The Cinematic Northern Territory of Australia

Abstract

Australia’s Northern Territory has been inscribed on film as an unspoilt wilderness, an iconic national resource and as a threatening horror landscape. From the definition of ‘the Territory’ as a definitive national location in The Overlanders (1946), this most remote and vacant area of a sparsely populated continent has been promoted as a unique and marketable landscape for Australian cinema. This is epitomised by the convergence of cinema and tourist advertising campaigns with the productions of Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Australia (2008). However, the Northern Territory has also become associated with the uncanny and menacing aspects of the Australian environment, through connections to indigenous culture beginning with Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), and with monstrous and relentless wildlife, as seen in Rogue and Black Water (both 2007). An additional irony to these contrary conceptualisations of the Territory is its realisation on screen via the use of locations from Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales. Thus the Territory on screen can be described as the comprehensive, representative Australian landscape