Disclaimer: This My Brilliant Career interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Full spoilers ahead!
My Brilliant Career author Miles Franklin never included the Indigenous perspective in a meaningful way. This latest adaptation of her book is changing that. Indigenous Australian actors, including Miah Madden (Betty), Sherry-Lee Watson (Nell), and Jarron Andy (Charlie) are bringing a much-needed cultural authenticity to this story.
I spoke with Miah Madden about consulting with her own elders to better study the series’ time period, the sisterhood of Betty and Nell, and that doomed romance…
LadyJenevia: My opening icebreaker is something that I’m asking everyone. What is your favorite Baz Luhrmann project?
Madden: I’m gonna say The Great Gatsby because it was probably one of the first of his films that I watched, and then I rewatched it recently and realized how camp it is, which I didn’t realize back in the day. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is fabulous on so many levels that I probably overlooked when it came out when I was like 13’ but then also Romeo and Juliet is iconic as well.
LadyJenevia: Yes, agreed. The thing with this question is, there’s no wrong answer.
Madden: I can imagine, yeah. [laughter]
LadyJenevia: Another reason why I bring him up is [that] I find that when art is done well, it can broaden the viewer’s world and understanding. For example, with Baz, his projects Australia or Faraway Downs were a meaningful introduction for me, someone who has never been to Australia, to learn what drovers are and also learn more about the history of the Stolen Generations. Now with this new adaptation of My Brilliant Career, the story has been expanded from what it was in the book to include a more diverse ensemble of Australians. At what point in your journey of auditioning, booking, and doing the job did you learn how much of a voice was going to be given to indigenous Australian characters?
Madden: Great question. I think from the get-go, when you see that it is a retelling of a classic story, and as a First Nations actor, you see an audition come your way for a period piece, you’re instantly like, ‘Oh, they must be going back and doing their due diligence and including those perspectives that were always there.’ I had heard of My Brilliant Career before. I hadn’t read the book before I knew about the project.
Sometimes you wonder how much of a say are we going to be having in this production. Once I had the scripts and I read them, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is being done really well.’ We’re not just there to tick a box. It’s a genuine inclusion of these perspectives that are really important to include. I was so happy when I realized that.
LadyJenevia: What sort of historical research did you do that helped to better inform your understanding of Betty as well as the world that she exists in?
Madden: The wonderful thing about this production was they gave us so many resources before we even had a chance to do so. We were told not only how women in the Edwardian era were dressing and behaving, but how Nell would behave or how Betty would be treated in the house, which are things that sometimes there aren’t too many resources out there for. Colonial Australia is a very young country, so to say, and sometimes those things aren’t documented. Our production did a really great job of making sure that we had all those resources, but then I also talked to my grandparents and my elders.
My grandmother, she grew up living off of the land and she has a really well-recorded account of all of the women that grew up on that mission all the way back to the late 1800s. Seeing photos from the early 1900s and things like that, which are very hard to come across, also helped me understand whose story I was telling.
LadyJenevia: You talk about how she’s treated in the house. When Sybylla arrives at Caddagat, she offers her hand to Nell when meeting her. Nell briefly hesitates, but she does shake her hand. Then, shortly thereafter, Sybylla offers her hand to Betty when meeting her for the first time, and Betty doesn’t shake her hand. Could you explain a bit of the etiquette lore of this situation with Sybylla and the handshakes? I felt like there was some context I was missing as a viewer.
Madden: Yeah, great observation there because we talked about that a lot: how Betty and Nell come from the same world, but they treat it completely differently. Betty as a housemaid has a whole different set of rules, and part of that is… Indigenous people were not of society. To touch or to speak without being spoken to was considered inappropriate back in the day. It’s also why she has her affair with the police officer, because he too was not considered part of that society, but he is regarded as a peg higher because he is a white man. There are all of these layers in this society of early 1900s Australia. I think Betty was taken off guard because she never would have had a person in the house introduce themselves like that before. In a lot of ways, Sybylla is so different from everyone in that house. That’s where our story begins.
