Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

Peach’s Australia – Flinders Ranges (1976)

play
clip
  • 1
  • 2
An ancient land education content clip 1

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

Clip description

Bill Peach takes us for a meander through the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Along the way, we learn that the white squatters who settled the area in 1851 welcomed the artist Hans Heysen to stay with them while he was painting the hills and ancient gum trees of the area. The clip shows the sites where Hans Heysen set up his easel as he painted the landscape, intercut with a series of the paintings he created while living at the property, though somewhat compromised by the aged film stock. From a chopper over Lake Frome, Peach tells of an Aboriginal Dreaming story that explains the great expanse of salt that makes up the lake. Aerial shots show the river gorges of the Flinders Ranges.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

It’s hard to imagine that this arid and rugged landscape could support a farming community, but George Hunt Sr took over Wilpena Station in 1924. His son, George Hunt, still runs the property, much smaller these days than the original 931 square miles. With carefully chosen digressions, Bill Peach keeps his audience fascinated throughout this travelogue with a difference.

Bill Peach was already an Australian institution when he began his wanderings for Peach’s Australia. He’d been the inaugural presenter of This Day Tonight, Australia’s first nightly current affairs program and was known for his unflappable on-air style as stories failed to materialise or a tape broke on air.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows the landscape of Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Bill Peach’s voice-over talks of the artist Hans Heysen’s appreciation of the Flinders Ranges while scenes of the landscape that Heysen enjoyed are shown. Music then accompanies film shots of some of Heysen’s paintings. The sound of a helicopter introduces the next segment, in which Peach flies over Lake Frome and tells how local Indigenous people explain the origin of the Lake and of the gorges of Arkaroola Creek, visible far below.

Educational value points

  • The clip shows the paintings of Hans Heysen (1877–1968), a notable European landscape painter who is closely associated with the Flinders Ranges and more remote areas where the desert begins. Emigrating to SA with his family from Germany in 1883, he showed early artistic ability. His first paintings were inspired by his love for the Australian landscape, which continued after he studied in Europe between 1889 and 1903.
  • The traditional owners of the Flinders Ranges National Park are the Adnyamathanha people, who still reside in the area and who tell how Arkaroo, a legendary serpent, drank Lake Frome dry and then crawled into the nearby mountains, Arkaroola Creek marking the pathway he took. Wherever he urinated he created waterholes, a feature of the gorges in the Flinders Ranges.
  • The region featured in the clip is the Flinders Ranges National Park of SA, situated 384 km north of Adelaide, stretching from Port Pirie on the Spencer Gulf to Lake Callabonna in the north. This ancient landform, once covered by sea, contains important geological evidence of early life forms and glaciation, which was the inspiration for Sir Douglas Mawson’s desire to explore Antarctica.
  • The Flinders Ranges are of great geological interest. In 2004 they were the location for the installation of a 'golden spike’ marking the 'boundary stereotype’ for the newly designated Ediacaran period of geological time. The boundary stereotype is a rock sequence and level that is used worldwide as the standard comparison for all other rock sequences of its age. The Ediacaran period spans from 600 million years ago to 542 million years ago and is the time when multicelled life forms started to emerge.
  • Lake Frome, shown in the clip, is an example of an endorheic, or closed, basin, a watershed that has no outflow. All water collected in the basin leaves it through evaporation. Endorheic basins are commonly found in desert locations. Minerals leached from surrounding rocks by rainwater are deposited in the basin and left behind as crystals when the water evaporates, creating salt pans.
  • This clip is narrated by and features the broadcaster and filmmaker Bill Peach. The episode on the Flinders Ranges is one of 26 half-hour episodes of Peach’s Australia (1975–76). At the time the series was made, Bill Peach was widely known throughout Australia as the host of the daily ABC current affairs program This Day Tonight (TDT, 1967–78). On leaving TDT, Peach made a series of Australian documentaries and now runs a tour company that operates in NZ and Australia.