During Covid-19 lockdowns, when many of us were baking sourdough, crocheting beanies and reminiscing about old flames, the prolific Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann was ruminating about his biggest critical flop.
Labelled by naysayers as “aggressively sentimental”, “cringe” and “overlong”, Australia was a film the auteur had struggled to get over the line before its release in November 2008. As the deadline loomed, he’d been forced to capitulate to the top dogs at 20th Century Fox and give the 165-minute wartime epic a happier ending – one where Hugh Jackman’s ruggedly handsome Drover doesn’t die. Audiences at test screenings hadn’t appreciated Wolverine being killed off. (It’s unclear how they felt about Nicole Kidman’s immobile forehead, which also attracted unrelenting commentary.)
Of the two endings Luhrmann shot, the one where the Drover and Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley survive the Japanese bombing of Darwin and ride off into the sunset with Indigenous child Nullah (played by an adorable 12-year-old Brandon Walters) was not the one the Romeo + Juliet director had wanted. And so, 12 years later, when production on Elvis was forced to shut down for six months due to the pandemic, Luhrmann revisited the 2.1m feet of film in his garage that he had amassed while shooting Australia and came up with the idea of serialising it for the streaming world.
The result is Faraway Downs: a six-part TV series named for the sprawling outback cattle property it is mostly set on, which premiered at the closing night of the inaugural SXSW Sydney Screen festival on Saturday. (It starts on Hulu, Star+ and Disney+ from 26 November.) If one of the chief criticisms of Australia was its length, Luhrmann has doubled down: re-edited using deleted footage, Faraway Downs stretches to four hours.
Only the first episode was screened at the Darling Harbour Theatre on Saturday night but it was enough to allow keen-eyed fans to play spot the difference. Dialogue and characters have been fleshed out, and the soundtrack given a contemporary First Nations overhaul.
The opening credits, now animated by Indigenous creatives, are put to original music by the Aria-winning singer Budjerah, while the sweeping opening shots of David Gulpilil’s King George on the escarpment are accompanied by Anpuru, an exhilarating new song by soul duo Electric Fields – part of Luhrmann’s concerted effort to “work with all these young emerging musical artists and graphic artists” and “deepen” the film’s Indigenous perspective.
Tonally, Faraway Downs isn’t much different to Australia, initially employing the same camp humour – “to disarm everyone” for the tragedies that come, Luhrmann explained after the screening.
The biggest audience reaction – raucous laughter – came when Jackman’s Drover tipped a bucket of water over his bare, rippling, campfire-lit torso as Kidman watched agog (her default expression in this dramedy) from her tent. The scene doesn’t deviate from the original but the sight of Jackman’s torso clearly never gets old. The second-biggest reaction – cheers and applause – came at the 40-minute episode’s denouement when Sarah banished the diabolical Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) from her property, the same point the movie reaches at just half an hour. As Luhrmann reminded us afterwards, the film’s other two notable Davids – Ngoombujarra and Gulpilil – have since died.
A week before Faraway Downs’ Sydney premiere, Luhrmann’s team travelled to the east Kimberley in Western Australia, where much of the original film was shot. They bought an 80-inch TV from Retravision in Kununurra and screened all six episodes to a local First Nations community. There, Luhrmann said, it was the astonishing scenery that garnered the biggest audience reaction. “A very special piece of land would come up, and even the little kids, there would be this heartfelt applause,” he said. “That’s probably the most important screening this show will ever have.”
Upon Australia’s release in 2008, the film’s treatment of First Nations people and cultures was met with wildly divergent reactions: the Indigenous academic Marcia Langton applauded Luhrmann’s “fresh, bold approach” to the plight of the stolen generations in the Northern Territory, arguing the film had “leaped over the ruins of the ‘history wars’ and given Australians a new past”. Germaine Greer, meanwhile, admonished the film for its historical inaccuracies – “a disrespect bordering on contempt”, as she wrote in the Guardian.
As Luhrmann explained on Saturday, his aim had been to take “the melodrama [of] Gone With the Wind but flip it, and tell it from this First Nations child’s point of view”.
“The big focus was to take such a painful scar on the history of this nation [the stolen generations] and put it in a context whereby you would open audiences to that,” he said, adding Australia had been a commercial success at home and in Europe, but a box office failure in the US – something he hopes to rectify with Faraway Downs.
Where Australia was released at a time of hope for First Nations people – nine months after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations – Faraway Downs will begin streaming weeks after the voice referendum was defeated.
“If we released this earlier, would there have been a different outcome?” Luhrmann reflected, responding to an audience question. “Probably not.”
“What has my support is a voice … because you need a voice to tell stories. And all [my team] do is tell stories, and we tell them together. The story has just begun and we’ve just got to keep telling the story until it’s heard.”
Faraway Downs streams on Hulu, Star+ and Disney+ from 26 November
