Fred Schepisi’s account of a mission-raised man who does everything white Australia asks of him and is cheated for it is hard, clear and, at its centre, sickening to watch. The manhunt that fills the second half loosens its grip.
Fred Schepisi wrote and directed this from Thomas Keneally’s novel, and it follows a man taught to want what white Australia has and punished for wanting it. Jimmie Blacksmith (Tom E. Lewis) leaves a Methodist mission with the Reverend Neville’s advice in his ears: get a wage, marry a white girl, buy land. He goes out and builds fences for farmers who pay him half of what they agreed and dock the rest for flour. The film is hard, plain and, for the ten minutes at its centre, close to unbearable. We recommend it, with that warning attached.
Ian Baker shoots the country in flat, hard daylight and from far enough back that a homestead is a scratch of timber and iron on a hillside and a man on foot barely registers. The fences Jimmie builds run straight across it, post after post, and Baker keeps them in frame long after we have taken the point. Wendy Dickson’s homesteads are raw boards, unlined kitchens and one good room with a piano in it. Bruce Finlayson puts the settler women in dark buttoned dresses in the heat and Jimmie in a collar he has plainly saved for. Everyone in the picture looks as if they arrived last week, apart from the people who did not.
Lewis plays Jimmie by listening. He agrees to things with his face while his shoulders do something else, and when he finally states a grievance he says it as if surprised to hear it out loud. Freddy Reynolds, as his brother Mort, is loose and laughing where Jimmie is stiff, and the film’s few easy minutes are the two of them walking and talking. Angela Punch McGregor plays Gilda as a girl who has been told little and worked out less. Ray Barrett’s constable Farrell is a bully who has found a uniform to do it in. Don Crosby’s Jack Newby thinks of himself as a fair man while he counts out a fraction of what he owes, and Ruth Cracknell, as his wife Heather, is small, mean and entirely recognisable.
Then comes the scene at the Newby homestead, about an hour in, and we will not describe it beyond how it is made. It is quick and close and shot mostly from inside the kitchen. Brian Kavanagh cuts it into pieces a second or two long, so that we see less than we think we have, and Bruce Smeaton’s music stays out of it altogether. We felt sick, and we stayed sick for a good while after, because Schepisi neither looks away nor lingers, and because Cracknell has spent the previous half hour making Mrs Newby a person rather than a target. There is nowhere to stand back to. We do not think the violence is exploited. We do think the film never again finds anything to match it.
That is its problem. The second half is a manhunt through the bush, Jimmie and Mort ahead, the settlers, the police and the newspapers behind, and it loosens. The pursuers get scenes that run past their use. The schoolteacher McCready (Peter Carroll), taken along by the brothers, is given speeches that set out the film’s argument in case the pictures had not, and the pictures had. Headlines about Federation are cut against the chase, which lands once and is then repeated. Kavanagh, so exact in that kitchen, lets the last forty minutes sprawl. We were not bored, but we could feel the film walking us to an ending it had already earned.
Australian cinema of the period liked its landscape haunted and unknowable. Schepisi treats it as property: surveyed, fenced, disputed and paid for badly. Smeaton’s spare score and Baker’s long views give the country weight without making it mysterious, and the film is better for the refusal. Its case is not that the land is strange but that its new owners are, and that Jimmie has been asked to become one of them.
It runs 113 minutes. Watch it with someone, and not last thing at night; and when the second half starts to drift, remember that the first half is the reason it is still being talked about.
