Career advice: Reimagining Australian literary classic My Brilliant Career for the Netflix generation

Some novels can’t be contained by a two-hour feature film – and some protagonists won’t be.

My Brilliant Career, the 1901 Australian novel by Miles Franklin, has already been adapted for the screen as a 1979 movie starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. And now the classic story and its exuberant central character, the headstrong and indefatigable Sybylla Melvyn, have been reimagined as a six-part drama for Netflix.

The story follows Sybylla, a young woman from a poor rural family sent to live with her wealthy grandmother in the hope she’ll make a good match and secure her family’s future. But Sybylla has other plans: she wants to write, and she’s prepared to defy every expectation placed on her to get there.

Philippa Northeast steps into the role of Sybylla with boundless energy and charm, starring alongside Christopher Chung, Jake Dunn, Kate Mulvany, Anna Chancellor, Genevieve O’Reilly and Sherry-Lee Watson.

Following the show’s release on Netflix earlier this month, I spoke to executive producer Chloe Rickard, director Alyssa McClelland and writer Liz Doran about making the series. They reflect on what the novel meant to them growing up, how they modernised its portrayal of Australia, and why an original whistle became the sound of Sybylla herself.

They also reveal:
⦁ How Rickard secured the rights to Franklin’s novel, and how Doran came to write the adaptation
⦁ What impact the original novel had on Rickard and McClelland when they first read it
⦁ Why Doran believes the book’s central themes remain “timeless” for contemporary audiences
⦁ What anachronisms or gaps Doran identified in the original novel, and how the writers room addressed them
⦁ Why it was important to the creative team to tell the story through a “female gaze”
⦁ McClelland’s approach to portraying the Australian landscape differently from typical depictions in Australian film and TV
⦁ Which visual influences shaped the show’s look
⦁ The impact of British colonial customs on Australian society at the time, particularly through costume
⦁ McClelland’s use of different camera techniques to distinguish Sybylla’s freedom from the more rigid conventions of the period