What to watch: 20 Australian TV shows and movies to stream this long weekend

One excellent use for the Australia Day long weekend is to appreciate how rich and diverse this country’s creative screen talents have been. Even with classics such as Babe and Gallipoli unavailable on streaming platforms, a scripted sampling of 10 exceptional series and 10 memorable movies provides more than enough outstanding viewing options. How a country depicts itself on screen allows for entertainment and a deeper sense of understanding – this is who we were, this is who we are, this is who might be. From romantic comedies to crime thrillers, let’s start watching.

Boy Swallows Universe

Trent Dalton’s best-selling coming-of-age novel received a terrific adaptation, capturing its eclectic mix of familial longing, larrikin dedication, thongs-and-all magic realism, and 1980s Brisbane suburban crims. The seven episodes have a vivid energy, suiting the quests that fall upon the slender shoulders of 13-year-old Eli Bell (Felix Cameron) after his step-father (Travis Fimmel) is kidnapped by unhappy associates, plus a whiplash outlook that dashes together adolescent hope and adult realities. Netflix

Bump

Now that it’s concluded after five entertaining seasons, this cycle-of-life Australian comedy-drama stands up as a genuinely diverse body of work. Beginning with a surprise high school pregnancy that intertwined two students and their distinctly different families, Kelsey Munro and Claudia Karvan’s series was a paean to how we can adapt to – and grow from – life’s unexpected curves. Set in a multicultural inner-city Sydney, Bump could be farcical, endearing or heartbreaking. Can’t emphasise that last one enough. Stan*

Deadloch

Swearing has always been a distinct part of the Australian vernacular but has it ever had a practitioner as fluent as Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), the rattled Darwin homicide detective sent to a small Tasmanian town to help local police chief Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) with a macabre murder? A foul-mouthed and feminist screwball take on the classic procedural from Get Krack!n creators Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, the show is absurd and compelling. Amazon Prime Video

Fake

Asher Keddie and David Wenham are aces together in this dating app-era drama about a journalist (Keddie) who matches with a wealthy grazier and investor (Wenham) and slowly starts to lose her bearings. Told with scrupulous attention to the needs the characters steadily reveal, it’s a study of deception and cruelty where the accumulated cost is harrowing and enthralling. Paramount+

Firebite

Still not enough people know that one of the best shows in the vampire genre is this 2021 Australian series. Firebite puts an Indigenous spin on blood-sucking horror as an outback Aboriginal community is protected by a wayward father and his teenage daughter (Rob Collins and Shantae Barnes-Cowan) from the vampires who’ve been proliferating since they arrived with the First Fleet. Creators Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher go for pulpy fight scenes, derisive humour, and boomerang kills. SBS on Demand

Fisk

The comedy that single-handedly created a demand for brown suits, the idiosyncratic daily mishaps, and the small but satisfying victories of starting-life-over-in-Melbourne solicitor Helen Tudor-Fisk (co-creator Kitty Flanagan) make for a straight-faced but genuinely funny slice of office life. One way to measure how enjoyable this show is? The stacked list of Australian comic talent queueing up for a guest slot. ABC iview, Netflix

Love Me

This drama about a family whose individual members, whatever the generation, have to come to grips with what they really want from life, remains underappreciated. In outline, it’s tidy and sometimes even overly rewarding – when done-with-dating doctor Clare (Bojana Novakovic) meets the right man he’s a charming former model – but its depiction of the fractious family’s shared dynamic is sharply authentic. If you’ve ever been at a family get-together that went off the rails, this show knows your pain. Binge, ABC iview

Mr Inbetween

A criminal enforcer and occasional hitman who is trying to lovingly co-parent his young daughter sounds like an incongruous mix, but over three seasons, this black comedy from creator and star Scott Ryan hit all kinds of nerves. Ryan’s former soldier Ray Shoesmith is a laconic lens to examine violence’s corrosive hold, the struggle to escape past trauma, and the healing powers of the humble “dimmie”. Binge

New Gold Mountain

Set on the Ballarat goldfields in 1857, this limited series offers a revisionist take on Australia’s colonial history. When a woman is found murdered, and tensions run violently high, it falls upon two outsiders to seek answers. Leung Wei Shing (Yoson An) is the “head man” of the segregated Chinese miners, while Belle Roberts (Alyssa Sutherland) is a widow left with a failing newspaper. Neither knows what they’re in for. SBS on Demand

SeaChange

“Charming” can be apologetic praise at times, but it’s an essential element in this comic drama about a harried city lawyer (Sigrid Thornton) who relocates to a country town with her children to serve as the local magistrate and gets her sensibilities casually shocked back into shape. Given it ran from 1998 to 2000 (we will ignore the 2019 revival), SeaChange qualifies as a period piece, but it’s easy-going humour and underlying outlook have barely aged. ABC iview

