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In the Gulf country of northern Australia, a farming family are living through the wet season that, each year, takes over their lives. The pedal radio is all the Forshaw family have to keep them in touch with civilisation during several months of enforced isolation. They have no telephone or other contact with the outside world (the mail plane can’t deliver in the wet) and now they’re being told that the river is overflowing its banks.
Curator’s notes
This clip is vintage A Big Country, featuring Australians that city folk would never normally meet, living lives pitted against the elements. The filmmaking is very unobtrusive and non-judgemental, with no sense of the crew’s presence being unwelcome or disruptive to the Forshaws despite the apparently small size of their dwelling visible here. Andrew Olle’s measured narration is particularly well done, adding a layer of understanding to what we are seeing on screen. Olle was one of Australia’s best-loved journalists before his untimely death of a brain tumour in 1992. The filming is powerfully evocative of frontier life.
The aim of the series was to bring the lives of outback and country Australians into the living rooms of city people. A Big Country always rated well and, for over 20 years, was the flagship documentary series of the ABC. Stories were often found by rural reporters in the field and passed back to the program-making unit in Sydney. In this way, stories that had bypassed the mainstream media were the staple of the program.
