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The Shiralee (1987)

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clip On the road education content clip 1

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Buster (Rebecca Smart) the city kid has been kitted out for her new life in the bush and her father (Bryan Brown) is setting a cracking pace as they walk to his next farm job because, as he says, 'if I don’t work, you don’t eat’. But being the city kid she is, Buster is shocked at the way farm animals are treated and her father is laid off when she tries to stop the branding of a steer.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

This is the first day together for father and daughter. The enormous burden – the shiralee – that Macauley has taken on (out of spite for his unfaithful wife), is just starting to dawn on him and he’s determined to set a cracking pace which Buster is just as determined to resist. This will be typical of their spiky relationship until they grow to understand and love each other. The journey they embark on together provides the spine of the film.

Bryan Brown had already made a name for himself as a very fine actor when he played Macauley. He had appeared in a number of blockbuster miniseries including The Thorn Birds which made his name in the US and he worked in Hollywood for several years starring in a number of films including Gorillas In The Mist with Sigourney Weaver (1988) and Cocktail (1988) with Tom Cruise. Rebecca Smart was the great child actor of the mid-1980s and she won the Most Popular Actress in a Miniseries/Telemovie Silver Logie for her performance in The Shiralee. The director George Ogilvie is one of Australia’s most acclaimed directors and teachers of performance in theatre, opera, ballet and film. He began his career as an actor before joining with John Sumner to form the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1965. He was drawn to television by George Miller during the era of Mad Max (1979) and his credits include The Dismissal (1983) and Bodyline (1984) as well as The Shiralee.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows Mac (Bryan Brown) striding along a remote country road with his daughter Buster (Rebecca Smart), who struggles to keep up as Mac explains that he has to find work so they can eat. The film cuts to Buster watching her father and other men wrestling a steer to the ground to brand it. Buster intervenes, which results in Mac not getting the job and being paid off. Back on the road, Buster refuses to go on. Mac rushes back when she calls, fearing she has encountered a snake. But she has found a caterpillar and pleads to keep it.

Educational value points

  • The scenes in the clip portray the uneasy relationship between Jim ‘Mac’ Macauley, an unwilling single father, and his daughter, Buster. Mac’s tough exterior and his seeming inability to accommodate the needs of a child are conveyed in the scenes on the road. Buster’s pluckiness is revealed when she runs into the stockyard to defend the steer. Mac’s capacity for tenderness is conveyed when he later rushes to Buster, thinking she is in danger.
  • The clip demonstrates that visual language with minimal dialogue can reveal characters and the relationships between them. The long slow pan of Buster and Mac on the road depicts them as two figures isolated in a vast landscape. The next scene, filmed at a child’s eye level, conveys Buster’s confusion as she watches the activity in the stockyard. Her distress is revealed in her face as she perceives the steer’s terror, shown in the close-up of his eye.
  • The character Jim ‘Mac’ Macauley, played by Bryan Brown, displays elements of the archetypal Aussie battler of an earlier period. He is a ‘swagman’, an itinerant rural worker. Taciturn and independent, he is shown in the clip pitted against the harsh landscape and the challenge of finding work in the Australian outback.
  • Set during the Great Depression, The Shiralee, the miniseries from which the clip is taken, portrays the situation faced by many people who could not find work in the cities. As is the case with the character of Mac in this clip, they were often forced into an itinerant way of life, drifting around the countryside looking for work. The term 'shiralee’ probably refers to the ‘swag’ or ‘burden’ carried by these itinerants. Buster becomes Mac’s second shiralee.
  • The clip portrays the work of Australian film and television actor Bryan Brown (1947–) in a role well suited to him. Brown’s craggy features and broad Australian accent have repeatedly gained him roles playing aspects of the archetypal Aussie ‘bloke’, capable, tough and independent. Brown won the Most Popular Actor award for his performance in The Shiralee at the 1989 Logie Awards.
  • Rebecca Smart (1976–) won the Most Popular Actress in a Miniseries/Telemovie Silver Logie at the 1989 Logie Awards for her performance in The Shiralee. This clip shows the child actor Smart in a convincing portrayal of Buster, in which she conveys the complexity of her character’s responses to the exhausting and challenging situations she finds herself in with her father.
  • The 1987 television miniseries The Shiralee is based upon Australian writer D’Arcy Niland’s novel of the same name. Niland (1917–67) left school at 14 hoping to be a writer but found himself gaining first-hand experience of the life of the itinerant rural worker while accompanying his father during the Great Depression and working in shearing sheds during the Second World War. He later achieved literary success and is best known for The Shiralee, published in 1955.
  • The clip is from one of the most popular television miniseries of the 1980s in Australia and the highest rating miniseries of 1988. The Shiralee (1987) won the Most Popular Miniseries/Telemovie award in the 1989 Logie Awards. An Australian Film Commission poll rated The Shiralee the fourth most popular Australian miniseries for the period 1978–2002.