Whereas Nell, I think, is sort of… I don’t want to speak to Sherry’s decisions, but Nell treats things a little bit differently, and she doesn’t really abide by the rules as much as she needs to. Whereas Betty, in order to keep her job, she has to. And she takes that very seriously. I don’t think she sees too much of an issue with it other than, you know, the deeper racism that it stems from. But in terms of being in the house, she’s there to do her job, and she actually really likes it.
LadyJenevia: Correct me if I misheard, but I could have sworn that the first time we see Betty and Nell alone with each other, they reveal a bit of code-switching. To me, their accents sound different when they’re alone with each other than when they were speaking with the ‘whitefellows’ at Caddagat. What went into deciding to do that? How did you land on the exact way you two were going to speak to each other?
Madden: It’s really interesting. This is a big conversation that we had with our associate producer Shari Sebbens who’s a wonderful Indigenous creative as well. We spoke about how when Indigenous people mob, when we get together, we speak in a much more different way, and I think that sort of stems back from switching from a different language to English. When we’re around each other, we sort of speak in a different way that would be deemed maybe inappropriate in society, shortening words, just speaking quickly. That accent would have been so much different back then because the ‘proper’ version of an Australian accent back then was quite British.
Being in the house, Betty feels like she needs to fit in. She does everything that she can. She talks in more of a softer tone. Then when she’s with Nell, she’s saying, ‘shame, go and do this, go and do that.’ She’s speaking as a sister would, which is a really great thing to see. It is that code-switching of being able to take that mask off and stop performing in order to be accepted.
LadyJenevia: Another detail I was intrigued by is that early on, Betty and Nell express being a bit spooked by the fact that Sybylla was whistling at night. I didn’t know if this was an Australian thing or specifically an Indigenous Australian thing. Would you be able to explain the context of that?
Madden: Yeah, so that’s an Indigenous Australian thing. We have a very deep spirituality. Across all of the Indigenous cultures in Australia, you know that you do not whistle at night. It brings about bad spirits, in other words, bad luck, it’s not a safe thing to do. It’s so funny because even living in the city, not living on my grandmother’s country, for instance, out in the bush, I would never whistle at night even when I know I’m perfectly safe. It’s just something that has always been the case. I love that they include little things like that. Sherry’s from a completely different part of the country. She’s Arrente. She’s from Alice Springs. And out there, it’s exactly the same. It includes those little things which maybe people from overseas or even non-Indigenous Australians wouldn’t understand. But it’s funny because it’s almost not for them. It’s for the other Aboriginal men and women watching to be like, “Oh my god, we got to be included. That part of our culture got to be included.” And then wonderful people like yourself get to ask questions, and we get to tell people. So, yeah, that’s an that’s an Aboriginal thing.
LadyJenevia: We have a couple of instances of seeing Betty and Nell with their mother, and I always loved when we got to see them all together in a group like that. There are often references made to Nell taking after their father with all of the work she does with horses. Was it explicitly decided that Betty takes after their mother? I felt like that was being suggested or perhaps that was my interpretation of what I was watching.
Madden: I think it is their mother’s backstory that she also was a housemaid, but I don’t think she would have been in the same circumstances that Betty’s in because their father worked at Caddagat. I think those girls are very protected. For most indigenous Australian women back in those days, to work on a property, they were treated in very poor circumstances. A lot of women were abused. I think that her mother is probably really glad that Betty is working somewhere like the Bossiers’ house because she’s treated with a lot of respect. She’s treated like a human being.
I think she does take after her mom in that sort of maternal sense that she really feels a need to keep the house in order, and she wants to be a mother. I’ve been saying this before, but just because her dreams are to be a bit more domestic, it doesn’t mean that they’re less than Nell’s. I think that’s a beautiful thing that this show brings out as well.
