Share
clip 1Clip description
As the rescue party escorts the 3,000 sheep to safety, Clive (John Warwick), Joan (Jocelyn Howarth) and Wayne (Grant Lyndsay) are still caught in the fire. They make for a waterhole, but the fugitive Fletcher (Les Warton) has got there first. He refuses to let them in the water – all except his own son, Clive, with whom he plotted Joan’s ruin. As the fire rockets toward them, Fletcher divulges his secret – that Wayne is the real heir to Waratah Station – and then shoots Clive, by mistake. Wayne and Fletcher fight, as the conflagration arrives.
Curator’s notes
The speed of the approaching fire in the last few seconds of the clip gives some sense of how frightening this scene was to film. The flames have been encouraged by the addition, concealed amongst the trees, of large amounts of extremely flammable nitrate film, doused with old sump oil and diesel fuel. There appear to be voices other than the actors on the soundtrack, perhaps expressing the concern behind the cameras. Between the start of the final shots and the end, as the camera pans up with the flames, the actors scrambled across the pond to get to safety. The scene is remarkably exciting and extremely dangerous – the kind of risk-taking that was only possible then because the regulations governing film-making were virtually non-existent.
