Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Ralph (Matt Day) leaving the family farm in outback Queensland, bound for a music career in Nashville, USA. Ralph is ambivalent about leaving and his father (Roy Billings) challenges him, in a humorous yet tender way, to carry out his plan. A tracking shot accompanied by a wistful Patsy Cline song shows Ralph, viewed silently in a mirror by his sad mother, walking through the house and out the door. In the truck Ralph’s father offers him practical advice about women and the final low-angled shot shows the family driving away.

Educational value points

• The tone and colour palette used in this film is designed initially to reflect the past-era atmosphere of the family home and, finally, Ralph’s venture into the wider world. The dusty hazy light coupled with the earthy colour palette of the interior scenes of the house evoke a slow-paced seldom-changing environment holding little opportunity for Ralph. By contrast, the final exterior scenes showing the wide bright blue sky mark Ralph’s transition to a new life.

• The soundtrack reflects Ralph’s apprehension, his mother’s sorrow and the film’s comic tone. The Patsy Cline song, Life’s railway to heaven, with its gentle, whimsical rhythm, winsome melody and yearning lyrics about bravely negotiating life’s travails, underlines the visual depiction of Ralph’s uncertainty and his mother’s feelings of loss at the thought of his leaving home, while infusing the emotion of the sequence with a warm comic tone.

• Ralph’s mother, shown watching him leave in the reflection of a mirror, portrays without words her sense of loss and apprehension. The use of the mirror allows the viewer access to her feelings by showing her pained yet stoic expression and Ralph’s departure contained in one shot. The use of this visual device in a scene uncluttered by words intensifies its emotional power.

• The tracking shot that ends as Ralph walks out the door of the kitchen symbolises the journey he must take on his own. Here the camera is a proxy for his parents as it closely follows Ralph to the doorway, at which point it stops, remaining within the house while he ventures out into the world and stands alone on the veranda. The screen door closing on the camera suggests that while his parents will wait for Ralph to return, the door may have closed on this stage of his life.

• The concluding low-angled shot of the truck passing overhead is symbolic of Ralph crossing a psychological bridge between his childhood into the adult world. The shot, opening with an expansive view of the sky as if seen from a deep hole, represents unlimited opportunities (the sky’s the limit) with the camera acting as a bridge to this future.

• The complex relationship between father and son, including their inability to express the pain of separation, is rendered through the laconic humorous tone of the script and the performances. In the bedroom scene they resort to bickering. In the scene in the truck Ralph’s father offers his son frank yet practical advice about sex from a farmer’s perspective, reducing it to an act of breeding.

Dad You decent?
Ralph Yep.
Dad There’s the plane ticket. No need to tell your mother how much it cost.
Ralph Dad, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I should stay here. You know, we could spend the money on the truck or something.
Dad Fine time to be thinking about the truck! You’ve never touched the truck! You’ve never touched the tractor, you never feed the stock…
Ralph Cunnamulla Hotel are looking for a guitarist.
Dad What’s up with you all of a sudden?
Ralph I don’t know, I’m just a bit nervous, I guess.
Dad What about?
Ralph You know, the plane and stuff.
Dad When I was your age, half my mates had trod on land mines at Nui Dat. Never gave it a second thought! Never had a shag or even a shave, half of them. God almighty!
Ralph Yeah, alright, alright, I’m going.
Dad Yeah, well, go then.
Ralph I will, you watch me.
Dad Yeah, I’m watching. I’m watching.
Ralph inhales asthma puffer. He picks up his guitar case and bag and exits the house. His mother watches wistfully in the mirror.

Father and son sit in the stationary pick-up truck.
Dad Your, uh, your mother wanted me to have a word with you before you leave, man to man.
Ralph Oh, yeah. What about?
Dad About women. Don’t bring back any woman with thin hips to this part of the country, boy.
Ralph You’re joking, aren’t you?
Dad No, I’m dead serious. City women like their thin hips, I know that. But then they’ve got their big city hospitals. We’re too far away from a good doctor for that kind of luxury.
Ralph But, Dad, if you like a girl…
Dad Don’t get too choosy. They’re all the same when the lights are off. Any other questions?
Ralph No.
Dad That’s that then. You make us proud of you, boy.
Honks horn.

His mother has now joined them in the truck and they are on their way.
Dad When you were 4 years old, you could recite all the basic strains of merino sheep. All the cross-breeds. Everything. It was amazing.