
While staying with her well-to-do grandmother, Sybylla (Judy Davis) has a crisis about her looks. Her Aunt Helen (Wendy Hughes) tells her to stop looking in mirrors and tries to make her more feminine. Suitor Frank Hawden (Robert Grubb) offers a gift of flowers. Summary by Paul Byrnes.
Funny and still topical sequence about self-image and self-confidence, ending with a powerful image showing Sybylla’s ‘wildness of spirit’. Water imagery carries forward throughout the film, representing a kind of feminine energy. Note the almost impressionist look to the scene by the lake.
During the drought of 1898, headstrong and vivacious Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) dreams of escaping the drudgery of farm life for a career as a writer. On an extended visit to her aristocratic grandmother (Aileen Britton), she meets Harry Beecham (Sam Neill), a well-to-do grazier. Sybylla must decide if love will interrupt her plans for a brilliant career.
My Brilliant Career introduced two startling new talents to the Australian public. It was the first feature of Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) graduate Gillian Armstrong, one of the first women to break into feature directing in the 1970s, and the first time most Australians had seen the astonishingly talented Judy Davis, who had recently graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), in Sydney.
The timing was perfect, as was the choice of subject. Miles Franklin’s semi-autobiographical novel, published in Edinburgh in 1901, was a ground-breaking feminist text from an earlier era that perfectly dramatised the concerns of many women in the late 1970s. The period setting only served to underline the idea that the dilemmas had not changed that much for modern women. Career or marriage was still a difficult choice, and Sybylla Melvyn presented a powerful role model – a feminist warrior, in the same year that produced a masculine fantasy in the road warrior, Mad Max.
Judy Davis’s performance is a large part of what audiences responded to – Sybylla’s blazing self–assurance, her courage and youthful anger, her refusal to settle for anything less than the moon. The film’s cinematography has great contrast – the flat, barren landscapes of the Melvyn family’s farm in the midst of drought gives way to green and verdant homesteads of the landed gentry.
Cinematographer Don McAlpine gives some of these scenes an impressionist look, emphasising the sense of privilege. Armstrong showed a great pictorial sophistication, a kind of visual sensuality. The film remains one of the high points of the 'new wave’ of Australian cinema in the 1970s and a leading influence on women who followed in film in the 80s and 90s.
Notes by Paul Byrnes
This clip shows Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) at Caddagat, her wealthy grandmother’s home, embarking on a beauty regimen that is overseen by the refined and gracious Aunt Helen (Wendy Hughes). Later, in an idyllic scene by the river, a transformed Sybylla sits beneath a tree reading a book. When suitor Frank Hawden (Robert Grubb) appears with flowers she graciously accepts them, but throws them into the river once he is out of frame. As rain begins to fall Sybylla is joyful, oblivious to her soaking dress or her ruined book, straw hat and gloves.
Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.