It’s been a big year for mystery thrillers on the small screen. And adding to the highly-bingeable likes of Passenger, The Jetty, True Detective: Night Country and The Red King is new Aussie crime thriller High Country, an eight-part series set in a rural corner of Victoria.
The set-up has a city cop travelling to a backwoods community where, at first glance, everyone seems intent on killing each other. But is there more to it than meets a veteran detective’s eye? Are a local psychic and a white dingo portents of something darker and more mystical?
The show is the brainchild of Marcia Gardner and John Ridley, creators of Wentworth, Australia’s answer to Orange is the New Black, in the mid-2010s.
‘I read a feature article about people who had gone missing in the high country over a period of about a year in a very small geographic area, about 60 kilometres,’ Gardner tells the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It was all very mysterious – it had the police and the locals baffled.’
As our top pick of Best Australian movies proves, Victoria also has serious pedigree in the field of mysterious vanishings – onscreen, at least – and this crime thriller is inspired loosely by real events. Here’s where this one was filmed.
Who’s in the cast?
The show’s lead is indigenous Australian actress Leah Purcell, a veteran of breakout Aussie movies like Lantana, Somersault, The Proposition and Jindabyne. She plays Detective Sergeant Andie Whitford, an indigenous cop in Broken Ridge who is drawn into a terrible potential murder case when she stumbles upon the body of a child in a hollow tree.
‘Andie's a fearless woman, but also there's a vulnerability to her, which is nice,’ Purcell tells Concrete Playground. ‘And what I liked is that she's quieter, she's an observer.’
Whitford’s artist partner Helen Hartley is played by Sara Wiseman, while her high-school-aged daughter Kirra is played by a newbie actor Pez Warner.
Aaron Pedersen is Owen Cooper, a park ranger who helps Andie navigate and search the woods for clues.
Northern Irish actor Ian McElhinney, one-time Barristan Selmy in Game of Thrones, stars as Sam Dyson, Brokenridge’s now-retired cop.
Francis Greenslade stars as Dr Patrick Haber, the seeming perp behind the murder of his wife and children. But suspicion also falls on Damien Stark, a local mystic played by Henry Nixon, while Linda Cropper is Rose, a local patron of the arts who may be a wrong’un too.
Where was High Country filmed?
The small Victorian town of Jamieson, about three hours’ drive from Melbourne, stood in for the fictional and murder-strewn settlement of Brokenridge for High Country’s 36-day shoot. This rural corner part of southeastern Australia is best known as the setting for 1982 Australian western The Man From Snowy River and it offers a suitably brooding, woody backdrop for High Country’s dark goings-on.
‘[The landscape] is important to Andie on a couple of levels,’ Purcell tells Concrete Playground. ‘As the detective, the sergeant trying to solve the mysteries – because is it just that these people took a wrong step on a trail in the bush? Or is there more behind it? And also for her and her journey, the land really speaks to her and makes her look at herself.’
How many episodes are there and how can I watch?
There are eight hour-long episodes in total and they’re all available to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK now or live on BBC One on Saturday nights. In the show’s homeland of Australia, High Country is available on Foxtel and Binge
Watch the trailer for High Country below.
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