August // 2026
Where was My Brilliant Career filmed? South Australia's Penola, the Barossa and Adelaide Studios
My Brilliant Career
The cameras started rolling near Penola on June 12, 2025. A small, limestone-coast town of 1,400 people in South Australia's far south-east. From Penola, the production spread to the Southern Barossa region and back to Adelaide Studios, where the interiors were built. Netflix's My Brilliant Career — the new series adaptation of Miles Franklin's beloved novel, premiering August 13, 2026 — was filmed entirely in South Australia.
Miles Franklin wrote her novel in 1899 when she was nineteen years old. It took Hollywood eight decades to make a film of it — the Gillian Armstrong version with Judy Davis and Sam Neill in 1979, which won three BAFTA Awards and remains one of the defining works of Australian cinema. It has taken Netflix and Jungle Entertainment another forty-seven years to bring it back.
My Brilliant Career follows Sybylla, a fiercely modern young woman with one burning ambition: to be a writer, even as her family pushes her toward marriage. Sybylla breaks every convention of 1900 Australia as she chases a story that could write her way to independence — until she falls in love.
Penola, South Australia
The series entered production near Penola, in the South East of South Australia, in June 2025. Penola is a small town of around 1,400 people in the limestone coast region — its wide, flat streets, its stone buildings and its surrounding pastoral landscape making it one of the most authentically preserved 19th-century rural settlements in the country.
Also the histroic homestead Yallum Park, near Penola, will feature in the series. It is one of the best-preserved historic homes in the country.
Tourism hopes for the town ran high from the moment Netflix announced the production. The town's local council welcomed the crew, the 400 cast and crew members, and the attention that a major Netflix production brings to a region that the industry has rarely reached before.
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Para Para Mansion and the Southern Barossa region
Filming also took place at Para Para Mansion in Gawler West, just north of Adelaide, in May 2025. The historic property is one of South Australia's most significant 19th-century homesteads
Further south, at the Southern Barossa region — the wine-producing area south of the main Barossa Valley — additional scenes where shot. At this time, we do not yet know the exact locations.
Adelaide Studios
Adelaide Studios served as the production's primary studio base for interior scenes and technical work. The SAFC's flagship facility, located at Glenside in Adelaide's inner east, provided the controlled environment for the period interiors — drawing rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms — that the series required alongside its outdoor location work.
My Brilliant Career premieres on Netflix on August 13, 2026.
SOURCE
Wikipedia // ABC Australia
CREDITS
Netflix Studios, Jungle Entertainment // Photo Ian Routledge
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