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The joy of short films

joy-short-films — Gympie’s Heart of Gold short film festival

The phrase most often heard during a four-day short film festival is that film-making, in particular short films, is a ‘labour of love‘.By that, the film-maker means he/she/they did not make a bean out of it – in fact probably lost money.

Gympie’s Heart of Gold International short film festival was held last weekend after a two-year hiatus through the Covid pandemic.

Festival director Jackson Lapsley Scott waded through 914 short movies from Australia and around the world to end up with a 170-film programme. We arrived at noon on Friday so despite the late start (the festival opened on Thursday night), we did well to sit through 32 movies, including two sessions under moonlight in an arena at the Gympie Showgrounds.

We’d been to this festival previously and found it most entertaining and absorbing. The joy of watching short films is, if you are not enjoying it, there’s only 10 or 15 minutes to sit through. Some of the films were really short. The endearing Irish animation, Gunter Falls in Love, runs for just two minutes. Gunter is a pudgy pug who falls in love on Christmas Day. The story is almost entirely conveyed with eye movements and sight gags. I’m not such a fan of animated movies, but at this festival there were some outstanding examples of the genre.

Some combine live action film with animated characters – this was first done to effect in 1988 with the acclaimed Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Who could forget the curvaceous character Jessica, who tells horny Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins): “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way!”

Wildebeest is a 20-minute film about a middle-aged couple who go on a trip of a lifetime safari only to be left behind with the wild animals in the South African savannah. This somewhat raunchy satire is darkly amusing. There were others that caught my attention – an Australian animation (Reboot), about an out of work skeleton actor whose famous old movie is being re-made using digital technology. Skel’s not giving up without a fight.

Festival director Jackson Lapsley Scott’s name cropped up in a couple of movies as ‘executive producer’. I asked him did that mean he put up the money?

He explained that he had worked with Screen Queensland to help produce the movies, Thea Goes To Town and The Moths Will Eat Them Up. His role was to help facilitate script development, oversee budgets and be involved in other producer roles. Each film was allocated $50,000, which is quite generous in that some independent shorts are made with a $500 catering budget and a team of volunteers,

“With that sort of budget you can pay people properly. Fifty thousand might sound like a lot of money for a 12-minute film, but it can disappear very quickly.”

The Heart of Gold Festival was staged this year with the help of a $180,000 Federal Government RISE grant.

The Federal Government invested $200 million in the RISE programme to help arts organisations rebuild after Covid setbacks.

Jackson said the grant was vital to organising this year’s festival at a time when local sponsorship had dwindled due to the negative effects of Covid and floods and volunteer interest needing to be rebuilt. The grant also meant the festival could stage some free events to engage the local community.

“We probably would have been dead in the water or a very different looking festival without it,” he said.

“The grant allowed us to appoint people to paid positions and start rebuilding the festival after two years off.”

Fortunately, audience numbers this year were higher than usual. So although the budget is yet to be finalised, safe to say HOG will be back in 2023.

“We were expecting numbers to be lower because of the way audiences responded to Covid,” Jackson said. “We were very heartened by the response.”

Heart of Gold took some short films on the road in late June to promote the festival, visiting Maryborough, Toowoomba, Pomona and Maleny. Jackson said the promotional tour was successful, so is planning to do it again next year and extend it to seven locations.

This year, the festival moved from its traditional home (the Gympie Civic Centre) to the showgrounds, making the most of the extra space, staging live music, an outdoor cinema, talks, workshops and podcasts.

The festival was not without some hiccups, including a savage storm on Thursday evening which brought strong winds, rain and hail. The storm damaged some of the festival’s outdoor tents and equipment and there was a blackout. But someone found a generator and a battery-powered PA, so the show went on!

The motivation for film-makers entering movies in a festival like Heart of Gold is that films are seen by a new audience and some are nominated for awards, judged by a panel of experts. Apart from cash prizes, winning awards brings street cred in the cinema business.

