Clip description
The landscape of arid central Australia is scoured and the plateaus worn down to gibber desert. It’s impossible to imagine that any living thing could survive in this environment but the shingleback lizard manages well because it can survive without regular food and water.
Curator’s notes
An evocative clip, featuring the brilliant camera work of David Parer and his team of highly skilled and endlessly patient cinematographers. Dione Gilmour, who later became head of the ABC’s Natural History Unit, recalls that staff photographer Keith Taylor filmed most of the intimate sequences of desert creatures on the backlot at Elsternwick, even finding appropriate music for each animal. The well-written narration is supported by a sparse soundtrack with well-chosen music.
The series cost $1 million per program (in 1988 dollars), won the Wildscreen awards ('Green Oscars’) for best filming and best series, and sold around the world. In Australia alone, it sold 100,000 VHS copies and 80,000 copies of the book. Sadly, writer and executive producer John Vandenbeld died just a few years later in the early 1990s.