Greg McLean made his name creating eerily familiar characters: good old-fashioned Aussie blokes whose turn of phrase, anti-authoritarianism and sense of humour remind viewers of the people who populated their childhoods. or signup to continue reading Almost two decades after it was released, he says people still tell him reminds them of their uncle. "Even though he's a crazy serial killer, there's a real affection for the character - people love Mick Taylor.
It's really weird," he says. In his latest offering, , the murder is implied but McLean's love for the land and its people remains clear. The setting may be thousands of kilometres away on a remote Northern Territory cattle farm, but the characters and backgrounds come directly from his own childhood growing up on a farm in Emu Creek on the outskirts of Bendigo.
As a child, McLean attended Eppalock Primary School with about 25 other students, before starting high school at Catherine McCauley. At the end of the first episode of , when cattle baron Colin Lawson looks down at a picture of his father, it's not an actor in an artificially aged photograph, but a real photo of McLean's father as a young jackaroo in the 1940s. "It's meant to be Colin looking at his dad.
.. but that's kind of my own story of growing up with a dad who was from the land.
" There's a bit of his uncles and cousins in all the characters in , he says, and a lot of his childhood in everything he does. In spite of any head start he may have had from his upb.