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Within the first 10 minutes of My Brilliant Career, Netflix’s new adaptation of the classic Australian novel by Miles Franklin, there’s smutty performance poetry and a Divinyls needle drop that suggests it’s not going to be your standard turn-of-the-century period drama. By the end of the first episode – in which our teen heroine, Sybylla Melvin, pops a squat for a bush wee and flashes her knickers at a drawing room full of toffs while dancing to a Rod Stewart cover – you sense that anything could happen. And yet somehow, the alfresco fingerbang later in the series still surprises.
“It’s bonkers,” admits the show’s star Philippa Northeast, who plays Sybylla. “You really see this world through a teenage lens – which is true to Sybylla’s spirit and Miles’ age at the time she wrote the book … it reads like a teenager’s diary entry, pretty much.”
We’re talking in the Sir William Dixon Research Library within the State Library of New South Wales, where Northeast came to research for the role. Her preparations included reading Franklin’s diaries to get a closer sense of the woman behind the story that – despite the author’s protestations – was substantially inspired by her own life.
Netflix’s series is the latest in a string of adaptations of Franklin’s novel, which she wrote as a teenager and published in 1901 when she was just 21 years old. These include Gillian Armstrong’s internationally acclaimed 1979 film, starring a young Judy Davis and Sam Neill, and stage and musical versions.
“It is a timeless story; everything it speaks to is still relevant,” says Northeast, who follows in Davis’s weighty footsteps in portraying Sybylla, a budding bush poet and aspiring author. In Franklin’s book, she narrates her journey from an impoverished life of drudgery on the land towards artistic fulfilment and financial independence, by way of a string of torturous match-making attempts and marriage proposals.
“It’s about being a woman and trying to forge a creative life, and contending with society’s expectations,” says Northeast, who first encountered the book as a child and found it highly relatable when she rediscovered it as an adult. Having made her name with girl-next-door roles on shows including Home and Away, she struggled for years to land more complex parts. “When the way you feel rebels against those expectations, trying to carve a way forward can be incredibly frustrating – but also essential to your own survival.”
A rebellious spirit is the driving force of Netflix’s adaptation, created by an all-female team of writers, producers and directors. Their version of Sybylla dances with demon energy, falls flat on her face, screams at the open sky with frustration, goes goblin mode in her bedroom when confronted by a marriage ultimatum, and experiences her first oyster and orgasm as epiphanies. She’s wild, passionate and indomitable.
The soundtrack is an appropriately boisterous mix of female folk pop, glam rock and indie ranging from Wet Leg and Ecca Vandal tracks to in-scene covers performed by the likes of Thelma Plum and Isabella Manfredi, along with original tracks by Kate Miller-Heidke and Beckah Amani.
“We thought, we’re unashamedly going to make a show that is intended for women,” says Liz Doran, the show’s creator and lead writer.
Northeast, the engine of the series and barely off screen across its six episodes, gives a full-throttle performance, and embodies the messiness and awkwardness of teen girldom so convincingly that it’s hard to believe she is 31.
“Stepping into that teenage spirit again was probably the biggest challenge, after being conditioned by society, as a woman, to be polite and proper,” she says. “But I was very much encouraged and supported to rip into that and make the performance as messy as I thought it should be.”
This adaptation is easily the most ambitious to date; while it stays true to the marrow of the novel, it reimagines Sybylla’s main love interest, Harry Beecham, as Chinese-Australian (played by the extremely buff Slow Horses star Christopher Chung), and expands the story to include First Nations characters and storylines, and a gay subplot.
“When I read the book for the first time, all these thoughts just occurred quite naturally to me,” Doran says. “I was like, ‘Well, [this character] is gay.’”
When adding new characters, such as the ambitious Aboriginal stockwoman Nell (played by Sherry-Lee Watson), or significantly changing an existing character’s identity, as with Harry, the show’s diverse writers room “approached it from the perspective of: who is in this world; who is living in Australia in 1900, who wasn’t represented in the book”, Doran says. They then fleshed those characters out, giving them “story, agency, a life”.
“In Miles’s story, Harry’s a straight-up blokey member of the squattocracy. He’s not a very complex character. But we thought, what if Harry’s dad had married a Chinese woman? And Harry has grown up with all the trappings of being the wealthiest man in the district but he’s only accepted because he’s rich – once he loses all of that, he’s going to lose all his social currency. What does that mean for him? It makes him an interesting person for Sybylla to fall in love with, too.”
Chung says reading the script for the first time, he was struck by how “forward-thinking” it was. “It’s not colour-blind casting … and it’s not tokenism.”
We meet Harry in the first episode but it’s not until the second that his Chinese heritage is revealed, when Sybylla visits his home and his Aunt Augusta (Kate Mulvany) asks her to take her shoes off, to honour the house rules of his late Chinese mother. “It’s so true,” Chung says of this moment. “Every time I would go to my grandmother’s house, it was like, ‘Shoes off at the door.’ It’s just those little touches Liz managed to put so delicately through the script; nods to the heritage, but without making a point of othering him.”
Chung, who returned to Australia for the role after leaving for the UK in 2012, has spoken previously about the dearth of interesting parts for Asian actors: “This show is a really incredible example of how well the Australian industry is shifting towards … navigating inclusivity in a truthful way,” he says now. “My hope is that it continues to foster more work within Australia and show what is possible and what stories resonate with audiences.”
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My Brilliant Career launches on Netflix worldwide on 13 August
