This is a repository copy of The Cinematic Northern Territory of Australia. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/107635/ Version: Accepted Version Book Section: Rayner, J.R. (2016) The Cinematic Northern Territory of Australia. In: Dobson, J. and Rayner, J.R., (eds.) Mapping Cinematic Norths. New Studies in European Cinema, 20 . Peter Lang , Bern, Switzerland , pp. 241-261. ISBN 978-3-0343-1895-2 https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-78707-082-0 Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ The Cinematic Northern Territory of Australia Jonathan Rayner, University of Sheffield Introduction Here is a passionate and prolific earth never tamed and trimmed to small designs of man; …. A sixth of Australia…. a State, and one of the greatest in its own geographical right - 523,620 square miles from under Capricorn to the Timor Sea …. Someone is always discovering the Territory, its colour and beauty, infinite resources, boundless wealth, ‘forever piping songs forever new’ […] What is the truth of this changeling child of ours? Is it a paradise or hell, milk and honey or Dead Sea fruit? Has it a transcendent future or only a pitiful past? Is it true, as the American serviceman said, that in colonising Australia we ‘began at the wrong end’ or, to use the cynical old phrase you hear so often up there, shall we ‘hand it back to the blacks with apologies’?1 This paper examines the filmic representation of the Northern Territory of Australia, through a consideration of the narratives, settings and locations used to depict this distinctive region within Australian cinema. The Northern Territory (frequently referred to simply as ‘The Territory’) is arguably the most remote and underpopulated region of Australia, not just in the opinion of outsiders but from the perspective of Australians themselves. The Territory’s capital Darwin, for example, is over 1900 miles from Sydney. Where Melbourne and Sydney both boast populations of over 4 million, Darwin’s is barely more than 130,000, and the entire Northern Territory accounts for just over 1 per cent of the total population of the country.2 The Northern areas of Australia are also differentiated demographically from the rest of the country. The Northern Territory and Western Australia are the only states where males still outnumber females, and in the Territory the Aborigines and Torres Straits 1 Graham Wilson, Children of Arnhem’s Kaleidoscope (BeyondBeyond Books, 2012), 8-9. 2 Anonymous, Australian Bureau of Statistics: Northern Territory: <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Products/3218.0~2010- 11~Main+Features~Northern+Territory?OpenDocument#PARALINK2> accessed 8 January 2015 217 Islanders constitute approximately 30 per cent of the population, the highest proportion of any Australian state.3 Consequently, the Territory’s place in the popular imagination (as a remote, inhospitable, unique, frontier-like and male-dominated terrain) conforms to pervasive perceptions of the country, character and landscape of the country as a whole. The perception of the Territory as a distant and unspoilt area, even by comparison with the expanses of Western and Central Australia, is also reflected in the preservation of extensive Aboriginal cave art in the region and the establishment of the iconic Kakadu National Park within the region. While Australian cinema since the 1970s has explored the country’s culture and character through historical narratives, polarised depictions of the rural and urban environments, and more recently has striven to represent the modern and multicultural society, the Territory has occupied a special place within documentary, touristic and horror discourses crucial to the image, and self-image, of the country.4 The films examined here - the documentary feature The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), the first Australian colour feature film Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955), the horror film Rogue (Greg McLean, 2007) and the self-conscious epic Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) – reflect the range of aesthetic, narrative, affective and ideological responses to and representations of this iconic region. The narratives of these films are set in the Territory, but notably their shooting locations are not limited to it. The disjuncture of setting and location points to paradoxes of depiction, in which the image of the territory propagated by mise-en-scene and narrative impacts on the ways in which these films’ images feed, reinforce or alter an Australian imaginary, influence a national image or identity linked to perceptions of landscape and environment, and affect the local and global audiences addressed by these representations. The Overlanders (1946) The Overlanders was an Ealing production, conceived during the Second World War but completed after the war’s end, as part of the production of documentary-inspired feature films representing and supporting the war effort. It was written and directed by Harry Watt and starred Chips Rafferty, a local actor who came to embody the laconic Australian male in the 3 Ibid. 4 In examining some specific examples, Stephen Carleton has proposed that films portraying the Northern Territory constitute a distinct group or genre within the national cinema. Stephen Carleton, ‘Cinema and the Australian Northern: Tracking and Troping Regionally Distinct Landscapes via Baz Luhrmann’s Australia’, Metro 163 (2009), 50-55. 218 cinema of the 1940s and ‘50s. The British-ness of the production should not distract from the initiation of the project by the Australian authorities, who desired a propaganda documentary production to be made by the Ministry of Information to represent the Australian contribution to the global conflict.5 After lengthy research the story Watt chose to depict was of the epic cattle drives, which moved massive herds from the Northern coasts of Australia across the country away from an anticipated Japanese invasion. The film’s opening voice-over describes the Territory in stark terms, reflecting both the rhetoric of wartime and Australia’s contemporary racial realities: In 1942 the Japanese were driving invincibly southward from Singapore. It seemed inevitable that next into their hands would fall the Northern Territory of Australia, largest undeveloped region in the world, with a million head of cattle and a population of only 5000 whites. Space, scorched earth and space, was Australia’s final weapon. But first, the vast herds of the Northern must be saved. At this point, the importance, and even the quantification, of whites and cattle, rate above the Territory’s non-white, Aboriginal population. Amid scenes of the evacuation of families and farms, the film’s exhortation for Australia to follow the example of Soviet Russia in using the scale and inhospitableness of its landscape – ‘scorched earth and space’ - to confound an 6 invader, is perhaps an indication of the Left-wing tendencies of its makers. The emphasis upon the Territory’s isolation works to heighten the apparent vulnerability of its population and assets, but also ennobles the teams of volunteer drovers who move the cattle thousands of miles across arid country rather than simply destroy them. Rafferty’s character Dan McAlpine gathers a scratch crew or ‘plant’ together from work colleagues, the Parsons family fleeing the expected invasion, a pair of Aboriginal drovers, and a Scottish sailor who leaves his ship to join the drive. The quiet determination with which this extraordinary operation is undertaken rhymes the portrayal of British reticence and innate 5 Adrian Danks, ‘“Scorched earth and space”: The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946)’ Senses of Cinema 64 (2012): <http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/64/scorched-earth-and-space-the-overlanders-harry-watt-1946/> accessed 30 April 2014. 6 Ibid. 219 Australian nonchalance together in the format of the wartime documentary feature. Although the ‘mass migrations’ of cattle are described by the voice-over as ‘unique in history’, a crucial national precedent is invoked as Dan proposes his journey. When Bert the boss tries to dissuade Dan from overlanding his cattle from the Kimberley to either Queensland or Adelaide, he cites the Durack family’s three-year journey to the region (in the opposite direction, from Queensland to Northern Territory) in the nineteenth century. Equally, Australian nationalism and socialist sympathies emerge in the call to preserve the Territory as an ideal and epitome of the nation and its values. When one of his helpers proposes the creation of a company to exploit the natural and mineral wealth of the Northern Territory, Rafferty’s Dan responds with an instinctive reproof, throwing the company’s draft prospectus into the campfire: We’ve exploited our south for a hundred years and torn the heart out of it. The Territory’s too valuable to be messed about by get-rich-quick schemes like yours. I say let’s save the Northern from what we’ve done to the south […] Leave it to Australians. Ordinary Australians. It’s a national job. Dan’s example and the experience of the drive chasten and temper its Australian participants and naturalise the sailor (nicknamed ‘Sinbad’).