In the Australian imagination the phrase "the Never Never" has two meanings. It can mean either the mythical distant Outback that you can never reach, or a debt that you can never repay. This film uses the double meaning to explore the way Australians fight over whether to find spiritual salvation in their land or use it for financial gain.
Behind the veneer of modern cities, Australia is a stark landscape of ancient, infertile soils and wildly unpredictable weather. This film follows people who try to shape this land to their dreams, and describes the conflicts that follow. Young men and women called ferals confront loggers whose families have worked the timber for generations. Irrigation provides billions of dollars in crops, but rivers are dying. A group fights to get water back in the famous and now empty Snowy River, yet the project that took it away it is a root of Australian culture. In the northeast, farmers clear trees and brush from millions of acres, but in the west other farmers pay the price for past over-clearing as salt rises to kill fields.
People try to shape the land in an image of ancient simplicity. In a program called Project Eden, foxes and cats are killed to make room for native species. But the Never Never is elusive. Nature is too uncertain to offer security, and humans can't get far enough from themselves to find salvation in wilderness. While Aborigines seek a taste of their old life in honey-ant burrows in the desert, the Never Never vanishes like a dream, fading in the light of the real world.
Distributed internationally by CS Associates. |
