Philippa Northeast is having a moment. The 31-year-old is currently on stage with Shaun Micallef and Daniel Henshall in the MTC’s Uncle Vanya, and next month she’s in the running for an acting Logie for her turn as a depressed young mum in the ABC drama The Family Next Door. But it’s the Netflix adaptation of My Brilliant Career, in which she plays Sybylla Melvyn, the hot-headed heroine and narrator of Miles Franklin’s much-loved novel, that is certain to put her on the radar globally.“I’m glad it’s this story,” she says of her looming breakthrough moment, “because I think any anxiety I had in terms of levelling up is quite squashed by the fact that is entirely what Sybylla stands for and wants. So, weirdly, I can throw myself into the protection of that.”Sybylla is a dirt-poor farm girl in 1890s Australia, damned by her father’s alcoholism and incompetence to endless drudgery. But she dreams of and aspires to a creative life. She wants a brilliant career – of letters, of music, on the stage, it hardly matters. Just something other than an existence defined by when the sun comes up and when the cows need milking.Philippa Northeast as Sybylla in My Brilliant Career.Ian Routledge/NetflixPlaying her in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film launched the career of one Judy Davis, who was 23 at the time and had never acted on screen before. Northeast, though, already has some serious runs on the board, with notable turns as a junkie in The Newsreader and as the highly capable daughter who would surely take over the farm in Territory, if only she weren’t a bloody girl.“I’m not in any capacity an overnight sensation,” says Northeast, who was born in Richmond, in inner-city Melbourne, and grew up in Warrandyte on the north-eastern fringe, where she attended a Steiner school that allowed her free rein to explore whatever creative instincts she might harbour.“I feel like I’ve been sort of knocking at the door and putting my head down and tail up for over a decade. I really identify with the determination and the boldness and the bravery to continue following a creative life in the face of constant rejection,” she says. “I relate to Sybylla’s endurance.”Northeast’s first onscreen appearance was in the sketch comedy series Skithouse in 2003. But it was on Home and Away, where she did a 341-episode, five-year stretch as Evelyn MacGuire from 2013, that she cut her acting teeth.Still, My Brilliant Career – a big-budget, somewhat freewheeling adaptation in which she’s on screen for almost every minute of its six episodes – represents a huge step up in terms of visibility. And she’s relishing the opportunities that come with it.“As a younger actor, I was just jumping up and down and happy to do whatever – not whatever, but a wide array of things so that I could prove myself,” she says. “Now I’m starting to have a little more creative choice and become maybe a bit more publicly known. The really exciting part to me – and I know it can ebb and flow and be fleeting – is that I’m getting an opportunity to have an intentional career and start to make a few choices about the stories I would like to put out into the world.”Northeast’s Instagram account is testament to her rising profile: fashion shoots, magazine covers, red-carpet premieres on the arm of her actor boyfriend Sam Reid (who is having his own turn in the spotlight as star of The Vampire Lestat).Northeast, right, with Bella Heathcote and Jane Harber in The Family Next Door.ABC TVBut if she is very definitely stepping into the spotlight with this role, so too – finally – is Miles Franklin.For decades, she was best known as the author of the book Armstrong adapted in 1979, with Davis as Sybylla and Sam Neill as Harry Beecham, the man she might be destined to marry if love alone were to determine her course. The book – like the literary award she established in her name – cemented her place in Australian literary history. But to some extent, Franklin herself remained in the background.Recently, though, she has been celebrated on stage in no fewer than three productions, with a straight adaptation of My Brilliant Career in 2020, the acclaimed musical version in 2024, and this year’s musical biopic, Stella.There have been two books, too – Kerrie Davies’ biography Miles Franklin Undercover last year and, just last month, The Very Secretive And Passionate Stella Miles Franklin, a biographical novel by French author Alexandra Lapierre.Miles Franklin in 1901, the year My Brilliant Career was published.Alamy Stock PhotoAnd now, of course, we have a lavish series made for the world’s biggest streamer.It’s a remarkable legacy for a book that was, as Northeast puts it, “bold, brilliant, brave for its time and unique, but also still written by a teenager, that is chunky and clunky and sort of naive”.My Brilliant Career was written when Franklin was just 19 and published in 1901, when she was 21. Despite her protestations to the contrary, it was widely assumed to be autobiographical. And even with an enthusiastic (if somewhat patronising) endorsement by Henry Lawson in the foreword, it had only middling sales.In 1910, a deeply frustrated Franklin withdrew it from publication. To that point it had, according to the National Museum of Australia, “only earned her £24”.The book didn’t reappear in print until 1966, 12 years after the author’s death at the age of 74.Franklin had a reasonable career, mostly in Britain and the US, churning out another 18 books. Though she was never wealthy, she left £9000 as seed funding for the Miles Franklin Award, which now pays out $60,000 annually to the winner and $5000 to each of its other five short-listed novelists.Reading the novel now, 125 years after it was published, what strikes you most is how it bristles with an energy and attitude that makes it seem alive, fresh and utterly relevant. Which is not to say everything stands the test of time; the casual racism in particular is quite awful.The 2024 stage musical of My Brilliant Career, which was revived earlier this year.MTCLiz Doran, who wrote the series, had never read the book until she was approached by the production company Jungle about five years ago. But she did know the story.