Rarriwuy Hick likens the build-up to her first lead role in a TV drama to an athlete training for a major sporting event.

“There were months and months of preparation before pre-production,” she recalls. “Meditation, trying to find things that could ground me, working out every day with Pilates and boxing.”

To play police detective Toni Alma in True Colours, a four-part series created by Warren H. Williams and Erica Glynn, she also travelled to the production base in Alice Springs (Mparntwe) a month before shooting started. “I needed to get a sense of the pace of Alice Springs: it’s very different to where I’m from, even though it’s also the Northern Territory,” she explains.

The dancer, writer, choreographer and actor (Redfern Now, The Gods of Wheat Street, Cleverman, Wentworth) is based further north, closer to Darwin in Arnhem Land, which she describes as a long way, geographically, climatically and culturally, from the Arrernte country where the drama is set.

“We have palm trees and crystal-clear water, it’s very tropical, humid. It’s got that Bali vibe. Alice Springs has this beautiful flat desert with amazing ranges. You hardly ever see a cloud in the sky. We were filming in winter, this time last year, and it is cold. But you turn the camera on, and it doesn’t matter what time of the day, the landscape is strikingly beautiful with its bright red colours and spinifex.”

Near the start of the series, made by Bunya Productions (Mystery Road, Goldstone, Sweet Country) in association with SBS and NITV, Alma is sent from her city posting to a remote community to investigate an assault on a teenage girl, Mariah (Janaya Kopp). The fictional Perdar Theendar is where the detective was born and raised, a place where she has deep roots and a complicated history. And while her boss (Emma Jackson) believes Alma’s local knowledge will be an asset for the case, some members of the community now resentfully regard the policewoman as an outsider.

Her presence in Perdar Theendar allows the drama to explore the customs, rituals and kinship system that operate in the region. Hick, who speaks seven Indigenous dialects, learnt to speak Arrernte, as a significant amount of the dialogue in the series is spoken in the local language.

Alma’s uncle Samuel (series co-creator Williams), a community police officer, cryptically advises her soon after her arrival that “there’s a lot going on around here”, and not all of it is readily apparent, even to a woman who understands the relationships and conventions. Among the challenges, her younger brother, Keithy (Keenan Japangardi Mitchell), is acting out and a former boyfriend might know more about events that took place on secret ceremonial lands than he wants to reveal.