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During its heyday, Ealing Studios produced five films in Australia, of which this was the first and best. It also provided them with one of their biggest box office successes. It’s a visually ambitious tale of a resilient drover (played by the affable, sun-dried Chips Rafferty), who, in the face of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territories at the beginning of Australia’s involvement in World War II, elects to drive a thousand head of cattle 2000 miles cross-country to Brisbane rather than have them slaughtered. The Overlanders gazes in wonderment at the open spaces of the outback landscape and marvels at its sunlit pockets of adventure. Leslie Halliwell called it a ‘semi-western’, and that’s a fair description: it’s more a paean to the trials of ‘frontier’ life than a war movie. There’s also a pervading sense of post-war optimism, as if a victorious but battle-fatigued England is looking to the New World in its hope for the future.

 

Julian Upton on 20th December 2008
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