Australia

Baz Luhrmann’s outback epic exists because another one collapsed. He had been developing an Alexander the Great picture with Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio, with a studio already built in the northern Sahara, until Oliver Stone’s Alexander reached cinemas first. The result plays as two films in sequence: a cattle station adventure about driving a herd to port, then a war melodrama that opens with the bombing of Darwin. Nullah, played by Brandon Walters, narrates and is the seam between them. The Stolen Generations material is entrusted to that child’s voice while the camera keeps its position beside the white leads. Luhrmann has said he wrote 6 endings and shot 3. Russell Crowe was in talks for the Drover before Hugh Jackman took it. The awards record is narrower than the scale suggests: one Oscar nomination, Costume Design for Catherine Martin, which it lost. At the Australian Film Institute Awards it won Production Design, Costume Design, Visual Effects and the highest grossing film prize. In 2023 Luhrmann recut the material into a 6 episode series, Faraway Downs. A good fit if you accept red earth and 1940s Darwin as painted scenery rather than landscape. Not for viewers waiting for Indigenous characters to take the centre; Nullah narrates, but Sarah and the Drover carry the story.