When director Greg McLean captured a cattle muster in the new Netflix series Territory, it required a huge feat of logistics.
“There’s 3000 cattle in some of those scenes, and you’re thinking, ‘This is just amazing to be able to get real scenes of cattle mustering.’
“There was one day where we had probably five camera units filming a real cattle muster with real ringers, working with actors on horseback.
“In episode five you’ll see this incredible cattle muster scene. I was so impressed that we were able to pull it off.”
In addition to horses, jeeps and quad bikes, scenes entailed helicopters while real ringers drove cattle on a working station.
“It was a 61-62 day shoot all up, roughly half in the NT and half in South Australia. We went to NT first. So we started with four weeks or so in Tipperary Station 200km south of Darwin,” he explains.
“It’s a vast tract of land, 343,701 hectares in scale and the cattle are roaming free.
“We would work with the cattle teams there, and sit down and talk about what scenes we wanted to film, and what we had to do, to do that. So we would say, ‘We’re doing a scene where we show the actors mustering cattle down this area and we want to fly helicopters over these paddocks.’
“How many cattle do we need? What do they need to drink? What’s the path they are taking? It was quite a complex joint operation between the filmmaking community and cattlemen.
“After that, we went to Kakadu where we found an incredible place called Hawk Dreaming and we worked with the traditional owners to get permission to shoot on this amazing, pristine bit of land, which you’ll see featured quite heavily in the show.”
The series created by Timothy Lee (Mystery Road, Bump) and Ben Davies (Bondi Rescue, The First Inventors, Outback Ringer) centres around the fictional Lawson family at Marianne Station.
Robert Taylor (The Newsreader, Longmire) is looking to the succession of the station, but is troubled son Graham (Michael Dorman) up to the task or could daughter-in-law Emily (Anna Torv) rise to the challenge? Only problem is, she has married into the Lawsons from a rival family….
“It’s basically a family drama about power. It’s about, legacy, succession is the word that we use, but ultimately, it’s what happens when a power vacuum appears on a place that is worth millions and millions of dollars. It brings out a lot of extremely bad instincts in people. So a battle begins between competing powers to take control of this cattle station,” says McLean.
“But essentially, it’s a family trying to deal with elements of the past. Do you want to keep it and how do you survive into the future? I feel like those are themes that are actually real in terms of,people on the land and a rural lifestyle, because that lifestyle is constantly under threat from changes that are external, some internal, tradition versus surviving in the modern world.
“Those things that we’re talking about are actually taken from real stories about challenges to cattle industry, mining, industry, forestry…all industries that thrive in the NT.”
The bulging ensemble includes Sam Corlett, Sara Wiseman, Dan Wyllie, Clarence Ryan, Jay Ryan, Philippa Northeast, Joe Klocek, Kylah Day, Sam Delich, Hamilton Morris, Tuuli Narkle, Tyler Spencer, Jake Ryan. But McLean says the story point of view lays with Emily (Anna Torv).
“The story is how this woman who is part of this family by marriage, navigates this incredible tragedy and tries to work out her own place within this twisted legacy,” he continues.
“It’s told through her point of view. She begins and ends the series. Her character and her arc in the show is an unusual one. It’s really fascinating. So I’m dying to see how people track with her through it, because, as you’ll see, it goes through some quite phenomenal twists and turns.
“To coin a cliche, it’s a very tough, determined woman trying to survive in a very male-dominated world. But how does one do that? As we found with many of these stations and operations in the NT, they’re usually husband and wife operations. It’s incredible how much the wives of these cattle people do, in terms of basically running businesses and making big decisions, and how important and crucial they are to making everything work. They’re really leading in their own field. So it’s a testament to the women of the bush and the rural lifestyle of just how important they are in terms of making it all work.”
Territory also features First Nations actors and storylines driven principally by Clarence Ryan as Nolan who is establishing his own cattle station interests.
“The First Nations story is incredibly complicated, complex and multi-layered and there are all different levels to that story as well. We tried to represent the conflicts. Clarence Ryan’s character is straddling both of those worlds. He’s trying to be part of the bigger cattle industry and have his own station. But at the same time, though, he has responsibilities as an Indigenous character to his own community,” McLean maintains.
“We had Kodie Bedford and Steven McGregor, who wrote three of the episodes of the series. Lynette Riley, who’s Chair of Aboriginal Education and Indigenous Studies at Sydney Uni, was our cultural consultant for the show, who was across all of the production. On site, we had an amazing Indigenous guy from the NT who was really helping us with making sure that all of our outreach and communications with the Indigenous community was respectful and done properly. So we had an enormous amount of help and assistance. You could not do a show like this without that.”
McLean, who filmed Rogue in the NT even gets crocodiles on screen and jokingly refers to the series as ‘Dallas with Dingoes.’ He hopes it finds an audience both in Australia and overseas.
“I was very, very keen to take people into the life of Outback cattle stations, and really romanticise that in some way, so that people fall in love with that lifestyle and really want to experience it, go to the NT and go to those stations. They love having people there to come and visit. They’ve got whole areas where people come and stay and experience it,” he adds.
“So hopefully we get people around the wall falling in love with Australia again, in the same way that Crocodile Dundee alerted people to this magic of Australia and brought a whole generation of people to Australia.
“Hopefully this has a similar kind of impact.”
Territory premieres Thursday October 24 on Netflix.
links to content on ABC
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