The veteran film and television director George Miller – whose most celebrated work is the majestic Australian western The Man from Snowy River – died at the weekend aged 79. Any obituary of the Scottish-born film-maker must, in one of life’s slightly unfortunate kinks, acknowledge that he did not make the Mad Max movies – that’s a different George Miller, whose career also took off in the 1970s. Miller was a well-established director by the time his Mad Max namesake came along, working on popular TV shows including Homicide and Matlock Police.
His career hit the next level in 1982 with the aforementioned smash hit, a high-spirited adventure inspired by Banjo Paterson’s beloved poem and starring Tom Burlinson as the brumbie-herding stockman. The plot of The Man from Snowy River is old fashioned, following Burlinson’s Jim as he inherits his father’s land and proves his worth to the hard yakka locals. Yet it holds up well today, with a cracking pace and even a feminist undercurrent in the story of Sigrid Thornton’s Jessica, the daughter of a cranky station owner (Kirk Douglas) who rebels against her father’s conservative views of womanhood.
