This Top End family drama will suck you in
It’s more surprising than I was prepared for, exasperating at times and, damn its soapy soul, wonderfully watchable. Anna Torv is the standout.
For kids of my generation, growing up in Melbourne’s satellite suburbs, sitting bored in our weatherboard state primary schools, still learning our tables by rote, and standing on a treeless asphalt playground singing the national anthem of a country 10,000 miles away, the Far North was a magical place. At least it was for me.
The name itself had aura, and romantic promise. An image drawn, maybe, from the novels of Ion Idriess or Frank Clune, or the paintings of Sidney Nolan or Russell Drysdale, offering images of the “essential Australia”, to those of us feeling stultifyingly suburban.
I loved the stories of brave settlers and pastoralists establishing some sort of life among the stunted waste of ant hills and hot red sand. The Far North then was still populated by men with a lust for adventure and fast money, the streets of its ramshackle towns filled with brothels, bars and gambling houses and days of occasional murder. Or so it seemed.
Then out of the blue comes Top End family drama Territory like a fevered dream, fulfilling every boy’s fantasy, even if the storyline is at times hard to grasp, with so many characters and their familial affiliations to identify. It’s more surprising than I was prepared for, exasperating at times and, damn its soapy soul, wonderfully watchable.
Territory is about well, territory, both the Top End itself, the unforgiving landscape against which the events of this rather dense story play out, but also the intellectual territory that destroys the Lawson family as it finds itself in a battle for succession. At stake is control over majestic Marianne Station. It’s a billion-dollar empire that traces its heritage back to 1891, and is still controlled by gun-toting patriarch Colin, known as “Pop”, played with gruff intensity by Robert Taylor.
What we have is a pulpy social melodrama built around the hidden motives, secret corruption and human folly underlying the events that take place at Marianne, the biggest cattle station in the world. Or so we are told. Often. And that’s it’s as big as Belgium.
The main plot is worked out in proper melodramatic fashion – the good and the sympathetic undergo much testing and difficulty and are ultimately saved. Or are they?
The whole thing is like a dark parable of family regeneration as its characters try to cope with the inequities and contradictions of traditions rooted in the past.
But from the start the plot is so crammed with incident, so many of the younger characters seemingly interchangeable in look and demeanour, it’s almost impossible to know who we should support. It’s hard to feel either empathy or emotional support for any of them.
When heir Daniel Lawson (Jake Ryan), the oldest son, is found dead, after being attacked by dingoes – who fired the shot that scared his horse and threw him? – his father must choose a new successor even as he grieves. It’s a decision that encompasses not only control of the immense property but pastoral and mining leases and the complexities of Aboriginal title.
The vultures are already circling in the stultifying heat of the Dead Heart before Daniel is even interred, his coffin covered in flowers, on the property in a grand funeral.
Among them is insipid alcoholic oldest son, Graham (Michael Dorman); Graham’s ambitious wife from a notorious rival family known as cattle thieves, Emily (Anna Torv); Graham’s twentysomething prodigal son, Marshall (Sam Corlett); and Graham and Emily’s teenage daughter, Susie (Philippa Northeast, resourceful and determined. (Torv is the standout in the show, an actor with uncanny skill at inhabiting any character she takes on.)
Then there are the outsiders staking a claim. Ruthless billionaire mining magnate, imperious Sandra Kirby (Sara Wiseman), bearing a generational grudge against the Lawsons, is determined to dismantle their dynasty. As Colin says, “Cattle stations are not democracies, they’re kingdoms” and Sandra is determined to be Queen and will use her considerable resources to claim the crown.
And seemingly in cahoots with Kirby is Indigenous cattleman Nolan Brannock (Clarence Ryan) owner of Laggan Downs station, a somewhat unique figure in the white-dominated cattle industry.
They’re surrounded by a bunch of young troublemakers, rival cattle barons, desert gangsters and Indigenous elders all with their eyes on a slice of the action. With billions of dollars at stake, everyone wants a piece of the Marianne pie and the Lawson fortune. As someone says, “It’s all about who’s going to be boss.” It’s an encompassing story of greed and ambition, of modern politics and economic forces explored in confrontation with the enduring magic of the Dreamtime.
It’s from a couple of unlikely collaborators. One production company is Ian Collie’s Easy Tiger, producer of the brilliant Rake, that legal comedy of bad manners, and the crime dramas Jack Irish and The Broken Shore, based on the award-winning novels of Peter Temple.
And the show was created by Ben Davies and Tim Lee, a writer on the brilliant Mystery Road, described by its creators as a “brew of tropic gothic outback noir”, with Davies company Ronde co-producing with Easy Tiger.
Davies gave us highly cinematic testosterone-charged Outback Ringer, also set in the tropical north of Australia, following the professional feral bull and buffalo catchers, and exploring grand themes about an exciting, dangerous slice of Australian life, and the characters who have achieved such a harmonious affinity with their environment. Executive producers are Collie, Davies, and Easy Tiger’s Rob Gibson.
To complete Territory’s group of creators is director Greg McLaen, no stranger to outback gothic themes having created the remarkable Wolf Creek. If you recall John Jarratt was Mick Taylor, the outback pig shooter who helps three backpackers after their car mysteriously breaks down near remote Wolf Creek Meteorite Crater, eerily rising out of the flat desert plains of north-central Australia. And who tows them into butchery of harrowing intensity.
The origin story for Territory story goes that during a pandemic-era beach walk, Davies and Gibson “got excited about the prospect of doing a big-scale, high-stakes action drama set on a cattle station in a part of the country, you don’t often see on-screen”. So Gibson told Netflix’s PR site. “It was a complete contrast as we were surrounded by the Bondi crowd, people moving past us in their active wear, wetsuits, carrying their surfboards while Rob and I were dreaming up stories about people in jeans, boots, and flannel shirts in the Top End.”
And it’s turned out to be a big one too. It begins with beautiful shots of an alluring landscape, voluptuous even with its tender pinks and soft, glowing reds. A woman’s voice begins quietly. “People say the Territory has two seasons, drought, and flood. And it’s true: everything up here is trying to kill you. The climate, the land, the animals. You learn to live with it. It makes us who we are.”
And suddenly we are in the middle of a massive cattle muster, a monumental roundup of thousands of cattle directed by McLean in scenes reminiscent of Outback Ringer, highlighting the hazardness of the job and the sheer otherworldliness of the machines, hurtling cut-off jeeps, and tiny swooping helicopters, used to corral the primordial-seeming animals.
From the start, the director returns to the visual vernacular of the western epic, utilising all of its old-fashioned scenic values, filming mainly in wide shot, alternating them with close-ups deepening character.
He keeps things moving at such a pace that the broadness of characterisation, and the holes in the storyline that one of those futuristic jeeps could drive through, are hardly noticeable. As you might expect with McLaen, he’s good those extravagant scare-you-to-death moments too, and a master of visually rich set pieces.
This is a show that sucks you in – sweeping, violent and racing along with the exultation of a cattle drive.
And McLean gets the Territory just right, As Charmian Clift wrote, “Such unearthly beauty one knows – and still yearns for – is fatal. It is a landscape for saints and mystics and madman.”
Territory is streaming on Netflix.
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