"Australia" is a epic historical romance film directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It is the second-highest grossing Australian film of all time, behind ”Crocodile Dundee” and was released on the 26th November, 2008.
PLOT
In the year of 1939 the british woman Lady Sarah Ashley travels to Australia to visit her long gone husband and to force him to sell his ranch and cattle station, Faraway Downs. Because Sarah isn’t so familiar with the area her husband arranges so that a cattle drover, named Drover, will take her there safely.
When they arrive she get the horrible news that her husband has been murdered just a short time before they came to the ranch, and Sarah is now the person who gets to take over it.
While Neil Fletcher, the cattle station’s manager, spreads the rumor that the person who killed her husband was a great Aborigines-elder by the name of ”King George” and eagerly tries to regain the control over the estate Sarah comes closer to the Aboriginal-born boy, Nullah. Nullah has an Aboriginal mother and a white man as his father. Such children are the authorities constantly looking for and both Nullah and his mother are forced to hide so that he will not be captured.
Fletcher, who treats Nullah’s mother like a slave, mistreats and threatens both Nullah and his mother so Lady Sarah fires him and decides that she will try to run the cattle station by herself.
Lady Sarah persuades Drover, who is a very independent man, to take the cattle to the city of Darwin for sale. Drover is friendly with the Aborigines and therefor often gets shunned by other white people in the territory. It later reveals that he once was married to an Aboriginal woman, who died after being refused medical treatment in a hospital because of her race.
Despite their differences Sarah and Drover falls in love during the dangerous adventure with the the cattle. After some time they begin a happy life together and the young Aboriginal boy is drawn to perform a walkabout with his grandfather.
Walkabout is a rite of passage during which male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey and live in the the wilderness for a period as long as six months. In this practice they would trace the path, or songlines, that their ancestors took.
... But in the story Nullah instead is taken by the authorities to live on a Mission Island among other half-Aboriginal children everything takes an unexpected turn...The Japanese starts bombing Darwin and attacks at Mission Island. In the flames of World War II:s beginning the family split.
”When pleading for air in the fear-filled dust ... Can you find strength enough to still believe in love? Can you let old beliefs live on? And can you say goodbye to someone you know, actually, will never go away?”
I really like this movie. It has all the parts a movie like this should contain. Love, humor, action, truth and it tells us something truly remarkably. :-)
A funny thing is that more than half of the cast & crew come from Australia. That includes both Kidman and Jackman, the director Baz Luhrmann and the music composer David Hirschfelder.
// Liv♥
