Ambition, Australia, and the problem with behaving yourself.
I may be Canadian, but I have long been an absolute sucker for Australian film and television, from Indigenous storytelling and historical dramas to comedies and smaller character pieces. Something about the combination of dry humour, cultural specificity, eccentric personalities and landscapes stretching forever consistently works on me, which meant Netflix's new adaptation of Miles Franklin's MY BRILLIANT CAREER already had a considerable advantage before Sybylla Melvyn even appeared.
That enthusiasm only carries something so far when MY BRILLIANT CAREER occupies particularly important territory within Australian culture. Franklin published her semi-autobiographical novel in 1901, while Gillian Armstrong's 1979 adaptation became a landmark through Judy Davis's performance and its refusal to domesticate Sybylla. Any new version consequently inherits both an extraordinary protagonist and the intimidating responsibility of finding something worthwhile to say about a story already told exceptionally well.
Liz Doran's six-part reimagining responds by refusing to behave like a museum piece, embracing contemporary music, heightened romance, playful humour and an expanded world around Sybylla. It occasionally tries too hard to remind us how modern it intends to be, but there is infectious confidence to the approach, especially when the woman at its centre was already challenging expectations more than a century before anybody decided she needed updating.
Philippa Northeast is the reason nearly all of it works, delivering a performance so energetic that Sybylla seems incapable of occupying a room without changing its atmosphere. Northeast approaches her not as a feminist symbol conveniently possessing all the correct opinions, but as a funny, impulsive, stubborn and occasionally infuriating young woman whose certainty about what she does not want is considerably stronger than her understanding of what comes next.
Sybylla wants to write, although wanting something and possessing the freedom to pursue it are entirely different matters when her family is barely surviving at Possum Gully. Her father's financial failures leave artistic ambition looking almost indulgent beside practical responsibilities, giving Sybylla's rebellion economic consequences the series wisely refuses to ignore. Rejecting convention becomes considerably harder when marriage offers the security that pursuing an uncertain creative future cannot guarantee.
Her arrival at Caddagat replaces financial hardship with beautiful clothes, social gatherings and wealth, but simply exchanges one collection of expectations for another. Anna Chancellor makes Mrs Bossier more interesting than a straightforward authoritarian grandmother, genuinely believing marriage and social position will protect her granddaughter from hardship. Sybylla is consequently not rejecting cruelty so much as another woman's sincere definition of security, happiness and what a successful female adulthood should resemble.
Christopher Chung's Harry Beecham makes that conflict considerably more difficult because he is precisely the kind of romantic prospect capable of making convention look attractive. Chung possesses wonderful chemistry with Northeast, while Harry remains kind and appealing enough that Sybylla cannot simply dismiss him. If her choice were between an awful husband and artistic freedom, there would barely be a choice, whereas loving Harry forces her to consider what she might genuinely sacrifice.
That relationship works because the series separates romantic feeling from permanent obligation, allowing Sybylla to love somebody without automatically accepting the future attached to him. The adaptation emphasizes romance more heavily than Franklin's story necessarily requires, but its strongest romantic material recognizes that Sybylla's dilemma is not whether she can love another person. It is whether love should possess veto power over the person she intends to become.
Kate Mulvany's wonderfully eccentric Augusta offers Sybylla something arguably more valuable than romantic validation: evidence that an unconventional adulthood is possible. Her encouragement matters because she treats writing as a legitimate vocation rather than an adolescent indulgence, while Sherry-Lee Watson's Nell expands the series beyond Sybylla's individual rebellion by examining how race, gender and class determine whose ambitions receive recognition and whose can simply be overlooked.
That expanded First Nations perspective is particularly worthwhile because Australian historical drama cannot seriously interrogate national identity while treating Indigenous Australians as invisible. The execution occasionally reveals the adaptation's twenty-first-century consciousness too explicitly, particularly when dialogue announces ideas already communicated through character and circumstance, but the underlying point remains valuable: the society restricting Sybylla's freedom was restricting many other Australians simultaneously, and those restrictions were never remotely equal.
