Creator Liz Doran must have wept with happiness when they found an actor capable of bringing so much to an already glorious script – and who embodies the joie de vivre upon which so much of the plot, as everyone she meets becomes part of her orbit, depends. Sybylla is one of too many children for her hardworking mother and debt-ridden, irresponsible father to support. So she is sent from their impoverished farm in Possum Gully to stay with her maternal grandmother (Anna Chancellor), the aptly named Mrs Bossier.
She is a successful horse breeder who lives in widowed splendour, with her other daughter Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly) miles away in a grand mansion. She has plenty of time on her hands to shape Sybylla into a proper model of womanhood and get her married off to a rich man who can take care of her and the rest of her family. Sybylla does not take kindly to the revelation of Granny’s plans.
Sybylla had thought she was going to be at Caddagat House, see the wider world and fuel her ambition to become a writer. Knowing that husbands do not help this mission, she practises a cheerful kind of resistance against Mrs B while throwing herself into the rest of her new life. She makes friends with Nell (Sherry-Lee Watson), the talented horse trainer from an Indigenous family who dreams of becoming Caddagat’s foreman despite the handicap, in 1890s rural Australia, of both her background and her sex.
Sybylla makes frenemies (but! He’s extremely attractive) with an English guest at the house, Frank (Jake Dunn), and becomes a mentee of sorts to their high society neighbour, the glamorously eccentric Augusta (Kate Mulvany, having a wild time). Augusta’s nephew Harry (Christopher Chung) is, like Frank, like all of us, drawn to this new, iconoclastic free spirit who has appeared in their midst – but the limits to Augusta’s bohemianism and other factors mean he is not as free in his turn as he might be to choose a wife.
The Sybylla-Frank-Harry love triangle evolves slowly and convincingly as the three young people make their mistakes, are overheard saying things to each other that they shouldn’t and generally explore the different kinds of attraction that different people offer each other. But, refreshingly, it doesn’t become the dominant tale. Sybylla’s writing ambitions remain important, with Augusta urging her to try to get stories published in magazines as an alternative way of supporting herself and her family that would also allow her to retain her independence.
The ramifications of her father’s incompetence increase. Bailiffs gradually strip the home of its few valuables and eventually another daughter must be sacrificed – this time to become a governess/maid of all work to a local family – to help manage his debts. The pressure on Sybylla to marry, and marry well, mounts as her friendships with Harry and Frank deepen in different ways.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
