Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This animated clip shows gang-gang cockatoos screaming 'Beware! Beware!’, alerting a mob of grazing brumbies that mountain men are on their way to catch them. The oldest horse and leader, Arrow, sneers at his younger brother Thowra for taking the warning seriously. Two riders then gallop towards the mob, which splits up, Thowra leading some to safety, while those with Arrow are captured. Dialogue, natural sounds and music are used throughout.

Educational value points

• First episodes such as this one usually introduce the main characters, style and themes of a series. In this case the conflict between Thowra and Arrow foreshadows an epic drama that evolves in later episodes. Their sibling rivalry reveals critical internal tensions within the mob and threatens the mob’s capacity to cope with external challenges, such as the mountain men.

• This clip is from an adaptation of The Silver Brumby, the first novel in Elyne Mitchell’s series on wild horses in the Snowy Mountains, first published in 1958. Mitchell (1913–2002) developed a passion for horses from her father, General Sir Harry Chauvel, commander of the Desert Mounted Corps during the First World War. In 1935 Mitchell and her husband moved to the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales, the area where the Silver Brumby series is set.

• Visually the Silver Brumby animations are reminiscent of collages and picturebook watercolour paintings. The animators have layered film cells so that images of animals, drawn in a traditional Walt Disney style, move over more softly coloured and subtly depicted Australian bush landscapes. The horses stand out against the still backgrounds and the animators achieve interesting effects by seeming to pan back and forth between the colts and hunters.

• The 'High Country’ in the title refers to the Snowy Mountains of south-east NSW, the highest mountain range in Australia, where, by the time Europeans arrived, the Indigenous Walgalu, Ngarigo and southern Ngunnawal people had lived for thousands of years.

• Banjo Paterson’s famous poem The Man From Snowy River, also about brumbies and the cattlemen of the area, led to two feature films: The Man From Snowy River (1982) and The Man From Snowy River II (1988) and a television series of 64 episodes called Banjo Paterson’s: The Man from Snowy River (2004). Paterson and lines from this most famous of his poems are also featured on the Australian $10 note.

• Brumbies are descended from lost or escaped horses of early European settlers. Australia has more wild horses than any other country and significant numbers can be found in the Australian Alps, although most are in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Brumbies are feral animals that, along with goats and deer, inhabit and do damage to the high country. There were estimated to be between 300,000 and 600,000 wild horses in Australia in 2001 (Duckworth, ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’, 2001).

• Media World Features produced the award-winning feature film Silver Brumby (1993) before creating the animated television series a few years later. One of the few Australian companies capable of taking an animated project from script through to post-production, Animation Works (a facility of Media World) produced the series. Jon Stephens co-wrote both the 1993 feature (with the director John Tatoulis) and the series (with Judy Malmgren).