While there was a strong contingent of Australian films, there were worthy offerings from around the world. This year Heart of Gold introduced an audience’s choice award (won by The Invention).

This endearing 18-minute Irish film focuses on a Belfast lad who hatches a plan to steal cigarettes (for a good cause).

My favourite was Where is my Darling, a documentary about a homeless man, Lanz Priestley. Lanz organised distribution of bottled water during the drought to remote settlements in New South Wales. A charismatic character, he built up Dignity Water just using his mobile phone and a Facebook page.

Heart of Gold is one of 25 or more film festivals held in Australian cities and towns but is billed as the country’s biggest rural festival. It’s been going for 16 years, albeit with an absence during three of those years.

It’s plain to see there is no shortage of material. Heart of Gold’s brief is to find films that are positive and uplifting. But as Jackson said, post-Covid a lot of filmmakers focused on the darker side of life so it was difficult to find a balance.

The Best Short Film award was won by Like The Ones I Used To Know (Canada) directed by Annie St-Pierre. This is a bitter-sweet tale of a recently divorced man who visits his ex-in-laws on Christmas Eve to pick up his children.

Best Australian film, What Was It Like, was directed by Genevieve Clay-Smith. In this documentary, eight film-makers with intellectual disabilities interview their parents about what it was like when doctors delivered their diagnosis.

Which brings us to the question – where can you see movies like this if you don’t go to film festivals?

Many are available (free) on internet video platforms including YouTube and Vimeo. A link to the aforementioned Wildebeest is included here (don’t shoot the messenger!)

I’m wondering what it would take to convince the big cinema chains to reinstate the tradition of ‘shorts’ which used to precede feature films? It would be handy too if the big chains paid to screen the shorts, deriving much-needed income for independent film makers around the world.

Until that happens, the independent short film makers get by through applying for grants and asking sponsors and supporters for money. Many of the short films we saw stated in the credits that the film could not have been made without crowdfunding through the likes of Pozible, Go Fund Me and Kickstarter. As long-standing FOMM readers may remember, I canvassed the topic of crowdfunding back in 2015, as it was emerging. Good to see crowdfunding still supporting independent movies, art, theatre and music.

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Cinemas And The Return Of The Drive-In

cinemas-drive-ins — Photo of Jericho Drive In (the world’s smallest) by Graham Adams

In any learned discussion about cinemas and movies, it does not take long for someone to relate that old Dad joke about two goats.

(Two goats are munching on a spool of film at the local dump). First goat: “What did you think?

Second goat: “I preferred the book”.

It’s a bit that way one episode into the SBS series Archangel, based on the thriller by Robert Harris about an academic who stumbles upon the lost diaries of Joseph Stalin. But I digress.

I don’t know about you, but even with the cinemas open again, I am loathe to sequester myself in a dark, air conditioned room with a posse of strangers. Who knows where they have been!

My main objection to attending cinemas at this point in time was (until I read up on the topic), the dangers of the virus being spread by air-conditioning. Safe Work Australia says there is no evidence that COVID-19 is airborne – it is primarily spread by respiratory droplets and personal contact. All the same, one would hope businesses are taking extra care with cleaning and maintenance of air-con plants. So, I might just be anti-social, then?

The allure of the cinema has been eroded by the variety of in-home cinematic content available in the Cloud, much of it ‘free’. Despite telling ourselves we should be watching the foreign movies available on SBS or new release movies on subscription services, we usually end up binge-watching 50-minute episodes of TV dramas.

The most recent was season five (Prime) of the excellent UK series Line of Duty, about a fictional police corruption unit called AC12. There will be no spoilers here if you only got to season three or four, but safe to say series six is ready to go. Filming was supposed to start on series six earlier this year, but COVID-19 intervened.

Anyone who works in the Arts will know how that sector has been hit harder by the pandemic than, say, the National Rugby League.

