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A Big Country – Peninsula People (1968)

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Tea's up education content clip 2

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Musgrave Station is a busy crossroads in the far north of Queensland. Every day, planes come into the station airfield to refuel. Both passengers and pilots find a ready cup of tea from the station owner’s wife, Mary Hales. She and her husband Jim are outback pioneers who haven’t lost the art of welcoming strangers, even in this modern era of people dropping in from the sky instead of arriving by horseback.

Curator’s notes

This is a simply but engagingly told story that subtly emphasises the remoteness of the area, and the different life the subjects lead. The interviews are very natural. It is worth noting the hand-held camera, which would have been quite innovative at the time.

Station owner Jim is an old bushie. He calls the Aboriginal stockmen 'natives’. Until very recently, when white Australia began to listen to its Indigenous population, this way of talking about Aboriginal people was not uncommon. There is a brief reference to the recent equal wage case for Aboriginal stockmen, although its real effect on the bush is not teased out in this story.