Ruthless Landscapes

Warwick Thornton’s new film, a grim, historically inspired story of death and injustice in the Australian outback, draws upon and subverts elements of the classic western. As JASMINE CRITTENDEN finds, the film offers complex observations on white and Indigenous relations of the past, as well as the echoes that linger in the present.

What chance has this country got? What chance has this country got?’ asks missionary Fred Smith (Sam Neill) in the closing scene of Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017). Even though Fred is walking towards a rainbow – a symbol of hope – viewers cannot help but despair. They have just witnessed the vengeful, fatal shooting of an Aboriginal man by a white pastoralist, despite a judge having acquitted the former of a killing committed in self-defence. In 2017 – nearly a century after the true events that inspired the film took place – Indigenous Australians make up 28 per cent of prisoners nationwide, yet comprise just 3.3 per cent of the total population.

‘The origin of Sweet Country was told to me by [script co-writer] David Tranter,’ writes Warwick Thornton in his director’s statement.

It is loosely based on stories told to him by his Grandfather. One of these […] is the true story of an Aboriginal man, Wilaberta Jack, who in the 1920s was arrested and tried for the murder of a white man in Central Australia.

Thornton’s film transforms the bones of this storyline into a period western, set among the vast plains, open skies and rugged rock formations of the MacDonnell Ranges near Alice Springs.brothers Tremayne and Trevon Doolan). By night, Philomac escapes to Black Hill, where Sam and his wife, Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber), are staying alone, as Fred has travelled to town. Harry storms the property with his rifle, accusing the stock-man of hiding the runaway, and, in self-defence, Sam shoots the intruder dead.