Underplayed Gems

The Back of Beyond (1954)

The Back of Beyond poster
Directed by
John Heyer
Genre
documentary film
Country
Australia
Runtime
1h 06m
Rating
6.3 of 10 from 12 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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The catalogue in 3D

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How it feels

A documentary follows a mailman on his regular delivery run through a remote and stark Australian desert track. The film observes his interactions with isolated settlers and the rugged landscape he travels.

awe-inspiringharshruggedquietly epicreflectiveday-in-the-lifeunderstatedsolemn

What happens

The Back of Beyond (1954) is a feature-length award-winning Australian documentary film produced and directed by John Heyer for the Shell Film Unit. In terms of breadth of distribution, awards garnered, and critical response, it is Heyer's most successful film. It is also, arguably, Australia's most successful documentary: in 2006 it was included in a book titled 100 Greatest Films of Australian Cinema, with Bill Caske writing that it is "perhaps our [Australia's] national cinema's most well known best kept secret". The aim of the film, as requested by the Shell Company, was to associate Shell with the essence of Australia, with Australianism. Heyer took as his central motif the fortnightly journey made by mailman Tom Kruse, along the remote Birdsville Track from Marree, in South Australia, to Birdsville, in southwest Queensland. In 1957, Heyer wrote that this film, when viewed with Francis Birtles' earlier In the Track of Burke and Wills (1916), "clearly suggest[s] that the true image of Australia is, and always has been, the image of Man against Nature". The film brought Tom Kruse to public notice, and resulted in his being appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) on 1 January 1955. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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