It was the most-watched TV series in 1988. Now this Australian classic is hitting the stage

When The Shiralee was broadcast in 1988, it was an old-school miniseries that these days would be called a “TV event”. Starring Bryan Brown as a boxer named Macauley, and Rebecca Smart as his five-year-old daughter, Buster, it was also the kind of miniseries you stayed home for. Or, in my family’s case, the kind of miniseries you asked your neighbours to videotape for you because you were away on holiday.

It wasn’t just us. Over in Western Australia, Kate Mulvany also had the family VCR ready to go.

“We only ever had two videotapes with ‘Do not ever, ever tape over’ written on them,” says Kate Mulvany. “And it was The Shiralee – the Bryan Brown and Rebecca Smart one – and Molly’s death from A Country Practice.

“And as a kid, it [The Shiralee] got me. And I’d watch it with my dad, whilst going out on the road with my dad, so it was all very living the zeitgeist.”

Mulvany’s dad, Danny, was a 10-pound Pom from England and a Vietnam veteran who worked for the Main Roads Department. The pair would talk about soil and rocks and pick up injured animals as they travelled around the Kimberley and the Pilbara.

“He just found solace on those roads,” says Mulvany, talking over lunch with her co-star Josh McConville while on a break from rehearsals. “He was a man who didn’t say much. He often spoke with his fists, not so much at home, but he was a defender of his mates. He was a defender of people who were seen as less than because, I guess, he felt like he was less than, and often I was there. Nothing was getting in the way of dad and protecting his mates.

“So I grew up in a very brutal country landscape, surrounded by a lot of male energy, but also I knew how capable he was of love, if only someone allowed him to open up. I don’t know if I was that person, but I’d like to think of myself as his Buster every now and then.”

Now, 37 years later, Mulvany has her own version of The Shiralee ready to premiere.

But where George Ogilvie’s two-part miniseries, which was the most watched television show in Australia in 1988, shaved off the rougher edges of D’Arcy Niland’s 1955 novel, Mulvany has returned to the original text to craft a story that is as much a tribute to her father as it is an examination of masculinity and power.

It is also a bookend of sorts to Mulvany’s two previous works with the Sydney Theatre Company: the two-part The Harp in the South and Playing Beatie Bow. Both were adapted from works by Ruth Park, Niland’s wife and long-time creative partner.

“My father, since doing Ruth Park, has passed away, and I really miss him,” says Mulvany. “But also it’s a real time at the moment of pulling apart … what it is to be a little girl in a world of very, very powerful men. And also that even a man of extreme power, or who looks terrifying, can be a caramel heart and can be a gentle soul. And a little girl who looks like she could be knocked over in the wind and can be the most powerful of creatures.

“I just wanted to explore all of that and how we all walk forward together in the world, and which road we’re on.”

In The Shiralee, Macauley is an itinerant worker and travelling boxer in South Australia. When he discovers his first love Lily is now married to someone else, he turns to another woman, Marge, who he marries and moves to the city with. Years later, after travelling again for work, Macauley discovers Marge has been living with another man, so he takes their daughter Buster and hits the road with the young girl in tow.

“I wanted to base it more on the book,” Mulvany says. “Because for me, the miniseries is so beautiful and golden and perfect through George Ogilvie’s vision … The book is so much darker. And I wanted to tap into that inner world of Mac a little more. I wanted to hear him speak a little more, I guess, than what you necessarily see in other realms, and I wanted to centre it also as much on Buster as it was in that [book].”

McConville is playing Macauley. “We’re diving deeper into his backstory,” he says. “There’s a real deep complexity and struggle with him coming to realise who he is and his relationship with the world and the people around him.

“There’s trauma in his own life that resonates into the world around him; and men back then, and still today, suppress their emotions. It’s him grappling with the emotions that are bubbling inside him, coming up. And having the space and the people around him to allow him to let them out and release them, which through that, I think then he finds that he has the capacity to love his daughter.”

It’s a role that requires a big emotional range from McConville, as Macauley swings between violence and rage and then a tenderness with his daughter. It’s also a role Mulvany wrote especially for McConville.

“He’s a really gentle, warm and kind, generous human,” Mulvany says. “You have to have that sort of an actor in order to step into the shoes of Mac, because Mac can be terrifying, he can be absolutely brutal. So it’s really important that everyone feels safe in a room with that performer.”

The pair have known each other for years and even “discovered” a young singer named Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, where they played the manager and founder of Sun Studios.

“[Knowing each other] means you get over that hurdle of going, ‘We don’t know each other, I’m going to scream at you’, ‘We don’t know each other, I’m going to kiss you’,” Mulvany says.

Adds McConville: “I loved it the other day when I wasn’t looking at you and I shouted ‘Oi!’ It was so spontaneous, I love that kind of stuff.”

That trust between Mulvany and McConville is important because Mulvany, who plays Macauley’s wife Marge, is often on the receiving end of Macauley’s anger. It would be easy to pigeonhole Marge as a “bad mother” who uses her daughter and cheats on her husband but, Mulvany says, that is a far too simplistic reading of a woman who was just trying to survive in the 1950s.

“Marge is doing what she has to do to keep her roof over their heads,” Mulvany says. “Mac is away all the time on the road because he finds he’s not really cut out for city life. The streets of King Cross are not paved with gold, which is that classic thing in Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland’s work. They’re broke, they have a child. They’re living in a broken down, dilapidated sort of hovel, and the only way she can keep a roof over their heads is to f--- the landlord.

“And when you think of that trail that she’s on, it’s devastating. It’s not that she’s just a bad mother, she’s trying to be the best mother in the only way she can at that point. But that’s really difficult for Mac to understand.”

While Macauley’s daughter Buster was played by Rebecca Smart, who was then 11 years old, in the miniseries (both she and Bryan Brown won Logies in 1989 for most popular actor; there was also a movie in 1957 starring Peter Finch), in the STC adaptation, Buster is played by Ziggy Resnick.

“In the book, Buster is four,” Mulvany says. “But because I didn’t want to sugarcoat this world that Mac lives in and that he drags her through, and she drags him through, [that world] had to be brutal. So I didn’t want to put a child on stage with that; there’s sex, there’s violence, there’s addiction, and it can be quite hard to put a child actor amongst that.”

For Mulvany, The Shiralee has proved more than another job – it has become a lasting connection to her dad, who died in 2017. “I had a little emotional moment, just like last night,” she says. “I actually went to call my dad because I wanted to check on something, and I picked up my phone, went to his number, and it took that long before I went, ‘Oh my god.’ Because he’s so present in my head and in the room right now. And I just had this moment going, ‘I can’t call him, the bugger.’”

The Shiralee is at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, from October 6 to November 29. The Shiralee miniseries is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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