Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This clip shows unfolding images of outback Australian landforms and animals to the sound of a lyrical orchestral score and narration on how alien and hostile they seemed to early Europeans. The first sequence includes aerial footage of Uluru, Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), the Bungle Bungles and Gosses Bluff. The next sequence shows animals unfamiliar to early Europeans – goannas, thorny devils and frill-necked lizards. The final sequence focuses on water, showing an inland river. The narrator concludes that the water sustains 'an assortment of life, much of it unique’.

Educational value points

• To most non-Indigenous explorers, Australia provided a stark and unwelcome contrast to the 'green and gentle land’ of their origins. Not only was much of it arid, but its texture and shape were unfamiliar. In fact, most landforms in Australia are dramatically older than those in other countries. Most of what is seen in the clip has existed as part of the landmass for more than 500 million years, and it contains even older rocks, some more than 3,000 million years old.

• Because of their great age, Australian landforms such as Uluru and Kata Tjuta are weathered and eroded – as the narrator says, they are 'ancient, worn, scoured to their very bones’. The Uluru and Kata Tjuta region, for example, was folded and raised above sea level between 300 and 400 million years ago and since then the rocks have either eroded due to the mechanical action of blown sand or been weathered due to chemical changes caused by moisture.

• Some of Australia’s landforms such as Gosses Bluff are the eroded remains of the impact craters of meteorites. This crater was formed about 143 million years ago when a large comet or meteorite crashed into Earth, causing a zone of intense disruption more than 4 km deep. The original crater rim, about 22 km wide, is now completely eroded. The clip shows some of the lower levels of rock that were formerly deep beneath the original crater.

• The effect and sense of 'otherness’ of the unfolding topography in the clip are heightened by the aerial cinematography and the musical score. The sight and sound of the gliding wedge-tailed eagle reinforce the viewer’s impression of soaring over the continent. The equally 'soaring’ score was written by music director Kevin Hocking (1932–) with the Melbourne Symphony and won the French television award for best documentary score of the year.

• Australia is sometimes called 'the land of the lizard’ and lizards are used in the clip to exemplify how familiar animals in the Old World took on 'strange and startling forms’ in Australia. Goannas, for example, have evolved in a great range of sizes in Australia, possibly because there were relatively few competing medium-sized carnivores. Australian lizards have also developed unusual defence mechanisms such as unappetising spikes and unfolding frills.

• All the footage in the clip is of arid regions in Australia and the red sand, bare rock and sandy watercourse reinforce the message in the closing seconds of the clip that 'water is precious and a little has to go a long way’. Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent as well as having one of the most variable rainfall climates in the world. Much of the continent’s biodiversity in both flora and fauna is the result of evolutionary adaptations to increasing aridity.