The last movie we saw at the local cinema was ‘A beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood’, in which Tom Hank plays the role of TV children’s entertainer “Mr Rogers”. We went with a small group, who met for coffee and drinks afterwards to discuss the movie. Perhaps I’m just a jaded, cynical journalist, but I found agreeing with Empire Online’s opening remark: “It could easily have been twee twaddle…:.:

I hasten to add Empire went on to give the movie a solid review. Based on a true story, the plot involves a magazine journalist Lloyd Vogel, who sets out to do a hatchet job. But he ends up receiving life lessons from the benevolent Mr Rogers. The film is based on a feature article by Tom Junee.

The other place where you can safely go to watch movies is your local drive-in theatre. What, you don’t have one? Research indicates there are still at least 16 drive-in theatres active in Australia, and more than a few ‘pop-up’ venues.

If you are of my vintage, you probably remember the glory days of the drive-in theatre. For those who cannot envisage the concept, a drive-in theatre is an open piece of land, usually on the town’s outskirts. People pay to come in and park their cars and watch movies on a very large screen. In the 1950s and 60s, those attending drive-in theatres attached speakers to their car windows (trying to remember not to drive off without hanging them back on the posts). Today, with FM radio, Bluetooth and streaming audio, it is a cinch to listen to the digital sound track in your car.

The drive in theatre liberated teenagers of the 1950s, an era where it was not uncommon for a boy keen on a certain girl to ask her father’s permission to take her on a date.

The drive-in offered teenagers a rare few hours of privacy at a venue where they may or may not have watched the whole movie. There are only three major drive-in theatres in Queensland: the Tivoli (near Ipswich), the Yatala drive-in at the Gold Coast and the Starlight theatre in Ayr (north Queensland). At one stage in the 1950s, there were 300 drive-ins in Australia, the third largest number in the world, after the US and Canada.

Outback cinemas are essential entertainment in small, remote locations. The Paraburdoo Drive In Theatre in Western Australia recently re-opened after a COVID19 induced hiatus. There is also a drive-in in the mining town of Tom Price.

Last Saturday’s double bill was ‘Moana’ and ‘Jumanji’, and meals were served. Tom Price is a town of 3,000 people, median age 31, which probably explains last Saturday’s kid-friendly choice of movie.

The benefit of a drive-in for families is fairly obvious – as Paul Kelly sings – ‘Mum and Dad up the front and the rest of us snug and tight’.

Developers would tell you it is not the highest and best use of urban land and indeed some former drive-ins have been replaced by big box warehouses, retirement villages and the like. While urban sprawl and competition from in-home digital entertainment has put paid to many, nevertheless, the drive in prevails. Australia’s largest theatre, the Lunar Theatre at Dandenong in Victoria, is a big operation. One of the country’s oldest, it closed in 1984 and re-opened in 2002. Now, with a capacity of 960 cars, its four screens operate seven days a week. Conversely, the smallest (at Jericho in Queensland), has room for 36 cars

The effects of Covid-19 on the entertainment industry has forced entrepreneurs to come up with novel ways of making a quid. There is more than one example of promoters staging drive-in concerts to give punters and artists a safe live forum.

Untitled Group had planned an elaborate drive-in show at Flemington Racecourse in July. A new promotional division, The Drive In, planned a dozen such concerts, each for up to 500 cars. But as organisers state in this link, they had no choice but to cancel as the COVID-19 situation in Victoria worsened. For Australian musicians, unfettered travel is essential to earning a living.

So far, no-one has come up with a scheme in which punters get to enjoy live music while those performing get paid what they’re worth.

We are a bit keen on film festivals, where you can binge on quality movies for up to a week. We may yet head North-West next month for the the Vision Splendid International Film Festival at Winton. The key advantage for those who take COVID-19 seriously is that the majority of movies are screened in the town’s historic open-air cinema. I have attended this festival twice and written about it once.

The festival has been held in late June every year since 2014. In 2020, a decision was made to postpone the event to September 18-26. Coincidentally, the festival was officially launched in Brisbane this week. It remains to be seen if interstate visitors will be allowed to travel to Queensland’s outback by mid-September.

