I first read Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as a master’s student pursuing Australian literary studies in India, thousands of kilometres from the country it describes. It opened up a world I didn’t yet know. That’s why Netflix’s reimagining of the novel — recasting Harry Beecham as mixed Chinese-European, played by Christopher Chung — has caught my attention.

I have no quarrel with recovering forgotten histories. The idea that Chinese Australians and mixed families were part of the social fabric at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating, and interracial life in colonial Australia deserves to be explored. Kate Bagnall makes a solid historical case that such a character could plausibly have existed.

But plausibility isn’t the same as justification. My question is simpler: why does that story have to be inserted into Miles Franklin’s?

My Brilliant Career, published in 1901, is a work of its time — its assumptions, tensions and blind spots included. I wasn’t looking for a contemporary Australia retrofitted into the book when I first read it. I was discovering a different one through Franklin’s eyes. Literature can be a window precisely because it doesn’t look like us. Not every classic needs to be brought into conformity with the present.

And the conversation should be bigger than one character’s casting. Australia has an extraordinary number of untold stories: the Indian hawkers, merchants, sailors, students and families who built connections with Australia long before today’s multiculturalism; the friendships, tensions and exchanges between communities in the colonial era. As someone who came to Australian literature as an Indian student, I’d love to see those stories told.

Just not by rewriting the ones we already have.

If I wanted to write about an Indian-Australian family in Federation-era Australia, I wouldn’t take Franklin’s characters and make them Indian, or alter Henry Handel Richardson’s, or rework a classic Indigenous text to fit my narrative. I’d write the story that hasn’t been written yet. That’s the more exciting form of representation.

This isn’t only about race. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey makes the same point from another angle. Homer has been reinterpreted for centuries, and no one seriously expects a literal twenty-first-century retelling — Nolan has every right to his own version. But that hasn’t stopped debate over what he changed, omitted or invented. Artistic freedom to reinvent a canonical work doesn’t put that reinvention beyond criticism. The same logic applies to My Brilliant Career: the question isn’t whether Netflix can reinterpret Franklin, but whether changing the classic is really the best way to serve representation — when there’s a third option.

Write a new one.

The Ghost in the Shell controversy is instructive too. When Hollywood cast Scarlett Johansson as Major in the 2017 adaptation of the Japanese manga, the backlash wasn’t really about her talent — it was about a powerful industry reshaping another culture’s property to fit its own expectations, instead of making something original. That question should cut both ways. If it’s a problem for Hollywood to alter a Japanese work rather than create something new, we should ask the same of ourselves when we alter an Australian one. The direction of cultural power differs; the principle doesn’t.

Here’s a harder question: would we be as enthusiastic if a celebrated Indigenous, Chinese-Australian or Indian-Australian novel were substantially reimagined by an outside production team — its characters’ ethnicity and relationships rewritten and called reinterpretation? I doubt it. And maybe it shouldn’t be treated differently. Respect for literary heritage shouldn’t depend on the author’s race — Franklin’s work isn’t untouchable because she was white, any more than a migrant writer’s would be fair game because they weren’t.

Both things can be true: Australia’s multicultural history deserves telling, and existing literary works deserve to keep their integrity. If the canon underrepresents Chinese, Indian and other migrant communities, expand it. If film and TV have overlooked colonial-era interracial life, fund the filmmakers who’ll tell those stories properly. Give writers from those communities the resources to make the work — don’t just change the characters in the books we already have.

I want to read the Chinese-Australian and Indian-Australian stories that haven’t been told yet. I want the stories of the people who crossed oceans, built businesses and made lives here long before today’s Australia took shape. I just don’t want them told at the expense of My Brilliant Career — and if I told one myself, I wouldn’t do it by rewriting a classic. I’d write my own.

Representation shouldn’t mean inserting new characters into old stories. It should mean giving new writers the chance to create stories of their own. The challenge for Australian culture isn’t to keep repainting the canon — it’s to expand it. The real achievement would be today’s Chinese-Australian, Indian-Australian, and migrant writers creating the classics future generations will argue about, adapt and love.

Support our Journalism

No-nonsense journalism. No paywalls. Whether you’re in Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA, or India, you can support The Australia Today by taking a paid subscription via Patreon or donating via PayPal — and help keep honest, fearless journalism alive.