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Clip description
Burke (Jack Thompson), Wills (Nigel Havers) and King (Matthew Fargher) trudge towards the depot they left more than four months earlier at Cooper Creek. It is 21 April 1861. They have no food and the fourth member of the party, Charley Gray, has already died. At the depot, William Brahe (Drew Forsythe) rakes over the ground where he has buried a box full of food, hoping to hide it from the local Aboriginal peoples. He does not want to leave, but he is worried about one of his men, who is gravely ill.
A young Aboriginal hunter returns to his family group near the creek, to recount what he has seen: the return of the strange white men who passed through some months earlier. The women, harvesting nardoo, stop to listen to his story. Brahe takes one last look at the horizon through his telescope. The Aboriginal people try to tell him what they have seen, but he can’t understand them. He leaves, a few hours before Burke, Wills and King arrive.
Curator’s notes
The final masterful shot in this clip gives a sense of how unlucky Burke and Wills were on that day, 21 April. The sequence is full of irony and aching contrast. The Aboriginal people are well fed and healthy, able to live comfortably on this land. The other men who have stayed at the depot are also well fed, although one is gravely ill, and will die on the return journey to Menindee. The misunderstanding, when Brahe misinterprets what the Aboriginal people are saying to him, is indicative of the whole expedition.
The movie was shot by one of Australia’s greatest cinematographers, Russell Boyd, and we see his superb craftsmanship in this clip, especially in that final continuous shot, which runs for more than a minute without a cut. The score is by Peter Sculthorpe, one of Australia’s greatest composers. It adds considerable weight to the searing drama of this sequence.
Graeme Clifford was significantly influenced in his conception of the film by the series of Burke and Wills paintings by Sidney Nolan, made after Nolan’s visit to Central Australia in 1949, just before he left Australia. Nolan’s paintings were also a major influence on Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout, which in turn influenced this film’s look (Clifford had worked as an editor with Roeg in the UK). Clifford invited Sir Sidney and Lady Nolan to accompany him during the shooting of Burke & Wills as official artist. Nolan sketched and painted scenes of the filming. Burke had also taken an official artist on his original expedition.
