Bush Wees and Rod Stewart: The Outback Reimagined as a Teenage Fever Dream
Ten minutes in, and the corsets are already off. Not literally—but spiritually. Netflix’s My Brilliant Career opens with smutty performance poetry and a Divinyls needle drop, and by the first episode’s end, our heroine Sybylla Melvin has squatted for a bush wee and flashed her knickers at a drawing room of stunned toffs, all to a Rod Stewart cover. This is not your grandmother’s period drama. It is a fever dream set in the Australian outback, and it is gloriously, unapologetically bonkers.
For those who haven’t yet booked passage to this particular corner of literary heritage, Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel—written when she was a teenager, published when she was 21—is the story of Sybylla, a budding bush poet trapped between the drudgery of rural poverty and the suffocating propriety of colonial high society. It has been adapted before, most famously by Gillian Armstrong in 1979, with a young Judy Davis and Sam Neill. But this new version, starring the luminous Philippa Northeast, trades the sepia reverence for a raw, hormonal immediacy. “It reads like a teenager’s diary entry,” Northeast tells me, sitting in the Sir William Dixon Research Library at the State Library of New South Wales, where she came to channel the ghost of Franklin herself. “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.”
The setting is the Australian bush, but not the one of billabongs and swagmen. This is a landscape of dust and longing, of heat that presses against your skin, of isolation that makes every glance feel electric. Northeast spent hours in the library’s archives, reading Franklin’s diaries, trying to get closer to the woman behind the story—a woman who protested that her novel was not autobiographical, even as she poured her own hunger for a life of letters into Sybylla’s voice. The result is a performance that feels less like acting and more like possession. Sybylla is stubborn, awkward, brilliant, insufferable, and utterly magnetic—a teenager in the truest sense, which is to say a hurricane of want and fear and defiance.
What makes this adaptation so thrilling is its refusal to treat the past as a museum piece. The alfresco fingerbang that shocks in episode four is not gratuitous; it is a declaration that these characters have bodies, and that those bodies matter. In an era when heritage dramas often feel like architectural tours with dialogue, My Brilliant Career reminds us that history was lived, not curated. The costume department has done its work—the lace, the gloves, the high-collared dresses—but the camera lingers on flushed cheeks and bitten lips, on the way a hand hovers too long on a waist. It is Jane Austen by way of Euphoria, and it works.
There is also a deeper resonance for travellers of the mind. Franklin wrote her novel in the 1890s, a time when Australia was still defining itself as a nation, and her heroine’s struggle to choose art over marriage, independence over security, feels eerily contemporary. The series taps into a global appetite for stories that subvert the colonial gaze—stories that let the colonised speak, and the colonisers squirm. It is no accident that Netflix, with its 260 million subscribers, has chosen this moment to resurrect Sybylla. The world is hungry for narratives that challenge the old order, and what better vehicle than a teenage girl who refuses to be tamed by either the bush or the ballroom?
For the luxury traveller, this is an invitation to see Australia anew—not as a stopover before the Great Barrier Reef or a detour to a vineyard, but as a landscape of the imagination. The State Library of New South Wales, where Northeast did her research, is itself a pilgrimage site for literary wanderers, its sandstone walls holding the diaries and letters of a woman who dreamed of a life beyond her station. And the bush, that vast and unforgiving terrain, is the real star of the show: a place where the sky goes on forever and the earth feels both ancient and newborn. It is the ultimate luxury, in a way—not a private island or a monogrammed suite, but the rarest commodity of all: a story that makes you feel alive.
Where do the wealthy go next? Not to the coast, but inland. Not to the known, but to the raw. My Brilliant Career is a siren call to those who have tired of the same five-star itineraries and crave something with grit and soul. It suggests that the next great luxury destination is not a place on a map but a state of mind—a willingness to be surprised, to be shocked, to be moved. And if that means a bush wee and a Rod Stewart cover, so be it. The world is about to fall in love with Sybylla Melvin, and honestly, how could it not?