In the interim, this at-risk bloke will confine his entertainment to YouTube music videos, Prime, SBS, ABC on Demand and the NRL (which is entertaining in all manner of unexpected ways).

February 29 – a most ingenious paradox

February-29-paradox — Sasin Tipchar, www.pixabay

Every four years we get to wish our friend (let’s call her Hannah), a very real birthday, as she was born on February 29. Hannah was born in a Leap Year, so officially celebrates her birthday every four years. Leaplings, as they are known, are a rare breed.

There have been only 2,470 Australians born on February 29 over the past 10 years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There are, however, 4.8 million Leaplings world-wide, 205,000 of whom live in the USA.

The chances of being born on February 29 are 1 in 1427. Longer odds might apply to Hannah’s discovery that a fellow Leapling shared her workplace.

Hannah has warmed to the idea over the years, saying it is always a talking point when birthdays are being discussed. In the workplace, there is little chance of avoiding that special day. On her 48^th birthday (when in Leapling terms she was only 12), Hannah’s work colleagues approached her deadpan, declaring it was time for ‘the talk’.

There are a few catches to being born on a day that is only recognised every four years. Chief among them is the plight of Frederic, an apprentice pirate in Gilbert & Sullivan’s light opera, The Pirates of Penzance. In Pirates, G&S, as usual, indulge their penchant for social satire: a man of low social standing is smitten by a middle-class damsel (or vice versa). Someone usually objects to the romance and so the fun ensues.

In this case, Frederic falls for the Pirate King’s daughter Mabel (she reciprocates). Unluckily for Frederic, he was born on February 29. The Pirate King decrees (on a technicality) that Frederic is not old enough to marry anybody and is in fact indentured until he reaches the age of 21 (or in Frederic’s case 84 years).

G&S cut loose on the concept of Leap Year, declaring it “a most ingenious paradox”.

G&S’s copyright expired in the 1980s, so I’m quoting at length the Pirate King’s reasoning (delivered mid-song as a rhyming monologue):

“For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,

Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,

Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,

One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –

You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;

And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,

That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!

I am not the first to observe that by acquiring an extra day every four years, employers are getting our enterprise for a bargain. February 29 is not a public holiday and it matters not if it falls on a weekend (as it does in 2020). The bottom line is, it’s an extra day is squeezed into the calendar, at the expense of working people.

It did not surprise me, then, having made this observation, to discover an attempt in the UK to have February 29 declared a Bank Holiday.

A petition made to the 2015-2017 government argued that the average salaried worker was losing out on £113 pounds ($A233) on account of being required to work one unpaid day in a calendar year.

The government responded to the petition, signed by 16,856 citizens, saying it had no plans to introduce an additional public holiday. An Impact Assessment for the additional Diamond Jubilee holiday in 2012 revealed that day alone cost the UK economy around £1.2 billion. Moreover, the government said, the extra day actually benefited those (Ed: in the gig economy), paid by the day or the hour.

I found a trove of statistics around February 29, which dates back to1582. It started with Pope Gregory III and the Gregorian calendar. It was calculated that it takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds for the Earth to go around the Sun. This results in an accumulation of ‘quarter days’. The Gregorian calendar added an extra day every four years to counteract this.

As if 29 days in February were not enough, two countries had a stab at adding yet another day. Sweden introduced a February 30 in the early 1700s (by accident), during a period where the country was switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The Soviet Union observed February 30 in 1930 and 1931 after introducing a ‘revolutionary calendar’ in 1929. This calendar featured five-day weeks, 30-day months for every working month.

Leaplings share their birthday with celebrities including Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, actor Dennis Farina, big band era singer Dinah Shore, rugby league player Nelson Asofa-Solomona, Australian actor and comedian Frank Woodley and US rapper Ja Rule.

