Screen
My work on screen, from adaptation to television presenting — stories of landscape, memory, nature, creativity and connection.
Scroll on or jump to:
Filming Back To Nature on Arrernte Country, 2020, coincidentally in the real meteor crater that inspired the fictional meteor crater I wrote in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart in 2014.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart
In 2023, my debut novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart premiered as a seven-part Prime Video series starring Sigourney Weaver, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Asher Keddie, Leah Purcell and Frankie Adams.
The series was the most successful Amazon Original series worldwide with the biggest opening weekend viewership globally for any Australian launch on Prime Video: it reached the top 5 in 78 countries, and top 3 in 42 countries.
In 2024, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart received 12 AACTA nominations and won 3 awards including Best Miniseries.
While these statistics put me on the floor, maybe my favourite is that after the series launched there was a reported 1680% increase in global Google searches for the desert town and crater I made up in the novel!
How did it feel?
Adaptation is its own kind of storytelling: a translation, a reimagining, a different flower field grown from the singular seed.
Seeing the first novel that I wrote – this story especially – take another life from page to screen was one of the most surreal, joyous, challenging, difficult, and moving experiences of my creative life.
It will stay with me always.
Have courage, take heart.
– the meaning of malukuru (Pitjantjatjara language) / Sturt’s Desert Pea, in my novel,The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart
Back To Nature
In Back to Nature, Aaron Pedersen and I travelled through extraordinary Australian landscapes, listening to stories of place, history, memory, ecology and belonging.
Our 8-part series premiered on ABC TV in 2021 to critical acclaim.
Co-hosting this series deepened so much of what I believe about story: that landscape holds memory, that nature changes us, and that paying attention is a way of coming home.
How did it feel?
I grew up watching ABC TV. Becoming the co-host of an extraordinary series about the connection between nature, story and humanity was never on my bingo card, but here we are!
This was my first time in front of a camera + we filmed this series in 2020 throughout the pandemic as it was unfolding = a gruelling, beautiful experience.
Personal highlights were filming episode 1, The Green Cauldron, on Yugambeh Country with the ancient Antarcic beech trees I grew up with.
And filming on the east coast in Lutruwita/Tasmania at the same time as I was dreaming the story of my second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, to life, which is set there among the seals, kelp, marina shells, and black swans.
When we spotted wild seals while filming, I was, as you’ll see in the clip below, totally unfazed about it.
One of my favourite scenes:
The people I worked with to make this show expanded my brain and heart into new star systems and deepened my understanding of land, sea and sky.
