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A Natural Opening: Movie set in Australia prompts a rush to draw tourists to where it was filmed
AP Photo
Australians Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman star in Baz Luhrmann's Australia.
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Published: November 20, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia
The camera sweeps across the landscape, taking in flat plains, gushing waterfalls and a dusty country town. The color is brilliant, the emptiness palpable, and the soundtrack soars dramatically as warplanes bomb a city.
This is Australia, the new movie by award-winning director Baz Luhrmann. The World War II-era romantic epic, which will open later this month, has already been hailed for its cinematography and its pairing of Australian film stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.
But tourism promoters claim that the real star of the movie is the country.
Tourism Australia, the national tourism board, has started a $26 million international advertising campaign based on the movie, highlighting the wilderness of Western Australia state and encouraging tourists to refresh themselves by getting away from bustling cities and their busy daily lives.
"We knew that this huge film would create a wave of publicity that would put the country in the spotlight around the globe," said Geoff Buckley, the managing director of Tourism Australia. "And we found that the film's story had a remarkable resonance for what we do marketing the country as a travel destination."
The movie premiered Tuesday in Sydney. It will open internationally on next week.
The film follows the story of a noblewoman on a cattle drive in Australia during World War II. The movie was filmed largely in rugged Western Australia, notably in and around the small town of Kununurra, a three-hour flight north of Perth, and in the Kimberley wilderness region, which is the size of California.
Other film sites include working cattle stations at El Questro and Home Valley, the sandstone escarpments of the Cockburn Range and the striped mounds of the Bungle Bungle Range in Purnululu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The movie's World War II scenes were filmed mostly in the northwest city of Darwin, where Japanese raids in 1942 and 1943 killed more than 900 people. Visitors to real-life Darwin can see a war memorial related to that attack as well as Stokes Hill Wharf, which provided the backdrop for some of the harbor scenes.
Other movie scenes set in Darwin were shot in Bowen, Queensland, a beach town north of the Whitsunday Islands. The real-life Strickland House at Vaucluse on Sydney Harbour, a historic 1850s villa and garden estate, served as the location for filming the movie's "Darwin Government House."
Various tour operators have started offering tours of the Kimberley region in connection with the movie, and the state of Western Australia has started its own $1.4 million tourism campaign of cinema, print, online advertisements and in-flight television.
"We want to make sure that moviegoers who are inspired to visit the region know that it's actually WA's stunning landscapes and outback adventure they're longing for," state tourism minister Liz Constable said in a statement last week.
The Northern Territory, where Darwin is situated, has also started a $390,000 tourism campaign in the wake of the movie, touting the territory as "the real outback."
Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson said that the movie "really is going to put us on the map."
The national tourism campaign, dubbed "Come Walkabout," includes two commercials directed by Luhrmann, an Australian. The commercials, broadcast in 23 countries, feature busy professionals who are visited by a young Aboriginal child who sprinkles red dust into their hands.
"Sometimes, we have to get lost to find ourselves," the child whispers. "Sometimes, we gotta go walkabout." The overworked businessperson is then transported to a moonlit picnic under a baobab tree, or a refreshing swim in a billabong. The ethereal campaign was criticized by erstwhile Australian celebrity Paul Hogan, of Crocodile Dundee fame.
Years ago, he starred in the "Throw Another Shrimp on the Barbie" tourism ads, which Hogan said highlighted the hospitality and friendliness that Australians are known for. "If I go to your house for a visit and I want to come back, it's because I enjoyed your company, not your furniture," he told reporters recently.
He complained that the new campaign ignored real Australians to instead focus on impersonal nature.
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