“It feels like a completely different world.” Actress Philippa Northeast on filming Netflix’s Territory

Philippa Northeast has vivid memories of arriving at Tipperary Station to begin filming Territory, a major Netflix drama premiering on October 24, 2024.

“It feels like a completely different world,” the Sydney-based actor says, describing the culture shock she experienced on location late last year, with dingoes skulking about and buffaloes loping across the road as the 200+ cast and crew rolled in.

For a month, they all lived on the working cattle station 200km from Darwin, taking up the station’s home and shearer’s quarters and 100 camper vans.

“It was like a festival site,” Northeast says, speaking on the eve of the series’ release. She is on one of her frequent visits to the family farm of her actor boyfriend near Canberra, ensconced in an elegant sitting room while her blue heeler lazes nearby on the verandah. It was here that Northeast, 30, mastered manual driving in preparation for her outback role.

“I did as much as I could, finding the dodgiest ute I could and trying to make it go, and really silly things like practising how quickly I could open gates or jump over fences,” she says, laughing. In Sydney, she took riding lessons with horse and animal trainer Grahame Ware, who became the show’s chief wrangler.

Northeast plays 19-year-old Susie Lawson, granddaughter of cattle baron Colin Lawson (Robert Taylor), in the Succession-style drama, in which family members jostle for supremacy among themselves while facing multiple external threats. Think big landscapes, big emotions, big risks, big hats and the constant friction of warring factions and bitter internecine feuds.

The Lawsons own the biggest cattle property in the world, Marianne Station, as Tipperary is rebranded for the series. When Susie arrives home from her Sydney boarding school, it’s to a family and business in disarray. After the anointed heir dies, the station is left without a clear successor and beset with generational clashes. Meanwhile, sensing vulnerability, rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, billionaire miners and indigenous interests circle. Billions of dollars and priceless sacred sites are at stake.

Holding it all together is Susie’s mother, Emily Lawson (Anna Torv), the central character. She has faced two decades of disparagement from patriarch Colin for coming from a notorious family, the Hodges, from the wrong side of the tracks, but she is determined to hold onto Marianne Station and make it her own.

“I saw Emily, Anna’s character, as the heart of this show, and Susie as the hope,” Northeast says. “Truthfully, it’s the women who serve the heart and the hope, but it just gets masked by the men and their masculine bravado,” Northeast says. “And that’s very much Emily and Susie’s journey – how do they tame these bulls, the men, in order to bring some equilibrium.”

The women are no pushovers. “There’s a great scene where Emily says ‘You gotta learn how to dodge the shrapnel’ and Susie starts to be very good at that,” Northeast says. “She knows how to do the bull dance with Colin to tame him and not show him fear…”

The love stories within the drama left Northeast pondering the idea of strategic partnerships in the bush. “There’s so many ways that women have to consider their standing and family, and who you join forces with on this scale in the country plays a really big role. I think in urban life you will maybe not be in business with your family, whereas in the country and rural life you are often in business with your family, and who you bring into the fold will determine the shape of that business for the next however many years.”

Northeast knows that Graziher readers tend to know one end of a horse from the other, not to mention the intricacies of some of the issues she portrays. “I hope they like her,” she says. “I tried to capture some of the resilience that country women have.”

Series director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, La Brea) is the man behind the redhot action that unfurls at a furious pace in Territory’s six episodes. He was thrilled to have the chance to work in the outback again nearly 20 years after his horror breakthrough Wolf Creek, filmed in South Australia, and 2007’s crocodile horror Rogue, about a boat tour that goes wrong at Kakadu. In recent years, McLean has directed well-received though slightly less terrifying dramas including Scrublands, based on the bestselling book by Chris Hammer.

He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve with Territory after reading the script and leaping on board. “We were very keen to give it a really big look and to not make it feel like a little Aussie drama,” McLean says. “Not that we wanted it to look Hollywood, but we certainly wanted to make it feel like that world and lifestyle was being presented in the biggest possible way. And we wanted to romanticise it and make it heroic and present that world and its drama in a really serious way.”

Game of Thrones was an inspiration to McLean and creators Ben Davies (Outback Ringers) and Timothy Lee. “We were interested in it in the sense of competing kingdoms, these warring clans and factions and we felt like the NT is a place that has many competing and competitive parties all vying for certain resources, so that was a good inspiration for us as well as Succession.”

People keep asking if it’s an Aussie Yellowstone, McLean says, referring to the hit US ranch drama with which Territory shares some broad plotlines. “We are all massive Yellowstone fans… but we are talking very much about Australia and specifically the Northern Territory because it is nothing like the rest of Australia. It is unique. We are very focused on trying to represent that particular world and mindset.”

FILMING ON TIPPERARY STATION

With most of Tipperary’s homesteads and buildings being more contemporary, Territory’s Production Designer Matt Putland and team faced a huge challenge in erecting an African lodge-style homestead exterior in just eight weeks before filming.

“There wasn’t that one iconic building at Tipperary that we felt would speak to the audience as a building from ‘the olden day’,” series director Greg McLean says. “In our story the station was founded by two brothers in the 1880s, so we needed to have that historic family home.

“Tipperary has these beautiful manicured lawns so we had to negotiate to be able to erect the house there. It was so well done that sitting on the porch you felt like it had been there for 100 years. It was extraordinary.”

One of the highlights of filming with stock was calling on the real-life ringers for several scenes, McLean says. The biggest of these was the Lawson family muster in episode five, bringing in 2000 cattle past the station’s runway and the homestead set.

“We walked through all the locations and storyboarded the sequence,” McLean says. “Then we worked with the station’s skilled cattlemen and women to figure out how you physically move the cattle and who’s going to be in the scene – who’s an actual ringer doing the actual cattle mustering on camera, how the actors fit in safely within that choreography, where the cameras and crews are able to be and then where the muster is going to end up. It was like a military campaign… and that couldn’t really come off without the skill of Tipperary’s cattle wranglers working seamlessly with our grip, stunt, wrangling and safety teams. Those guys and gals are the best you can get.”

Co-creator Timothy Lee was thrilled that Tipperary offered a chance to return to classical filmmaking. “Being at Tipperary and having access to that head of cattle allowed us to do old-school filmmaking that wasn’t CGI – we haven’t put the cattle in afterwards.

“They’re all real, in the thousands, and the choppers are really flying low over the top of them. It was a throwback to the old style of Hollywood filmmaking when things were created in-camera.”

Other Territory locations included Kakadu National Park in the top end and remote South Australia.

ABOUT TIPPERARY STATION

Tipperary Station, along with adjoining Douglas West and Litchfield, form the 386,000 hectare Tipperary Group of Stations, carrying one of the biggest cattle herds in the country.

Cattle breeding and backgrounding are the main enterprises. It is blessed with numerous natural watering points, with springs, creeks and swamps, supplemented with tanks and bores. It shares a boundary to the north with Litchfield National Park and Litchfield Station, Ban Ban Springs and Douglas Stations to the East, Crown Land to the south and Malak
Malak Aboriginal Land Trust to the west.

All six episodes of Territory premiere on Netflix on Thursday, October 24. 

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