Australia
It takes you Down Under – (Almost)
Baz Luhrmann, the man who made Strictly Ballroom, Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge has come up with this bonanza (a long one) called AUSTRALIA.
Don’t get me wrong, a long movie does not mean it’s a bad one. Australia does have the ability to take you on a free ride to a country infested with people clearly confused and insecure about their existence. Australia in the late ‘30s and ‘40s is portrayed in a very strange, dark and isolated way.
It’s a very simple story, narrated by a little half-white half-Aboriginal boy called Nulla. An Englishwoman, Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) goes Down Under to live with her husband, who runs Faraway Downs, a cattle ranch on ancestral property in the outback. Driven from the port to her destination across rough terrain by a hunky Australian cattle man Drover (Hugh Jackman), she arrives at the rundown ranch manor only to find that Lord Ashley, her husband, has been murdered. The blame is placed on an Aboriginal witch doctor nicknamed King George (David Guplili), who roams the mountains around the ranch, performing strange dances and rituals around bonfires each night.
Lady Ashley soon falls out with ruthless cattle station manager Neil Fletcher (played by David Wenham), who does his best to have her sell Faraway Downs to a competitor and mistreats the Aboriginal servants of the household, particularly young Nulla — he is Fletcher’s illegitimate son and King George’s grandson. Left to her own devices, the aristocratic but enterprising Englishwoman engages Drover to help her run the ranch and predictably, a passionate relationship is born of this arrangement. When Nulla’s Aboriginal mother dies in a tragic accident, he completes the picture of domestic bliss, but the story is only half over.
Fletcher, married to a wealthy white heiress, is determined to ruin Lady Ashley’s life, seize the profitable Faraway Downs and have Nulla taken away by the authorities, since the fact that he is the boy’s biological father could destroy his reputation in society. In fact, Australian law back in the ‘30s and ‘40s dictated that half-white half-Aboriginal children be taken away from their indigenous families and put in the hands of the Church, so as to prevent their further ‘diluting’ genteel society through further procreation.
When Lady Ashley and Drover fall out over a domestic dispute and World War II breaks out, Nulla is taken away from the ranch and sets in motion another story, one that brings to light the suffering of the ‘Stolen Generation’ against the backdrop of a battle. For those interested in a little trivia, the practice of separating half-caste aboriginal children from their families was only abolished three decades later in the 1970s. In 2006, then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered a formal apology for the horrific practice.
Australia is not the kind of movie to encourage tourism, because the country has changed drastically since the early ‘40s. The first half of the movie is better than the second half, which tends to get tedious toward the end. The problem lies in its length. It could’ve been edited better — 15 minutes shorter than it is at present would have made a lot of difference. The music, however, is brilliant. David Hirschfelder, the musical director, has done a great job. The evergreen Somewhere over the Rainbow from the classic movie The Wizard of Oz is the theme song.
Overall Australia has its moments. Luckily, they overpower the bits of boredom. Some long movies have repeat value, but unfortunately this one misses out on that privilege.
RishiO Rating – 2.8/5
[...] Australia [...]