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Clip description
Local police sergeant Tom Hicks (Bob Haddow) looks for two missing boys accompanied by the boys’ friends, Anne (Jacki Weaver) and Linda (Juliana Allan), and Anne’s father (Brian James). As they enter the hills, they see a radar on a hilltop and a strange robed figure. The figure points a weapon at a kookaburra, sitting in the trees above Hicks, Dad and the girls, and then the kookaburra falls to the ground – dead.
Curator’s notes
This clip introduces Jacki Weaver in her television debut, as Anne. It’s an innocuous start to a long career that has seen Jacki embraced by Hollywood over 40 years after this was shot, in the wake of Animal Kingdom (2010). Only 19 when this was released, she passes as a teenager and seems believably distressed at the death of the kookaburra.
Juliana Allan does not pass as an Indigenous teenager and the ‘blackface’ make-up she wears to play Anne’s friend Linda makes for an unconvincing representation of Aboriginality. She simply looks odd and this detracts from what is otherwise a smartly edited and intriguing adventure sequence. Why the mysterious robed figure on the hill chooses to shoot the kookaburra is one of several questions left unanswered by this clip.
