Productions that recount the lives of great sportspeople are often laden with a rah-rah-rah, “win at all costs” mentality that I find about as appealing as a fart in an elevator. But watching the ABC’s new series about Australian tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley – a former world No 1 whose accomplishments include seven grand slam singles titles – it is soon clear this will be something else, something deeper. Her story unfolds over three well-paced episodes with a refreshing kind of gracefulness. While it is perhaps not must-see viewing, it’s well above standard sports fare, and I remained captivated throughout.
From the start, director Wayne Blair (whose recent work includes Plum, Bay of Fires and Mystery Road: Origin season two) sets a contemplative tone, with light-filled compositions and a flashback structure that fluidly oscillates between past and present – less like a tennis to-and-fro than streams of water crossing and intersecting.
The show kicks off with Evonne (newcomer Lila McGuire) at Wimbledon but quickly jumps back to her childhood in the late 1950s, showing a young Evonne and her family arriving at their new home in Barellan, New South Wales, where they were the community’s only Indigenous family. “Never had a house with a proper floor,” says her mother, Linda (Chenoa Deemal), while embracing her father, Kenny (Luke Carroll), who summarises the emotional tone of these initial moments when he puts his arm around Evonne and tells her, “Good things are gonna come, bub. Just you wait.”
Dialogue like that should set off alarm bells, but amazingly, the moment doesn’t feel cheesy or cloying. In fact this entire series, written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, maintains a dignified approach, sidestepping the usual biopic bombast and prioritising restraint over go-for-broke rhetoric, while still delivering the expected moments of hard-fought triumph.
The timeline switching makes an early statement about where the show’s priorities lie: this story is as much about where Evonne’s going as it is about where she came from. That’s especially significant given her background, far from the wealth and elitism often associated with tennis. Visions of young Evonne using a paddle to hit an old tennis ball against a brick pillar provides an effective narrative shorthand while also feeling genuine.
An early moment, in which revered coach Vic Edwards (Marton Csokas) arrives at Evonne’s home to tell her parents he’s spotted in her “a raw talent that in all my years of coaching I’ve never witnessed”, reminded me of a scene from Scott Hicks’ great film Shine, when Nicholas Bell’s piano teacher rocks up at the home of David Helfgott, also proposing to help on the protagonist’s passage to greatness. (Edwards gets a comparatively easy ride, dealing with Evonne’s pleasant and supportive parents rather than Helfgott’s painfully overbearing father.)
Edwards is a well-drawn character: seemingly benign initially, but layered with elements that reveal a much more toxic presence. Csokas does a good job making him feel real and nuanced – though all eyes will be on McGuire, a Whadjuk and Ballardong Noongar woman, in the titular role. Her performance patiently and vividly ekes out Goolagong’s multitudes, presenting her as soft-hearted and agreeable in some ways but also projecting the kind of tenacity and doggedness needed to achieve tennis greatness.
The weaving in of some political elements that overlapped with Evonne’s career – including her decision to play in apartheid-era South Africa, during which she was granted “honorary white” status – gave me the sense that the writers were posing the question of whether the star could have done more, or behaved differently, without judging her or pretending to hold all the answers in the ever-continuing debate about sports and politics.
The tennis scenes are elegantly staged, with scaled-back colour schemes and camerawork that emphasises the position of the players (particularly Evonne) over the trajectory of the ball. In terms of on-court action, this can feel slightly distancing, though not necessarily in a bad way; it is Evonne’s psychological state that is the real focus. And this speaks to the entire emphasis of the show: tennis is used as a way to understand Goolagong, rather than a metric by which her personal worth is measured.
Goolagong begins on ABC TV on Sunday 8.20pm, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview
