Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip depicts the predicament of refugees from Cambodia and Iraq who have landed on the Western Australian coast from an Indonesian fishing boat in 1990. On climbing to the top of a sand dune, expecting to find a bus stop, they see only more sand dunes. Indonesian crew members on the boat joke about their predicament. The two groups, confused by the desolate landscape and hoping to reach Perth or non-existent mountains, set off in opposite directions. The Cambodians discuss their fathers, many of whom are dead.

Educational value points

• This clip presents a sympathetic view of asylum seekers arriving on Australian shores, mixing humour with a sense of sadness. The Indonesian fishermen mock their gullibility but the viewer knows that their belief that there is a bus stop nearby or that they are near Perth or mountains, while partly comic, also shows a dangerous ignorance of Australia’s vastness. The Cambodians mentioning their dead fathers confronts viewers with their experience of tragedy.

• The clip is set in 1990, when thousands of Iraqis were fleeing Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime and many Cambodians were fleeing their country, devastated by war and the ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge. Indonesian sailors catered to both groups’ desperate wish to escape Indonesia’s refugee camps and reach Australia by charging them large amounts to sail across the ocean in what were often dangerously unseaworthy vessels.

• The camera’s viewpoint emphasises the confusion of the refugees. A distant perspective shows the two groups toiling like ants as they climb a sand dune. The camera pauses on their expressions of disbelief on reaching the top as they view the scene confronting them. Panning shots of the desert reveal how far from civilisation they are despite their continued faith that there is a bus stop somewhere nearby.

• The clip suggests that even during misfortune people often remain in their own separate groups. The Iraqis and Cambodians are all seeking a new, better life in Australia, have shared similar misfortunes and are now in the same predicament. But, divided by language and cultural difference, each group stays separate, aware of the other but setting out in opposite directions. Even within the groups there is disunity.

• Filmmaker Michael James Rowland and his co-writer based the screenplay of Lucky Miles on research they conducted into asylum seekers who had arrived on Australia’s northern coastline in difficult circumstances. These people included a group of 43 West Papuan refugees found wandering on the north-west coast of Cape York in Queensland in 2006. Boat arrivals of refugees on Australia’s north coast began in 1976 after the Vietnam War.