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Clip description
Peter Lalor (Chips Rafferty) and his friend Raffaello Carboni (Peter Illing) arrive at the diggings near Ballarat, part of a long line of men looking for their fortune. They stop to survey the busy goldfields below. Carboni says they will build a utopia, but a mounted policeman tells them roughly to get back in line. They must buy a mining licence. In the town, they are surprised to see more mounted policemen harassing miners over licences. They help a newly arrived young Scotsman, Tom Kennedy (Gordon Jackson), to escape arrest.
Curator’s notes
These opening scenes on the goldfields are full of optimism, tempered with realism. Carboni represents the utopian idealist, while Lalor is ever the realist. Lalor talks constantly about practical idealism, though his character gradually hardens throughout the film. He does not openly question or resist the troopers in this sequence so it’s clear that he does not arrive on the goldfields as a revolutionary. In real life, others in Lalor’s family were involved in Irish revolutionary politics in the late 1840s.
The real Lalor probably spoke with an educated Irish accent. His family were landowners, and his father was a member of the British House of Commons, but Peter’s eldest brother took part in two armed rebellions in 1848. The family was Catholic and there were 11 children. Peter Lalor was educated as a civil engineer in Dublin. Whatever accent he spoke with, it would not have been the one we hear from Chips Rafferty here. Rafferty mostly sounds his usual Australian self in this clip, except for a touch of an English accent when he purchases his licence.
The sequence shows the large scale of the film, and the hundreds of extras that Watt was able to use, given the cooperation of the Australian Army, which helped build the sets and supplied many of the men we see here. The exchange between Carboni and Lalor introduces the idea of utopia – a paradise on earth for free men and women – but immediately punctures that with the authoritarian symbol of a mounted policeman. The theme of idealism versus authoritarianism continues with the trooper’s harassment of Kennedy and remains constant throughout the film.