But what you probably really want to know is why women are encouraged to propose to men in a Leap Year.

One version is that Ireland’s St Bridget and St Patrick cooked it up between them in the 5^th century. If a woman proposed to a man and he refused, he had to buy her a pair of gloves, so the legend goes.

Other accounts say the tradition started in Scotland, where the unmarried Queen Margaret took St Patrick’s informal arrangement and passed it into law in 1288, giving women the right to propose to men in a Leap Year. Men who refused the proposal in Scotland were ‘fined’, the penalties ranging from a kiss to a silk dress for the jilted woman.

Canadian blogger Omar Ha-Redeye, writing in Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine, doubts this story, observing that as Queen Margaret was only five years old at the time, her influence on matters of State was somewhat suspect.

Nevertheless, the Celtic folklore about Leap Year was readily adopted by Victorian society, who held Leap Year dances, so women could find suitable men to whom they could propose.

Given its romantic potential, I was puzzled to find only one mainstream movie made around the idea of a woman proposing to a man in a Leap Year.

Perhaps nobody has been game since reviewers gave Leap Year (2010) such a bollocking. Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode, is set in Ireland. The opaque plot involves a girl (Amy) travelling abroad to propose to her boyfriend. In so doing, she gets involved with Declan (Goode), a grumpy Irish innkeeper with money problems. The movie is said to be loosely based on the silver screen era hits It Happened One Night and I Know Where I’m Going.

Empire critic William Thomas made it clear how far short it fell of the romantic sizzle of the latter (starring Clarke Gable and Claudette Colbert).

“Rubbish. Irish eyes will be hard pressed to grimace, let alone smile,” Thomas wrote.

Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film one star out of five, saying it was “offensive, reactionary and patronising”. He said Leap Year (widely accepted as the worst movie made about Ireland), was evidence that: “Hollywood is incapable of seeing the Irish as anything but IRA men or twinkly rural imbeciles”.

Ah yes, but the romantics leapt at Leap Year, shelling out $32.6 million at the box office.

What do critics know, eh?

A Festive Feast of Christmas Movies

Has it ever occurred to you how few Australian Christmas movies there are and why our lives are so permeated by American culture (such as it is)? This week’s theme came to mind whilst seated in a front row pew at St Mark’s Anglican church in Warwick. We were participating in a Christmas service with our new choir, the East Street Singers.

It’s a magnificent 151-year-old sandstone kirk with a landmark tower, stained glass windows and distinctive bells which ring out over the town. The church has been much renovated and added to over the years and now is raising funds for sandstone restoration work costing $1 million. (see photo below)

The choir performed at various points during the evening church service, so there was time to sit and reflect. In my case, this amounted to thinking back many years to my childhood, raised in the Methodist faith by devout parents. Should I say this was my first time in a church since a funeral several years ago? I listened quite avidly to the ‘message’ by St Mark’s new Rector, the Rev Lizzie Gaitskell. I told her afterwards that her message was far removed from the fire and brimstone sermons of my childhood.

Her self-penned message compared the humble origins of the Christmas story with the commercial, chocolate-box version of the festive season. In saying so she confessed that she and her children has been indulging in a slightly saccharine diet of Christmas movies, courtesy of Netflix. The formulaic movies feature “picture-perfect, drought-free, carefree towns and villages in a festively snow-clad America, or a delightfully chocolate-box looking kingdom in Europe.”

“Is Christmas really to be found in this chocolate box escape hatch of our own contriving?” she asked.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the first Christmas, she added – was there even a donkey and a stable as such? Rev Gaitskill names Mary’s husband, Joseph, as the under-rated character in the Christmas story.

“In all likelihood Mary was little more than a teenager; carrying a child that was not her husband Joseph’s – though his readiness to marry her, guaranteed both hers and the baby’s safety.

“A young, first time Mother, giving birth outside her home town after a long journey. It’s as far from chocolate box as you can get.”

