Our Queensland

The World's Our Stage index

Noel Mengel is senior music writer with The Courier-Mail. He is a musician with experience in the recording industry.

Overnight success after a quarter century of acting . . . Geoffrey Rush and his mate Oscar after winning Best Actor for Shine in 1997.

Reel-life heroes

From Smiley to Lantana, films and actors have helped define the Aussie character.

IN the month of Steele Rudd's first success in The Bulletin in 1895, the Lumiere Brothers in Paris took the first humble steps in what would become the most significant entertainment form of the next century.

The Lumieres were projecting their first motion pictures onto a screen for a paying public. By 1898 Cambridge anthropologist Albert Cort Haddon was in the Torres Strait, recording Islander dances and ceremonies with a 35mm movie camera.

The next year, Fred Wills, of the Queensland Department of Agriculture, was making the world's first government films — 30 one-minute reels on such topics as cane-cutting, wheat harvesting, the opening of parliament and the Queensland cavalry heading to the Boer War.

Early films had fired the imagination of a young man who would become one of Australia's most significant contributors to cinema over the next four decades.

Galloping glory . . . Charles and Elsa Chauvel in 1940 on location filming Forty Thousand Horsemen.

Grazier's son Charles Chauvel was born in Warwick in 1897 and educated at Ipswich Grammar. From 1920 he worked as a production assistant and jack-of-all-trades, primarily responsible for horses, for film-makers such as Snowy Baker. In 1922 he followed Baker to the US.

When he returned to Australia he used his American experience to portray Australian bush stories, such as silent films The Moth of Moonbi (1926) and Greenhide (1927).

Elsa Sylvaney, star of Greenhide, wed Chauvel the next year and they formed a formidable film team for the next 40 years. Their Forty Thousand Horsemen, a 1940 tribute to the Australian Light Horse campaigns of World War I, is an Australian classic, helping define a rugged national character in the style of Chips Rafferty.

Chauvel's Sons of Matthew (1949), considered by many to be his finest work, was shot on the Lamington Plateau.

His final film, Jedda, investigates issues still part of the national debate, with its story of a young Aborigine torn between her people and her white foster parents.

A stage play of Steele Rudd's On Our Selection, with Bert Bailey as co-writer, producer and "Dad", became the first Australian talkie in 1932 and a big commercial success for director Ken G. Hall.

Continued >>