When you’re filming outside in winter in the Australian alps, a quick take is a good take.

“It was minus 2 in one scene, and I said to the crew, ‘I hope you guys are f---ing getting this’,” says Leah Purcell, who stars in High Country, a new eight-part crime mystery series for Foxtel and Binge that was shot in the region that, until now, has been best known as the setting for The Man From Snowy River.

On the day we talk on set in Jamieson, the tiny Victorian town that doubles as the fictional Broken Ridge, the rain has set in, turning the football field housing the production’s base camp into a quagmire. A week down the track, the gorgeous riverside camping ground where a good chunk of the action takes place will be underwater. But right now, Purcell’s mind is focused not just on the weather – chilling as it is – but on the vast range of things she has to get her head around on a show on which she also serves as cultural consultant and executive producer.

She’s in almost every scene in the series; she’s only got time to talk today because this is her first light workload in 36 days of shooting.

“I’m busy. I’m busy,” she says, cheerily. “I have not had a day off, and I won’t. Tomorrow I have one scene, with one word, so I love tomorrow. But I’ve got to go through my scripts for this block [of episodes] and get on top of it because then I can sleep at night, I know where my character’s going, I know what I’m saying.

“But you know, I’ve been working 30 years in the industry now, and you work for this, and I think I can handle all that because it’s what you’ve got to do.”

In High Country, Purcell plays Detective Andie Whitford, who has moved from the city with her partner Helen (Sara Wiseman) and daughter to take charge of a country police station, a shift that’s supposed to bring about a quieter life. But in the way of crime dramas set in small country towns all over the world (think Happy Valley from the UK, says Purcell, or Mare of Easttown from the States), an unfeasibly high murder rate soon puts paid to that plan.

It starts with a family murder-suicide, but soon there’s a cold case involving a missing hiker, and then a woman from town goes missing, and what about that strange loner who lives in a caravan and is assumed by many of his neighbours to be a sexual abuser – could they all be connected in some way?

Heightened though it may all seem, the idea for the series came from real events.

“I read a feature article about people who had gone missing in the high country over a period of about a year in a very small geographic area, about 60 kilometres,” says veteran producer Marcia Gardner, who co-created the show with writer John Ridley. “It was all very mysterious, it had the police and the locals baffled.”

“There were four or five other cases going back 10 or 15 years, but then there was a clump of three in a year who had just vanished and never been found,” adds Ridley.

That was the spark for a storyline that would soon enough veer off into fictional territory. The fact Ridley’s family lived in the area, and he had been visiting regularly for 35 years, provided all the kindling they needed.

“I’ve always come up here and said, ‘what a great place to shoot a series’, but three hours out of Melbourne, you go, ‘well, it’s never gonna happen’,” says Ridley. “But it just so happened that this was the perfect place for it really.”

Even before the idea for the show though, Gardner and Ridley had another, more vague but equally compelling, ambition: to create a vehicle for Purcell, with whom they had worked on Wentworth.

“She has an incredible sense of warmth and humanity about her, and I just loved her acting,” says Gardner.

That was the nugget of the show: a series of cold-case disappearances, the high country setting, and Leah Purcell. The details would come later.

“We were very particular about making sure Leah was right there from ground zero,” says Ridley.

“Once we had the pitch formulated in our minds, we rang her and said, ‘we told you we were coming with something; are you on board’,” adds Gardner.

Although the character Purcell plays has Indigenous heritage, she has little knowledge of, and no connection with, culture (which is quite distinct from Purcell herself).

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Andie’s journey into Country and culture is, says Gardner, “an important element in the sense that it differentiates this mystery thriller from every other mystery thriller that you see on the screen”.

But they’re well aware, too, of the sensitivities of non-indigenous creators telling stories that touch, however lightly, on such matters.

“We’re not necessarily telling an Indigenous story because Marcia and I aren’t Indigenous, so we don’t have any right to tell an Indigenous story,” Ridley says.

Which is where Purcell’s role as cultural consultant comes in.

Though she is a Murri woman from Queensland, Purcell knew it was important to reach out to the traditional custodians of the region where the production is set and filmed, the Taungurung. Through the land council, she made contact with elders and explained what the production had in mind, where it might touch on areas of cultural knowledge, and sought permission to tell the story in a respectful way.

“It’s not just me going in and saying, ‘Hey, mate, can we use your story’,” says Purcell. “There was a lot of discussion about how it would be used, if there was anything that was sacred that we needed to leave out. All the way through they could ask me questions, and through my knowledge of what we were doing with the story, through John and Marcia, we found a level playing field that they were happy with, what part of the stories were going to be used, and how they were incorporated.”

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Actor Geoff Morell, who plays a wealthy landowner in the series, has nothing but praise for the way Purcell has worn multiple hats on this production.

“Being a lead actor doesn’t just mean you’ve got all the lines,” he says. “A lead means you’re leading. It’s also the fact she has this great cultural input. This show isn’t ticking boxes, it’s the real deal, and she’s actually brought a lot of that stuff. So on all levels she’s led the company just magnificently.”

Purcell is proud of the way protocols were followed on High Country. But, she adds, “I’m still a big advocate of the idea that Indigenous people should be telling our stories, first and foremost”.

To that end, she has plenty of irons in the fire. The storyline for a TV spin-off of her play-turned-novel-turned film The Drover’s Wife (the feature was also shot in the high country, albeit on the NSW side of the alps) is done. She’s working on the screenplay for what she hopes will be her second feature as director. And her play Is That You, Ruthie? – which was staged at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre late last year – fulfilled a promise she made long ago to an elder from her grandmother’s clan that she would one day tell her story.

“This Aunty was saying forever, ‘Can you do something, can you do something?’, and it took me 20 years,” she says. “I had to get my stripes up.”

Whether she’s writing, producing, directing, negotiating around cultural knowledge or simply acting as a police sergeant, it’s pretty safe to say Leah Purcell has well and truly done that now.

High Country premieres on Binge on Tuesday March 19.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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