LadyJenevia: Another Indigenous character, Charlie, he expresses that he doesn’t know where he comes from, but it seems as if Betty and Nell perhaps do know where they come from. Did you ever explicitly decide what the Kirby family’s background is?
Madden: Betty and Nell, they know where they come from because I think they are traditional owners of the land in which Caddagat’s on or from a surrounding region. I don’t think they are from a mob that is too far from where they’re working. So every time they’re in Gol Gol, you probably don’t see it much in the show, but we had shot a lot of scenes where they’re really close with all of the Aboriginal extras in those scenes because we assume that they’re all family. I think Betty and Nell come from that area. Well, their mom does and that’s where they met their dad who wasn’t Indigenous Australian. I think that’s where they come from so they know.
But then yeah, there are characters like Charlie which is a great perspective that they’ve included in this show, where people have been displaced, and they don’t know where they come from even though they’re on Australian Indigenous soil.
LadyJenevia: Earlier you mentioned Betty’s love interest. What would you say is the basis of her attraction to him? That was quite a puzzle for me as a viewer.
Madden: Betty likes the sergeant; we meet them when they’re already established as a relationship. I can imagine he would have been very sweet and probably gave her the time of day. She’s a 16-year-old girl. I remember what it was like to be that age. A boy talks to you, and you get really excited. This is just my take, she never was too desperate to be a wife in the sense that she would more rather be a mother. She would love both of those things to coincide, but the fact that she has the baby is where she sees her life is going to be maternal. She wanted that to work with him. It couldn’t and that was heartbreaking for her. I think that her attraction to him probably came from him seeing her as more than just being the Indigenous housemaid, which sets up that heartbreak of, ‘But it wasn’t enough for him to stay.’
LadyJenevia: Thank you for explaining that because I was baffled the entire time I was watching. I was going, ‘She can do so much better than him. Get away from her!’
Madden: [Laughs] I feel like it’s going to be a bit divided. Reagan is so lovely. Him playing this character that is so disappointing in so many ways was very hard.
LadyJenevia: There’s a point where Nell is rejecting an ongoing colonial holiday by saying, “It’s not a new country to us.” Betty responds by saying, “I know, but we deserve to have fun, too.” I really liked the writing there because it perfectly encapsulated their differing perspectives and personalities. Did you find that as an actor, the more that you learned about Nell, the more that you understood Betty?
Madden: Yeah, I think so. As Nell’s little sister, I can imagine Nell probably would have been saying this rhetoric all throughout their lives, like ‘We deserve more. Why are we putting up with this?’ It’s probably why she never wanted to work in the house either. She’s working in a male-dominated field, which was being a stockman or a stockwoman in her case. I think that Betty’s response to these things would be that she totally agrees. She agrees that we deserve more, but she’s such an optimist that sometimes I think with Nell, she just goes, “I know you feel this way, but please let’s just go have fun because I want to see you happy.” It’s that sisterly thing of like, “Yes, this sucks, but you’ve said this for so long, and we deserve to be happy right now, so like, let’s just go and do it.” Sometimes she has to be the devil’s advocate to make sure that Nell actually like enjoys her life. She’s a good sister in that way.
LadyJenevia: What do you hope that viewers will take away from watching this new version of My Brilliant Career?
Madden: I hope that viewers have a greater understanding of what it was like for all individuals back in that time period, but also to be able to learn more about our culture and our wonderfully feminist history as well. I think sometimes Australia and our history might get a little forgotten or not taught overseas. Film and TV is a wonderful education platform half of the time. That’s the case with period pieces as we’ve seen historically. I’m really keen for that exposure to the world. I think it’s going to be wonderful.
LadyJenevia: Thank you so much for your time. I do want to encourage you not only to continue on your acting career, but to also write, develop things, because we need to see all types of stories and all types of people. That only happens when more of us are proactive about that. I would love to hear more of what you have to say as a storyteller in the future.
Madden: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate all of your thoughtful questions. Thank you so much.
My Brilliant Career is streaming now on Netflix.
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