“The Gillian Armstrong film had this huge influence on me as a young person,” she says. “It was a huge inspiration for me, one of the things that made me think, ‘oh, maybe I could actually be a writer’.”When she did finally read the book, she says, “I was actually really surprised at all the other things that are in it. We know what Sybylla’s story is – it’s so strong – but I was really interested in the other characters. And then you look at that book through a contemporary eye …”What she saw was all the stuff that would have been present in Sybylla’s (and Franklin’s) world, but wasn’t – perhaps couldn’t be – acknowledged. And Doran felt that was where the opportunity, the thrill and the challenge of this version lay.“Whenever I’m looking at an adaptation, I’m always thinking – especially for a period thing, and especially for this book – who is in this world who didn’t get put into the book. Because we’ve got six episodes, we can explore those other characters. Aunt Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly) gets a little storyline, and Uncle Julius (Alexander English) gets a storyline. And then, of course, we’ve invented the First Nations characters who also get a storyline. And we put all of those characters under an umbrella of career-versus-love, which is the main through line of My Brilliant Career. That was the big-picture approach.”Judy Davis as Sybylla in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film.NFSACome at this adaptation with an open mind and you’re likely to enjoy how the story, and the world, has been opened up. Julius — Uncle Jay Jay – for instance, is gay. He arrives at the Caddagat homestead with his Sydney friend Everard Grey, who is actually his lover. Grey’s clumsy proposal to Sybylla is nothing more than an attempt to cover his real romance. It’s ingenious and plausible but likely to offend some of the book’s rusted-on fans.“I don’t think we worried about that,” says producer Chloe Rickard when I ask if she was concerned about alienating the book’s solid fan base. “The reason I say that is because this is Sybylla’s story, right, it’s about a young woman who chooses herself against all odds. And I think inspecting the world around her with a contemporary critical gaze about who was there and what their lives would have been like, and what were their dreams and hopes and ambitions … just because Franklin didn’t write about them back then because of the times doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore the vast, colourful nature of our country at that time.“It doesn’t feel like we’ve imposed anything fake onto the story,” she says. “I think we’ve just used our imagination around the central premise.”In this version, Aunt Augusta moves from the fringes to become a central character, an independently wealthy suffragette (played with typical verve by Kate Mulvany) who nurtures Sybylla’s creative passions, while never quite believing any path other than marriage is available to her. The time shifts slightly, too: we’re in 1900 now, on the cusp of Federation, rather than 1897.“It is a coming-of-age story for Sybylla, and I think having that mirrored in the coming-of-age story for a nation is just a nice parallel,” says Rickard.Perhaps the single biggest change, though, is in Harry Beecham. A tall sun-bronzed laconic strongman in the book, here he’s played by Christopher Chung (best known as Roddy Ho in Slow Horses), with his Chinese ancestry a key part of his character.“I’m not a big fan of blind casting,” says Doran. “I think blind casting is not telling the truth, but the idea that Chinese people were in Australia is a fact, and is part of our history. And making Harry have a Chinese mother and a white father I thought opened a really interesting conversation about how this character fits in the world. I think it makes Harry more interesting. And also, we cast spunky Christopher Chung, you know.”Christopher Chung as Harry and Philippa Northeast as Sybylla in My Brilliant Career. Ian Routledge/NetflixOf course, given her centrality to the story, nothing mattered quite as much as casting Sybylla. And given the grip Judy Davis has had over the character, Rickard knew she had her work cut out.“I was like, ‘you can’t get this wrong’,” she says. “I found the responsibility of that huge.”The second she watched Northeast reading for the role, though, she felt all would be fine.“Literally from the first frame of her audition, I had full-body tingles – it was absolutely her,” she says. “She self-taped, and in the first frame of her audition she’s upside-down and out of focus, and she comes into focus, and I was leaning forward, like ‘we’ve got our girl’.“It wasn’t on purpose,” she adds of the upside-down framing. “I think her camera was just funny. But in the actual show, the first shot, she also comes into focus.”By contrast, Doran insists she never thought of Davis, simply because “in my mind, Sybylla was the character in the show we were creating, she wasn’t the film version, she wasn’t the book version, she was our version”.Coming up for air: This version takes some liberties with the source material. Will fans approve?Ian Routledge/NetflixShould their version catch fire, there’s every chance we’ll be seeing more of Sybylla Melvyn’s brilliant career on Netflix. But what we won’t be seeing is the sequel Franklin herself wrote.“I’m not a particular fan of My Career Goes Bung,” says Doran. “I don’t think that’s a good template. It’s also a terrible title.”She adds that she’s fascinated by the conflation of Franklin’s best-known fictional character and the details of her own life. And it’s in the meshing of these two that the further adventures of Sybylla might take flight.“What we would love to do is take Sybylla Melvyn as a character, and the cohort of characters we’ve created around her, and take those into further adventures. And alongside that, it’s also really interesting to us what Miles Franklin’s actual life was, because she had a really cracking and interesting life as a person and as a writer.”If this moment should beget more moments, Philippa Northeast for one will be delighted.“This is a character you want to see in the next challenging environment,” she says. “Because she’s so dog-headed, so all-in, picks herself up, and I think different environments would offer her different challenges. And we know in Miles’ real life there’s so much inspiration you could take because she went abroad, she became an incredible activist, she was a real voice in the women’s and workers’ rights movements.”So you might not be done with this phase of your brilliant career?Her face lights up in anticipation of what might lie ahead. “There’s so much that you could draw upon that would make sense for Sybylla.”My Brilliant Career is on Netflix from August 13.Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.