Sybylla is seduced by the more comfortable life her grandmother (Tracy Mann) offers and even has her head turned by the handsome-as-all-get-out Harry Beecham (Guy Simon).

Guy Simon as the head-turning Harry Beecham with Nikki Shiels as Sybylla. She’s impatient with her mother (Blazey Best) for marrying her father (Jason Chong), an alcoholic whose choices have disrupted the family’s financial security – her mother is now so busy she has no time for herself. Shiels is a storm of wild romantic adolescence in the role – you can’t take your eyes off her. This is a glittering-sharp script that centres Sybylla’s ambition and her frustrations and makes them timeless. It’s something to grapple with: who are we who is Franklin to us what do we want her to represent?įeaver has followed the thread that still runs tight around our lives: discrimination against women, especially poor women.

The reverence for her writing is complicated by the fact that later in life, Franklin was involved with the Australia First movement that sympathised with and supported Nazism. Photograph: Brett Boardmanįor better or worse, Franklin casts a long literary shadow: her novel is remembered while other Australian female writers of the time have been long forgotten her much-celebrated work helps build a collective national fantasy of white Australian history as the dominant narrative two significant literary awards, the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize, are named in her honour.

Here before us, so alive and hungry to be heard, is Sybylla Melvyn (Nikki Shiels).

My brilliant career by miles franklin