Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows colour footage of a pristine forest and some of the creatures that inhabit it. It has a voice-over narrative promoting the importance of the idea as well as the reality of wilderness. A music soundtrack is maintained throughout the clip, which ends with the sound of birdsong.

Educational value points

• The warm temperate rainforest near the Werrikimbe National Park is shown in the clip. Located on the north-eastern border of New South Wales, the Park covers 31,000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest, open forest, woodland, heath, grass-tree scrub, sedge swamp and meadow swamp. These areas are home to five rare species, one endangered species, and four classified as vulnerable. The Threatened Species Conservation Act of 1995 lists 22 threatened species that occur in this region.

• The clip discusses the meaning of wilderness. The term 'wilderness’ is defined within the Wilderness Act of 1987 as a large area of land that, with the animals and plants that make up its ecosystems, remains in an essentially pristine condition and has had minimal interference by humans. Two to three per cent of NSW falls within the legal definition of wilderness, and nearly all of this is contained within national parks and reserves.

• The clip proposes a duality in human nature, with the human urge to conquer, to 'explore and learn all things’ contrasted with an assumed desire for mystery in the world around us. The clip suggests that while wilderness was considered threatening to humans in the past, in a post-industrial age, people need these places to exist to increase their sense of wellbeing.

• Film techniques are used successfully to support an idea. A long establishing shot is used at the beginning of the clip to introduce the narrative and provide context. It also sets the slow pace and gives a sense of the fluid movement that continues throughout the clip. The camera pans across the landscape, following the natural contours of a stream. Slow fades are used between all of the shots. This approach also incorporates wide-angle and aerial footage and extreme close-ups that serve to link the whole forest with its individual components.

• The clip provides an example of music being used as an important element in the experience of a film. A piece featuring the recorder and the glockenspiel is used in the opening section, evoking early medieval religious music. The introduction of church organ music accompanies a more didactic and philosophical narrative. One sustained note underlines the final sentence of the narrative. This then fades and is replaced with sounds of the forest.

• This documentary A Voice for the Wilderness was used to publicise a specific cause. It was produced by Christine Wilcox and depicts the dispute over logging in the Hastings Valley rainforest in northern NSW. The campaign was successful in preventing logging of the area and the film was shown in the Sydney Opera House.

Serene music plays over wilderness landscape.

Narrator The word 'wilderness’ once stood for a wild, uncultivated place of fear and anguish – a place of banishment. Today, it’s still the same place, but we go there for different reasons. It’s a place of regeneration, where industrialised man can still feel the full sense of his origins.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigour, vast and titanic features – the wilderness, with its living and its decaying trees. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Clear birdsong sounds.