Australia

I hook the gate behind me, looping a rusting length of wire back over a splintery post and we drive a few hundred yards up the hard packed dirt road towards the cattle station. The house is a green, ramshackle place with a corrugated tin roof and a big front porch on the shady side of the house. It’s lifted off the ground on stilts, almost a full floor. There’s a dusty little blond haired girl in the yard playing. I ask her if her mom or dad are around and she shakes her head and says something I can’t quite understand. She races around to the steps up to the porch and points me towards the door. I walk up the rickety steps and knock and a voice calls me to come in. Inside, in a darkened room, are three ancient women, older than time. They’re each sitting in low rocking chairs, knitting. I have stopped in on a courtesy to ask permission to use the road and to assure them that we will close all the gates as we pass through, but I have fallen directly into the middle of a Peter Carey novel, I think, and now, anything can happen.

Later. There’s a tremendous amount of dust on the horizon. We keep going, wondering if we’re heading into a windstorm. The road always throws up dust, it’s so dry in the Outback, but this is more than we’re used to. We roll up the windows and slow down but in no time, we’ve caught up to the storm. Only it’s not a storm, it’s a real live cattle drive and all of a sudden, we are right in the middle of it. There are cowboys on horseback and the sound of hooves and the smell of cows and the dust and the heat are everywhere. The cowboys wave to us as we grind to an almost halt, staying close enough to see what’s going on but not so close that the cattle can brush up against the Land Rover. It doesn’t take long – in 15 or 20 minutes, they’re gone, turned off to the left, and disappearing into the bush, taking the dust storm with them as they go.

These are things I was reminded of as we watched Australia, the sweeping epic about a stuffy English woman who saves the farm and falls in love with a cattle man and a half aboriginal child. The picture is rife with cliches, the stuffy English lady, the handsome rough stuff, the scrappy orphan, the magical tribal elder, the unrequited lover, the evil villain, the society girl with a heart of gold, the businessman with respect for gutsy competition… oh, it’s a 1950’s big screen melodrama that goes on for much too long and hell, now that I’ve told you the cast of characters, you could probably write the story and the dialog. Should you choose to confine yourself to every movie cliche line ever written, you could probably match the screenplay word for word.

Whatever. The film, in spite of it’s flaws, is wildly entertaining and it’s good fun to watch. And if you’ve been to Australia, it might remind you of the time when you were crossing the flat white desert and you saw, though you are still not sure that this could be true, a wooden cart pulled by camels. Seated on top were two men in cowboy hats, it seemed impossible that they had come from anywhere and the only place they could possibly be going was hundreds of miles away. Surely the camels would be fine, but could they be carrying enough water for the humans? And what on earth was all that stuff in the cart? Could they really be dragging a dining room set across the desert?

The movie is both terrible and wonderful. It manages to capture some of that dream time feeling, some of that walkabout spirit, and if the dialog falls flat and the story line is predictable, the visuals are breathtaking. I’d say that’s worth the cost of a big screen movie – and certainly getting another look at those memories is worth eight bucks for a matinée.