Ali’s Wedding

This 2016 romantic comedy continues the Australian tradition of crowd-pleasing movies. Based on the real-life misadventures of co-writer Osamah Sami, it follows a misguided young Muslim man (Sami) who, to please his cleric father (Don Hany) and expectant community, fakes his acceptance into a medical degree. Jeffrey Walker’s film is a comic broadside against racial division, a tender love story, an exchange between cultures, and a comedy of poor judgment grown to alarming proportions. Netflix, SBS on Demand, Stan

Animal Kingdom

An unrelentingly tense crime thriller that serves as a bloody coming-of-age tale, David Michod’s astonishing debut follows a teenage boy (James Frecheville) who goes to live with his crime matriarch grandmother (Jacki Weaver) just as his uncle (Ben Mendelsohn, never more intense) becomes violently unhinged. Suffused with dread and told with cruel economy – an entire court case is encapsulated by a single brief shot – the film feels inevitable. There’s no escaping it. Netflix, SBS on Demand

The Castle

“Tell him he’s dreamin’.” “This is going straight to the poolroom”. Based on the catchphrases that this underdog comedy has lodged in the national lexicon, it is one of the most popular Australian films of all time. A low-budget shift into feature films by the Working Dog crew, it tells the story of a suburban everyman (Michael Caton) fighting the government’s compulsory acquisition order of his humble home. Clockwork precise, but also genuinely affectionate. Stan

Chopper

Writer/director Andrew Dominik and star Eric Bana rightly launched themselves into Hollywood careers in 2000 with this crafty, stylised crime drama based on the violence-laden life of Melbourne criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. Now a cult classic, it’s a film worth watching more than once – the insolent assaults and mordant logic initially still exude a deranged charisma, but seen again, there is a subtle judgment on Chopper’s chaotic actions. Stan

The Dry

Two decades after Chopper, Eric Bana gave a contrasting lead performance in Robert Connolly’s outback murder mystery, playing an uneasy police officer who returns to the country town that haunts him to investigate a monstrous crime supposedly committed by his former best friend. Set during an inescapable drought, it’s a masterful film of fraying, fearful people. Heroism is hardly the default setting of Bana’s Aaron Falk, adding to the tension. Amazon Prime Video, Binge, Netflix, Stan

High Tide

Gillian Armstrong’s storied career has many highs, beginning with her landmark 1979 debut, My Brilliant Career, but it’s this 1987 mother-daughter drama that I now value most. Judy Davis’s musician washes up in a NSW coastal town, only to realise that a local teen (Claudia Karvan, in her debut) is the child she gave up at birth. The film is deeply observed and prescient – it foretells the style and obsessions of many prominent 21st-century independent movies. Amazon Prime Video

Lantana

The way men and women related to each other, full of friction and unfulfilled need, has never been felt in an Australian film like they were depicted in Ray Lawrence’s 2001 hit. Spread across Sydney’s disparate suburbs, it’s a film of mysteries, whether emotional or investigative, brought to life by an ensemble cast featuring Anthony LaPaglia, Barbara Hershey, Geoffrey Rush, and Rachael Blake. The movie’s conflicts are timeless. Netflix, Stan

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

George Miller has made the definitive automotive action film in multiple centuries. Long before the elegiac mayhem of Mad Max: Fury Road, this 1981 post-apocalyptic rampage through the outback was a masterpiece of anti-hero sparseness and scything imagery. Mel Gibson is the loner joining forces with a valuable outpost besieged by a vehicular barbarian horde – shout out to Kjell Nilsson’s Lord Humungus – in a movie rife with accelerants. Binge

Muriel’s Wedding

The setting of Porpoise Spit is fictional, but the way its residents hold back Toni Collette’s awkward heroine, Muriel Heslop, feels all too real for everyone who sees P.J. Hogan’s idiosyncratic 1994 comedy. A box-office hit, the film is a celebration of female solidarity sparked by Rachel Griffiths’ defiant Rhonda, with a spiky soulfulness that’s become steadily more apparent as the story’s backbone. Amazon Prime Video, Binge, Stan

Mystery Road

A modern western so primal and powerful that it launched a film and television franchise, Ivan Sen’s 2013 original feature stars Aaron Pedersen as Jay Swann, an Aboriginal police detective divided from his outback community and colleagues. Jay stoically investigates a teenage girl’s murder, resulting in a quest where every intimidating encounter is irrevocably stained by historic wrongdoing. The finale is a masterclass in unrelenting tension. ABC iview, Stan

What do you love? Tell us your favourite Australian series or movie and where we can watch it in the comments below.

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Tell ’em you’re streaming: 20 Australian TV shows and movies to watch this long weekend

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