Territory is a sprawling, soapy dive into the lives of cattle barons of the Top End with a television heritage that is part Yellowstone, part Succession, with maybe a touch of Dallas. The director of the biggest Netflix series to come out of South Australia, Greg McLean, would be very happy for the comparisons to stick.
“I don’t think the initial reference was Yellowstone – in fact, the initial reference was Game of Thrones and Succession,” he says.
“Obviously, Yellowstone is a comparison in the sense it’s on a cattle station, but the reality is you would never try to repeat or replicate that. There is also the fact that one of their episodes would cost our entire budget. But if anyone wants to compare us favourably, that’s great, because we’re all big fans of Yellowstone.”
McLean, who directed the Wolf Creek films and most of the spin-off TV series in South Australia, was familiar with the challenges of filming in the outback and an obvious choice to direct a drama based around a massive cattle property known as Marianne Station.
The story follows the flawed Lawson family, which is headed by tough-as-nails patriarch Colin Lawson (Robert Taylor), his alcoholic son Graham (Michael Dorman) and scheming wife Emily (Anna Torv from The Last of Us). Circling them is a younger generation that includes Colin’s cattle-rustling nephew Marshall Lawson (rising star Sam Corlett from Vikings: Valhalla and He Ain’t Heavy). The series opens with the grisly death of Colin’s favourite son, throwing succession plans into disarray.
Michael Dorman and Robert Taylor as Graham and Colin Lawson in Territory. Photo: Netflix
McLean saw the project, which streamed internationally this week, as a chance to showcase the uniqueness of Northern Territory life not just to Australia but to the world.
“As soon as I heard the word ‘drama in the Top End’ I was interested, because I had made a film there before in 2007 (Rogue) and I am obsessed with the Northern Territory,” McLean says.
McLean is a master of horror and he put his stamp on Territory not just in the occasional gore but in the sense of grandeur he brings to the plight of station men and women pitted against a landscape. It is unashamedly a soap, but with a wild Northern Territory vibe.
“I certainly wasn’t afraid of making it visceral,” he says.
“I think having that experience in horror, thriller and suspense certainly influenced the final look and feel of the show. We really wanted it to feel like it was impactful and cinematic and as powerful as possible.”
And there are crocodiles. Rogue, which McLean wrote and directed, was inspired by real Top End stories about a crocodile called Sweetheart terrorising a settlement and another that stalked a man marooned on a sandbank. They have a special place in his imagination and the ever-present threat of crocodiles, at a peak during the daredevil helicopter retrieval of their eggs, is part of the Territory story.
“I just love them,” he says. “I have always felt like crocodiles are incredible. They are essentially living dinosaurs and I have always felt myself drawn to them because they are such evolutionary marvels.”
Territory‘s fast-moving story involves the mass movements of livestock, quad bikes, helicopters and large machinery, which made filming complex. McLean directed all six episodes, which simplified planning because it was designed as one big production, using the same teams. But it was still a military-style operation to get a 250-plus film crew to locations including Tipperary Station east of Daly River, which doubled as Marianne Station and is so large it has 30 fulltime staff and a school.
“I saw this as an opportunity to tell something on a very big scale, and also to romanticise that part of the world and that lifestyle and to make Australians feel great about Australia in many ways – it’s an epic country,” McLean says. “I wanted to tell this huge Australian story that was also going to appeal internationally.”
He found it a joy to work with a cast of the calibre of Anna Torv and Robert Taylor, who worked together previously on the ABC’s The Newsreader. They are also both known to US audiences; Torv from Mindhunter and The Last of Us, and Taylor through his long-running role as Sheriff Walt Longmire on the US western drama Longmire, which went to six seasons. McLean also cast Hamilton Morris from Sweet Country as Uncle Bryce, one of the Aboriginal stockmen.
“I was leading the charge on the casting and I had just worked with Robert Taylor on Scrublands, which I did for Stan, so I was a very big advocate, and he plays a great bastard in this,” McLean says. “Anna I had not worked with but she is such an incredible actor and a joy to work with, so that was a dream.”
Anna Torv on the set of Territory. Photo: Netflix
The crew adopted the real systems in place at Tipperary Station to move cattle, which had to go back and forth more than once for filming purposes, and McLean relied on and included in the film the real station cattlemen.
“Most of the workers from the station who deal with the cattle are in the show somewhere and what was fascinating was these guys had never really seen a film crew before but we said to them, ‘You look great and you can do the job, do you want to be in it?’ And they did these fantastic real performances. I think they had a ball doing it because it was such a wild experience to be filming this big TV show.”
The result captures the feeling of station life in stunningly beautiful but also forbidding country. All the cattle mustering, much of it filmed from overhead, was real footage with no CGI.
Territory, which started out as Desert King, was filmed on location in the Northern Territory, including in Kakadu National Park, but was supported by the South Australian Film Corporation with production and post-production in South Australia. McLean shot all of the house interiors in Adelaide’s inner north, and the massive NT beer barn called the Bull Bar is the shed that usually houses the undercover section of the Adelaide Showground Farmers Market.
“All of the interiors are in Adelaide and when they go to a bull auction, that was a real cattle auction down south of Adelaide,” McLean says. “We needed the scale of the exteriors in the NT but when we go inside, we spent five weeks in Adelaide shooting those scenes.”
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The series released this week on Netflix into almost every country in the world, in their language, and there is plenty of momentum for a second season, depending on audience interest.
“Hopefully people will fall in love with it around the world,” McLean says. “People everywhere in the world are seeing it at the same time, so hopefully they are fascinated enough that they want to see more.”
Territory episodes one to six are available on Netflix from October 24.
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