Camping Never Seemed So Inviting… A Buffy Movie Review of Australia

Camping Never Seemed So Inviting…

By Nan St. George

“’Just because it is, doesn’t mean it should be.’” Lady Sarah Ashley in Australia

As a longtime fan of Nicole Kidman I was greatly looking forward to the spectacle that is Baz Lurhman’s Australia. I knew it would be long and over-the-top as all of Lurhman’s films tend to be—and it has been seven years since Moulin Rouge, so I was sure his extravagant impulses have been long bottled and itching to escape. The main problem is that Australia is three different movies played in one long running time. There is the prickly romance ala The African Queen between Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley and Hugh Jackman’s “Drover.” (That’s the only moniker we get for Jackman—he never gets a real name even as time passes and he and Lady Sarah form an unofficial family with the Aboriginal boy, Nullah, played wonderfully by Brandon Walters …. He is simply “the Drover.”) The second movie is an adventure tale of a dangerous cattle drive across the great expanse of Northwestern Australia to get to the port of Darwin. The third is the saga of a half-Aboriginal boy and the history of Australia’s shameful practice of forcibly taking these children from their Aboriginal mothers and sent to “Mission Island” in order to “breed” the white side of their fathers and suppress the influence of their mothers.

There are echoes of what might have been in the trek across the outback. Lady Sarah and the Drover put together a ragtag group that includes Nullah, Nullah’s grandmother, an alcoholic accountant, and Chinese cook. A genuinely thrilling undertaking for them all, the drove illustrates the beauty and danger of Australia. But as the most impressive set piece of the movie is also the saddest, it is hard to truly love any section of the movie.

Australia is hemmed in by endless clichés, the most glaring being the father of young Nullah, the overseer of “Faraway Downs,” (the ranch owned by Kidman) who is so evil it is unfortunate that his mustache is not long enough to twirl. It is never explained why this man (played by David Wenham of Lord of the Rings fame) is quite so malevolent. There is a bit of exposition describing his family and that they have worked “Faraway Downs” for generations. But that’s it. The Australian actor Bryan Brown is mostly wasted in his role as the rancher competing against Kidman for a lucrative war contract.

Kidman is cringingly stiff at the beginning of the film, but warms up as her character falls in love with both Drover and Nullah. Jackman is more memorable in that he plays essentially the perfect man—one who cries beautifully, rescues children and cracks his whip with equal élan.

The old-fashioned sentimentality of the movie would be more enjoyable if it wasn’t dotted with sadness every 30 minutes, or if Lurhman had focused on one of the three stories running through the film—preferably to Jackman sudsing himself up and giving himself a sponge bath in the outback— we would have had an enjoyable Christmas movie. But instead he tried for epic tragedy to be spread amongst his epic cheese. And cheese + tears aren’t very festive.