Visually, MY BRILLIANT CAREER makes glorious use of South Australia without reducing its landscapes to tourism advertising. Physical openness repeatedly emphasizes Sybylla's social confinement, as she rides across enormous stretches of countryside while everyone around her imagines an increasingly narrow future on her behalf. Possum Gully can appear beautiful while remaining economically punishing, just as Caddagat can provide extraordinary comfort while introducing subtler restrictions, ensuring beauty and freedom never become synonyms.
The costumes and production design reinforce that contradiction during Sybylla's transformation at Caddagat, where there is obvious pleasure in watching her become increasingly polished while the personality underneath remains gloriously resistant to refinement. Northeast retains Sybylla's physical restlessness and irreverence regardless of what she wears, creating a comic tension between elegant presentation and stubborn individuality that makes respectability resemble another costume she has temporarily agreed to try on.
The contemporary soundtrack will probably prove more divisive, deliberately colliding modern songs against a story unfolding around 1900. Sometimes the contrast gives the series exactly the mischievous energy it wants, while other choices unnecessarily remind viewers how modern this adaptation considers itself. Franklin created a heroine whose refusal to subordinate herself to marriage remains striking in 2026, meaning Sybylla hardly requires a contemporary soundtrack to certify her rebellious credentials.
Those modern flourishes nevertheless give this MY BRILLIANT CAREER an identity distinct from Armstrong's film rather than attempting to reproduce its achievements. The six-episode structure occasionally becomes crowded by romance, class, race, sexuality, colonialism and artistic identity, with some supporting threads receiving less development than they deserve, but I would rather watch an adaptation overflowing with curiosity about its world than one treating Franklin's material with excessively cautious reverence.
Most importantly, Northeast never mistakes independence for invulnerability, gradually revealing the uncertainty beneath Sybylla's declarations about becoming a writer. She believes she possesses something worth contributing to the world, but confidence cannot guarantee talent, publication or financial survival. Every rejection of a safer future therefore contains genuine risk, because Sybylla could sacrifice security for her brilliant career only to discover that the career never becomes particularly brilliant at all.
That possibility preserves the delicious irony of Franklin's title, since Sybylla effectively declares her importance before anybody else has reason to believe her. Her victory cannot depend upon eventually becoming successful, because freedom becomes meaningless if somebody is only entitled to pursue it after proving they will succeed. Her real struggle is therefore not career against romance, but determining who receives authorship over a future whose outcome remains completely uncertain.
There is something particularly satisfying about watching such an unapologetically Australian production receive a global platform without sanding away the cultural specificity that makes it interesting. As a Canadian watching from the other side of the world, that specificity is exactly what attracts me to Australian storytelling. I do not need its humour, history or landscapes translated into something generically international, because discovering another country's cultural texture is half the pleasure.
MY BRILLIANT CAREER ultimately works for the same reason Sybylla does, possessing too much personality to remain contained by expectations of what it should politely become. It can be overly modern, occasionally sentimental and narratively crowded, but it is also funny, gorgeous, romantic and genuinely interested in the relationship between freedom and security, while Northeast gives it a heroine gloriously imperfect enough to prevent its feminist ideas from becoming tidy slogans.
What stays with me is the idea that Sybylla's brilliant career does not actually need to become brilliant for her choice to matter. She might become an extraordinary writer, struggle for years or discover that the life she imagined looks completely different once she reaches it, but uncertainty is precisely what makes the decision hers. Security provides an answer, whereas independence provides only the right to discover one for herself.
That conviction felt radical when Franklin published her novel in 1901 and remains remarkably potent 125 years later. For somebody already predisposed to fall for Australian film and television, MY BRILLIANT CAREER was always going to be difficult to resist, but what kept me there was Sybylla herself, gloriously imperfect and impossible to domesticate, alongside Northeast's understanding that her greatest achievement is not becoming brilliant or proving everyone wrong, but remaining unmistakably herself.
