Radio Australia Today Editorial

Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Do Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackman work?

24 November 2008

In a word, yes.

I saw the Melbourne premiere of “Australia” last night.

No, Nicole and Hugh weren’t there, despite the presence of a red carpet and heaps of security. I don’t know who they were trying to protect. Me?

But the night belonged to the film, all two and three-quarter hours of it.

It didn’t seem a minute too long.

The action happens in the north of Australia, where an English lady comes to a remote cattle property after her husband is killed. On first appearances she is totally unsuited to the rough and dry of the outback, but with the help of Hugh Jackman’s Drover, she becomes a local celebrity by droving 1500 cattle up to Darwin and winning a big contract away from the local cattle king, played by Bryan Brown.

It’s a tale of hardship, although the extreme heat and privation of the Northern Territory never really comes through. What does come through is the Japanese. For the first time that I can remember on film, the bombing of Darwin is depicted in all its gross detail. My mum and dad were in Darwin at the time, and though they will never get to see the film, I would’ve loved to have got their view of how the bombing was portrayed.

The great thing about this movie though is the aboriginality. Baz Luhrmann enlisted author Richard Flanagan to co-write the screenplay, and you can tell. Audiences will be treated to a lesson in understanding aboriginal culture and how the forced removal of aboriginal children from their parents tore at the aboriginal communities. Other aboriginal concepts like singing the land are also shown. Singing is the aboriginal way of mapping the land. They sing a song that includes landmarks (trees, rocks, mountains, ponds) that guide them through the land. Although the songlines, as they called, have been noted for some decades now, it has taken all this time for the concept to make it into a major international film.

This is a three-cry movie. There were sobs around me, even from the rather crusty man sitting behind me, who had given a dispproving tut when the film opened with a warning that aboriginal people might be offended because dead aborigines are depiected in the movie. He obviously thought such a warning was a waste of time.

I hope that by the end of the piece he had a little more undersatanding of the cultural sensitivities of other people. If Baz Luhrmann manages to do this, then I think he’ll feel his job was worth while.

I give “Australia” 5 out of 5.

– Phil