Experience

A tourist's guide to Australia on screen

By Dennis Harvey

At a reported cost of 120 million, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is by far the biggest Australian movie ever made. Whether it’s one of the best—or worst—will definitely be debated for a while, with some likely to consider it a sweeping, overwhelming old-fashioned romantic epic a la Titanic, while others may reject it as a steaming pile of microwaved cliches.

Few will disagree with the contention that Australia, the country, looks pretty good here—at least as good as a very period-glamorized Nicole Kidman and newly crowned Sexiest Man Alive Hugh Jackman. A few folk (certainly those at the National Board of Tourism) are hoping the movie sparks the kind of tourism uptick that scenically spectacular Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.

If your travel budget in these pinched times isn’t quite up for a jaunt Down Under, the next best thing is a good Outback movie. We’ll skip the too-obvious ones (Walkabout, Man From Snowy River, Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max, Priscilla Queen of the Desert) in favor of a dash through some variably lesser-known but very worthwhile films set in the Aussie continent’s ample wide open spaces. Many feature a cast member or two from Australia, which offers practically a Who’s Who of Oz acting greats. Warning: A few of these titles aren’t yet available on commercial U.S. DVD, so you may have to do a little web searching.

The Overlanders (1946): This Oz-U.K. coproduction is THE great cattle-drive movie—yes, better than Australia, even better than Red River. Local icon Chips Rafferty plays the leader of a team committed to driving 1,000 steer across nearly 2,000 miles of brutal terrain to mid-WW2 Queensland, the only (if possibly suicidal) alternative to shooting them all or letting them feed potential Japanese invaders. One of the all-time finest “Westerns,” if criminally underseen abroad.

Jedda (1955): The nation’s first-ever feature shot in color was, for its time, a surprisingly sensitive treatment of racial inequity (even if it was titled Jedda the Uncivilized in U.S. release). Its heroine is an aboriginal orphan adopted by a childless white couple, with inevitable culture-clashing results.

The Sundowners (1960): Chips aside, the talent—director Fred Zinnemann, stars Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Peter Ustinov—aren’t awfully Ozzie. But this adaptation of Jon Cleary’s novel was nonetheless considered the best Australian movie to date, and is still regarded as a fine study of rural life in its epic portrait of a sheep-herding family’s travails. Another excellent, if more downbeat, portrait of the sheepin’ life is Ken Hannam’s 1975 Sunday Too Far Away with Australia’s Jack Thompson.

Outback (1971): Chips is back, along with Thompson and the original Halloween’s Donald Pleasance, in Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s harrowing thriller about a schoolteacher stranded in a very unfriendly remote village. It’s horrifying, if not exactly a horror movie. For more Outback genre chills, check out Rolf de Heer’s enigmatic 1988 sci-fier Encounter at Raven’s Gate and Greg Mclean’s terrifying human-prey flick Wolf Creek (2005).

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978): A stark contrast to the lyrical outback mysticism of Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Fred Schepisi’s film dramatizes a grim chapter in colonialist 19th-century Australian history. Jimmy (Tommy Lewis) is a young aboriginal man pushed to take a shockingly brutal revenge against oppressive white society. Australia’s Thompson and Bryan Brown have supporting roles.

A Town Like Alice and The Shiralee (1987): Two highly regarded adaptations of great Aussie novels, both originally shown as multipart TV miniseries, and both starring Australia’s Brown. In Alice he’s an Australian POW in Malaysia who falls for an English captive (Helen Morse), a romance that subsequently sprawls over continents and decades. In Shiralee he’s a classic ramblin’ man forced to take responsibility for more than the next beer-up when he’s saddled with his young daughter’s care. Both stories were, incidentally, made into feature films in the 1950s.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002): Australia makes a plot device of the nation’s long, tragically misguided policy of “assimilating” aboriginal children by putting them in government institutions far removed from their families and native culture. Phillip Noyce’s movie treats that subject more seriously, to devastating effect, as it follows three young girls who escape and try to walk 1500 miles homeward, pursued by authorities. Walkabout icon and Australia player David Gulpilil appears.

Ten Canoes (2006): The Dutch-born, Aussie-raised Rolf de Heer wrote and directed this extraordinary expression of Aboriginal storytelling and “dreamtime”—both key (if more glibly dealt with) to Australia. Among de Heer’s other notable films are 2002’s The Tracker, a fine period piece about ugly race relations, and 1993’s Bad Boy Bubby—which has nothing to do with the Outback, but simply must be seen to be believed as one of the wildest films from Oz or anywhere else, ever.

Not sated yet? Well, there’s outback vintage children’s TV: Kangaroo Skippy, 1960s Australia’s landlubber answer to Flipper. Want something in the other direction entirely? It is my duty to inform you that there is a 1991 gay porn feature called Jackaroos, featuring someone billed as Foot-Long Sean. As Hugh Jackman (a pretty porny name that, I’ve always thought) keeps saying in Australia: Crikey!

topics: actors, world cinema

11.26.2008