Australia Film

The movie ends with Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations accompanying Nullah on walkabout with King George. The world is at war, but Europe and Australia, city and country, past and future are at peace as the Drover and Lady Ashley embrace in their outback paradise. When they marry, will she be called Lady Drover?

The general opinion on Baz Luhrmann's overstuffed epic Australia seems to be that it throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and then tosses that in too, just to be sure. Less remarked upon is that it also tosses in pretty much the entire history of Australian national cinema, not only from the years since the late-70s Australian new wave, but also from the cinematic dead zone that preceded them.

Look, for instance, at Hugh Jackman's character, a laconic, macho, roistering bushman and cattle wrangler named simply The Drover. To the untutored eye he's just an Australianised cowboy, directly transplanted from the American Western. Not so fast. He's in fact a resurrected version of one of Australia's favourite homegrown movie stars of the mid-20th century. Chips Rafferty made a career playing bush types, stockmen and weathered outback survivors before his early death in 1971. His most famous movie, and indeed the most successful movie ever made in Australia before the new wave, was The Overlanders, directed by British documentary pioneer Harry Watt under the auspices of Ealing Studios in 1946. It features a huge wartime cattle-drive just like the one in Australia; it preceded Howard Hawks's Red River and may even have influenced it. Rafferty also showed up in The Sundowners, a Hollywood production made in Oz in 1959 with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and set on an isolated sheep ranch. And Luhrmann draws heavily on working-class "Ocker" culture as epitomised by 1976 sheep-shearer drama Sunday Too Far Away, in which Jack Thompson played the same archetype.

Similarly, a first glance at Nicole Kidman's arrival among these wild, untutored people in their awesome landscape calls to mind Elizabeth Taylor in Giant (you wish, Nicole!). But they also call up all those Nevil Shute novels that so popularised a postwar idea of Australia in the British and later, the American consciousness. We remember him now for his post-nuclear novel On The Beach, but his 1950s work included work like Beyond The Black Stump and The Far Country, about proper English gals encountering rough, eccentric outback families. His other great bestseller, A Town Like Alice, formed the basis for the second most famous "Australian" movie ever made, starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch in 1956. When it was remade for TV in 1981 the Finch role went to Bryan Brown, who shows up in Australia.

As does David Gulpilil, the Aborigine saviour of Nicolas Roeg's transcendent Walkabout (again, the Pommie makes Australian movie history ...) and a star of Peter Weir's The Last Wave. Both are indispensable movies about original Australians, and alongside Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence, contribute heavily to the Aboriginal side of Luhrmann's story.

All that's missing, really, are Crocodile Dundee and his funnier antecedent, Barry Mackenzie. No one will miss the former but Luhrmann's movie could really use a little of the latter's toxic crudity and alcoholic excess.

The ambitious, not to say hubristic, title Australia brings to mind the blockbuster novels of James A Michener that took a place (Hawaii, Poland, Texas) and gave us its history from the Stone Age to the present, incorporating in the later stages a romantic tale of the struggles of three or four generations. Baz Luhrmann does something vaguely like this by having a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy steeped in the lore of his people narrate the story, though the setting is confined to the Northern Territory and the time frame a mere three years from the outbreak of war in 1939 to the Japanese air raids on Darwin in 1942. But a condensed TV mini-series is nearer the mark.

Australia is populated by faces made familiar by Australian films of the past 40-odd years - Ray Barrett, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown, Bill Hunter, Tony Barry, David Gulpilil among them - and in a superficial way it revisits the heroic period of Australian cinema in the 1970s and 80s. That was when Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford and others were exploring - in movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Gallipoli - such pressing issues as the relationship of white Australians to this mysterious new land, guilt over the treatment of dispossessed natives, the burden of cultural inferiority and the shaping of a national identity. The next wave of film-makers turned away from these big subjects, focusing on comedies and small-scale dramas of suburban life.