Australian
Screen

Clip description

Two young sisters, Sally and Roberta, have left their home for the Birdsville Track to get help for their mother. They have their dog, a bottle of water, and a wheeled cart in tow. The youngest picks up her recorder and plays a simple melody while they cross the desert.

When they come across their own tracks, Sally realises they are lost. Not wanting to alarm her younger sister, they keep walking. Sally is forced to leave their dog behind after discovering they are low on water and as she ties the dog under a tree, her sister continues to play on her recorder unperturbed. As the children continue under the hot sun, the narration reveals that they vanish, their tracks disappearing under the windblown sand.

Curator’s notes

This is one of the ‘tales and legends of the track’, as the narrator says. This powerful scene (the only one told in flashback) taps in to 19th century settler anxieties about the dangers of Australia’s interior, the bush and the outback. Stories of disappearing children are sprinkled throughout Australian literature and more recently film, and have become part of modern folklore. The scene here recalls two iconic feature films, Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). While the abandoned children in Walkabout make it out of the desert alive, the girls at Hanging Rock follow the same fate of Sally and Roberta – swallowed by the landscape, they vanish forever.