This Australian serial is currently screening on BBC1 in the UK and has already been seen in Australia and New Zealand. The serial is in 8 episodes of 42 to 46 minutes each. BBC1 is screening it two episodes at a time on Saturday nights and all eight episodes are on iPlayer. It’s a crime fiction drama involving the search for a killer of several people missing at different times over several months in a relatively remote part of the ‘High Country’ in Victoria. In many ways it’s a typical contemporary crime mystery narrative melding police procedural and the domestic melodrama focused around the principal investigator and the small community in which she lives. The two distinctive features are the setting in the Victorian Alps (the other half of the Great Dividing Range – the northern half being the Snowy Mountains) and the actor playing the lead character, Sergeant Andie Whitford. Leah Purcell is one of the best-known Australian actors of Indigenous heritage with credits in theatre, film and TV. She was the star of the film The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Mollie Johnson (Australia 2021), but she is also a writer, producer and director and cultural icon representing Indigenous creative people. She’s an executive producer of this serial produced by Curio Pictures (a Sony Pictures TV company) for Foxtel (65% owned by News Corp Australia).
In High Country, Purcell plays a police officer who appears to have had a career in an urban force as a detective but for personal reasons has elected to take a job as the senior police officer in a small rural unit in the mountains. The first episode sees her soon after her arrival in the small town of Brokenridge with her wife Helen (Sarah Wiseman) and Helen’s daughter Kirra (Pez Warner). The previous sergeant of the town is Sam Dryson played by the well-known Northern Irish actor Ian McElhinney. He has now retired locally and professes to be interested in only his fishing but it soon becomes clear that he has ‘unfinished business’ in town. The third familiar figure is the Indigenous actor Aaron Pedersen, the star of the Mystery Road TV series and films in which he plays an Aboriginal Australian police detective. His character in High Country, Owen Cooper, a horseman in this tourist country, has been sidelined by the town’s wealthy rancher. There are several other important characters but I don’t want to list them all and get into too many spoilers.
Andie is put in charge of the ‘missing person murders’ by a (female) senior officer but faces some obstruction by one of the local constables, the ex-sergeant and local youths and petty criminals. All of this is conventional for this type of crime drama. The difference here is Andie’s sense of identity (or rather its lack). Her mother is white (and in a local care home) but she believes her father had some Indigenous heritage. She hasn’t learned much about her own history and early on she is admonished by Owen’s ‘Auntie Gladys’ who tells her she should find out who her ‘mob’ are – if she doesn’t know them she can’t know herself.
This serial comes across as a curious mix in that it is part soap opera melodrama with several familiar character types, part action thriller as Andie takes quite a few risks investigating leads and part Indigenous identity mystery. This last element will see Andie have dreams and possibly hallucinations. A white dingo seems to be watching over her. Does she actually experience its presence or is she imagining it? Gradually she becomes more involved with Owen and his son Ben (who is the same age as Keera).
Written by Marcia Gardner and John Ridley, veterans of several Australian TV dramas, High Country is a handsomely mounted long-form narrative with beautiful photography by Craig Barden and Darrell Martin and a score by Cezary and Jan Skubiszewski that deserves more attention than I’ve been able to give it. I do feel that the whole thing is built around Leah Purcell’s performance, which is very engaging. Ian McElhinney’s character is also central but I think that Aaron Pedersen’s role is not as important as I expected. I enjoyed the show and it maintained my interest throughout but I think it perhaps sets too many hares running and doesn’t in the end catch them all. Having said that, the final resolution is satisfying in terms of Andie Whitford’s narrative. I think that what surprises me most of all is the way in which these kinds of narratives – crime melodramas with female central characters – seem to be developing in similar ways in different cultural contexts. Andie Whitford is similar in some ways to Sarah Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley (UK 2014-2023), Sofia Helin’s Saga Noren in The Bridge (Sweden-Denmark, 2011-2018) and Sofie Gråbøl’s Sarah Lund in The Killing (Denmark-Sweden, 2007-2012). Each of these three ran to at least three separate serials over several ‘seasons’. I don’t know if High Country has been successful enough to warrant a second season. It looks like it has sold internationally in several territories. I would certainly be interested in a continuation of Andie’s story but if it happens, I hope the Indigenous heritage storyline is brought more to the fore.
Here is the original trailer from Binge, the streaming service set up by Foxtel in Australia:
itp Global Film 