Australian
Screen

Clip description

In the highlands of Tasmania in 1933, Ruby and Henry Rose live by snaring wallaby and possum for meat and skins. They have adopted a homeless boy as their son, Gem. Henry (Chris Haywood) skins wallabies without sentiment but Gem (Rod Zuanic) hates killing animals and often sets the wallabies free. As they camp out under a rock ledge, Henry scolds him and explains that killing things is a part of life.

Curator’s notes

The aerial shots at the beginning of the film give an immediate sense of how different this film is going to be. These mountains do not look like the rest of Australia, and Roger Scholes set out to make a film that didn’t look like the rest of Australian film. The aerial shots are both beautiful and terrifying, and the introduction of characters does nothing to soften the impact.

Henry skins a wallaby with brutal efficiency, discarding the carcase onto an obscene heap that suggests that this existence is both harsh and fundamental. Henry understands that to stay alive he must kill animals; he doesn’t understand why Gem doesn’t see that. There is a sly humour in the way that Chris Haywood performs these lines. He gives us a sense that Henry is uneducated, in terms of book learning, but fully equipped in terms of survival skills. He is a man unhampered by spiritual thought.

Roger Scholes spent a year photographing and interviewing people of the Tasmanian Highlands, before writing the script. He resisted attempts to shoot the film in the Victorian Alps, nearer Melbourne. He was adamant that the film had to be shot in the Tasmanian Central Highlands or not at all. The opening shots of this clip show clearly that he was right – there is no other place like this in Australia. Most of the film was shot in and around the Walls of Jerusalem, which is now a national park, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage area.