I might never see my son again, really hit me.

"And it still happens today, there are wars going on, sons and daughters are still being sent away.

"What made it hard was that Julian did leave the set for a period of time, he wrote letters home, the whole idea of it really broke my heart."

There were plenty of times she watched her children struggle, whether at the dinner table or during the depression but nevertheless Ferrone is grateful her family has had this opportunity.

"The one thing we've all learned is to have a greater appreciation of how privileged our real life is," she says.

"We've become closer as a family, we've learned to find joy in the little things, when you take away all the distractions, social media, phones, laptop, there are three televisions in our house.

"When you take all that away it kind of forces you to spend time together and look at what's important."

She said it's made her more patient as a parent, that she's realised how resilient she is, and given her a deeper gratitude for what she has in her life.

Crabb says being involved in the show has given her some of that same gratitude.

I ask her, she of the fabulous vintage dresses and timeless charm, what decade she would like to head back to.

"I'm a lady of the present," she says.

"I love reading about all this stuff and seeing it play out but I wouldn't want to go back there, maybe for the reasons Carol found frustrating in the role of woman, wife and mother.

"I suppose one of the things I'm really grateful for is that I was born when I was born and as a working mother I get to do a lot of things, juggle a lot of things, that I would never have been able to do if I was born 20, even 10, years earlier because I rely on technology to allow me to do my job remotely and that's allowed me to have a fulfilling career while also having three kids."

For Ferrone, an executive coach in her real life, it was the changing role of women which in part drew her to the series in the first place.

"The underlying thing for me was that changing role of women through the decades," she says.

"In season one I spent the first three decades complaining that I couldn't go to work, this season I have to go to work because my men are either in jail or at war or unemployed and if we want to keep the roof over our head it's up to the girls to step up and do what we have to do."

She found it hard, particularly in this series to watch her eldest daughter Sienna struggle to find her place in the world, knowing, as Sienna herself put it in one episode, that basically she was just a wife and mother in training.

Opportunities for women were built around the idea of maintaining a good reputation to find a good husband, there was a lack of freedom and choice.

"If I'm really honest Sienna was the one member of the family who wasn't keen on coming back for season two, she found the life of a young woman, even in series one, quite different from the life she lives now."

For Crabb, these are the elements that make the show what it is, looking at how events and issues shape the lives of individuals first, and then the nation.

"I'm absolutely there for anything which helps explain history in a digestible way," she says.

"I really love the idea of looking at historical events through the prism of the little, the domestic details, we're all people and our individual lives are shaped by these extraordinary things that happen beyond our control.

"I mean there's no better demonstration of that than what we're all living through right now. I keep saying to my kids, this is a huge historical event, you are part of this enormous kink in the world's history, to them it's just their life, this is what life is like.

"The further you go back in history the more you wonder what the experience was like for ordinary people in those times."

"One of the reasons I was super keen to come back for this series is I'm absolutely fascinated by that period of history in this country, from Federation to World War Two.

"So many things happened on this continent, some of which are thought about all the time, some of which we're only finding out about now.

"One of the big priorities of the series was to look at history in the way it was conventionally taught, that is from a white stand point, and look at how those events affected indigenous people on this continent, which has been a hidden story for much of the conventional teaching of history."

And then, of course, there's the food. The show is called Further Back in Time for Dinner. Each episode pivots around a couple of meals, from a controversial calf's head in episode one, used to make mock turtle soup, to dainty cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches in the 1920s, to roasted wallaby and Vegemite roast beef.

"I'm more convinced than ever that what you eat reflects what's going on in your life," says Crabb.

"Food trends really are an expression of what's available to us as a people at that moment.

"Are we interested in conserving food, or do we feel profligate enough to serve microfood and fancy stuff and throw away the rest? Are we using the eyeballs of the sheep because we're so worried we're never going to get another bite to eat?

"We fed them some dreadful stuff."

For Ferrone, the kitchen was an interesting experience.

"All I know is I never want to cook another calf's head in my life ... or use newspaper in the toilet."