In the classic Australian bush story, there is usually a plucky little battler overcoming the odds to save the farm. When the outback tale warps into something different, rural audiences can get a bit touchy.
When I saw the big hats of the Netflix drama Territory advertised, I did groan. Lord, can I take another granite-faced farmer story, an iron fist in a spiky glove, battling to save the farm?
Curiosity got the better of me and I am glad it did. Territory hit the streamer’s top shows globally when it was released this October, no doubt for its wild narrative arc and Northern Territory scenery. Sunrises, swelling cattle mobs, crocodiles and dingoes tick all the boxes for global audiences.
Before we get to what it means, let me give you the pitch. Ageing patriarch Colin Lawson, played by Robert Taylor, owns the largest cattle station in the world, Marianne station, a piece of land the size of Belgium. He has done a shit job at running it and it is teetering on financial ruin. Colin is less the plucky battler than a bastard from the bush; abusive, violent and implacable.
Colin crowned his youngest son, Daniel, as successor until he was unexpectedly killed. He is left with his whip-driven, alcoholic eldest son, Graham, and Graham’s more capable wife, Emily, the daughter of neighbouring rivals and suspected cattle duffers. Colin also has a few younger options in Graham and Emily’s daughter, Susie (a woman, yeah nah), or the prodigal son, Marshall, whose mother is Graham’s first wife.
Power dynamics shift between Colin’s family, the traditional owners, a scheming billionaire miner and back again. Guns, blood, beatings, choppers, duffers and NT politics are legion. At its most basic, Territory is a family drama about the ways people hurt each other and use power against their nearest and supposedly dearest. That is not a nothing story. Its bones are as visible in the bush as in any city.
Colin has ruled his family and the station as a feudal lord. “Cattle stations aren’t democracies – they’re kingdoms,” he reminds us.
If that plot sounds familiar to you, you’d be right: it’s Yellowstone in the outback.
That might explain why some parts of the show feel weirdly American, for example how Colin wears a pistol in a holster on his belt. Handguns aren’t among the firearms permitted under a primary production or hunting licence but I concede a holster would not work so well with the shotguns and .22s that populate the gun safes of most Australian farmers.
Many farmers do wear holsters, usually for a pocketknife or a two-way radio but admittedly Colin would hardly be the menacing arsehole that he is while wielding a Leatherman.
Anyway, the whole show has got rural circles – particularly farmers – talking about the appropriate depiction of life in the outback. I found that interesting, because certainly we have all met someone like Colin, sans pistol. Hell, some of us are Colin.
As to the guns and the chopper convoys racing trucks and utes in the opening scenes: it is fiction, people.
Did anyone think Crocodile Dundee depicted Australian life? No, but we lapped it up anyway. Australia advertised itself off the back of it. Paul Hogan urged us to put shrimp on the barbie! Who says that? And is the city appropriately reflected by all those gangster and murder shows set in dark and grimy back alleys?
Here’s an alternative analysis. Australians love to play the happy larrikin, the simple hero, the battler. It is our source of solace and humour. Nothing is as funny as watching an outsider fall on their arse in a country they don’t know.
But show us our darker side, our unhappy families, our less savoury practices, then tweak them and, well, those bloody city film producers.
The best example, of course, was Wake in Fright. It was the story my father warned me about when moving to the country – half joke, half real.
The 1961 novel by the journalist Kenneth Cook was made into a harrowing film in the 1970s by the Canadian film-maker Ted Kotcheff.
A teacher is sent to an outback school to do his time for the education department before getting a job (and safety) in the city. He is pegged and trapped, largely by his own stupidity. The thing that brings him undone is a game of two-up in a “Yabba” pub the night before he is due to fly out for the beach. There begins a descent into hell, punctuated by aimless drinking, carousing, sexual disasters, shooting kangaroos and slashing their throats.
Does any of that happen in the bush? Yes, sometimes. Or are we all McLeod’s daughters on the fictional Drover’s Run, even though most daughters don’t inherit the farm?
The original print for Wake in Fright was lost for 13 years then re-released. I found a secondhand copy of the book a while back. Early in the novel, the teacher looks out the window into the shimmering haze, past the state border to the “silent centre of Australia, the Dead Heart”. It is an old Australian motif.
For the majority of Australians, the centre of Australia still largely exists in our imaginations, sometimes filled with facts gleaned from history and experience but never fully realised.
Stories take all forms. The good ones filter light on to a shard of the truth. It doesn’t have to be all true to have some truth. None of our stories are all true, even the ones we think we remember.
So turn off Territory if it offends you. Me, I’ll be watching for series two.