I ought not to confess to a wandering mind while listening to Lizzie deliver a message she had clearly put much time and thought into. But I was latching on the kernel of an idea for today’s FOMM, which I realised at that moment would be my 2019 Christmas message.

So the topic this week is Christmas movies, of which there are so many that websites dedicated to cinema can easily rattle off a ‘top 50’ or ‘top 100’ movies.

Two observations to be made here: the majority of movies have been generated by Hollywood, typically covering all of the traditional bases − Santa, snow, snowmen, reindeer, sleighs, plum pudding, Christmas bells, mistletoe, carols, Christmas trees and gift-giving.

The second point is that so few Christmas movies can stand repeated viewings, and even then, only once a year.

First of all there are feel-good movies which have no real bearing on Christmas other than that they are set at that time of year (Home Alone*, Love Actually*) or Christmas-setting action dramas (Diehard, Beverly Hills Cop*).

Some are (depending on your sense of humour and ideas about taste and relevance), quite appalling. I cite Bad Santa I and II, Gremlins and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation *. This third movie in a series about the hapless Griswold family is as tacky as the other two, raising the point made by a critic “One of the wonder s of Hollywood is how Chevy Chase still manages to get work.”

How crass is crass? Try this dialogue (from the 55 top Christmas movies review by Rotten Tomatoes).

Todd Chester: Hey Griswold! Where do you think you’re gonna put a tree that big?

Clark W. Griswold Jr. Bend over and I’ll show you!

Some of the movies mentioned can be seen on free-to-air TV in the coming week (those with an asterisk and also, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Fred Klaus, Christmas with the Kranks and the (execrable) Office Christmas Party.

So what rings my Christmas bell, you may ask?

As you may know from my song ‘Burning Father’s Letters’, I am something of a Dickens fan. So most of the 30+ versions of A Christmas Carol sum up the Christmas message for me.

The classic story of Scrooge, a bitter miser who is beset by ghosts of Christmas past and persuaded to mend his ways, has been re-told dozens of times in wildly different ways.

I have seen maybe 6 versions, but movie websites rottentomatoes.com and cinemablend.com will tell you more than you ever needed to know about the others.

Starting with the silent version in 1901, A Christmas Carol keeps getting retold because it is a classic case of humanity prevailing over capitalism.

As it happens, the FX made-for-TV mini-series, starring Australia’s Guy Pierce as Ebenezer Scrooge, was released just yesterday.

It has already gleaned some scathing reviews, primarily for turning Scrooge into a scheming psychopath rather than a habitual curmudgeon. I will probably watch it anyway, as it is directed by Peaky Blinders director Steve Knight (who has a reputation for gothic ultra-violence).

The critics unanimously picked the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim as a stand-out. I did like the 2009 CGI-laden version starring Jim Carrey. While it did stray from the Dickens story, I liked Bill Murray’s Scrooged. Some years back I recall seeing George C Scott and Edward Woodward in a British version which stuck authentically to the Dickens story.

Meanwhile in Australia, with our upside down version of Christmas, there have been only a half-dozen Christmas films worth mention.

They include the 1947 Chips Rafferty classic, Bush Christmas, remade in 1983 with Nicole Kidman, making her screen debut at 16. Now that we have a smart TV with access to a vast database of movies, I might track down this Jane Campion-directed movie (Ed: he always had a thing about Nicole, who I call ‘the stick insect’).

The Guardian’s Travis Johnston had a stab at making sense of Australia’s unwillingness to come to the Christmas movie party. He put it down to ‘simple visual iconography’.

“We celebrate Christmas in Australia, for sure, but we’re a desert island that experiences a seemingly endless summer, and the traditional trappings of the northern hemisphere holiday look a bit ludicrous against the bright, cloudless skies and blistering heat of an Australian December.”

I shall round out this FOMM with a few links to my Christmases-past. Thank you for supporting this weekly essay, now in its sixth year. I wrote this one on a fast-dying Toshiba laptop on a keyboard with two missing keys and the letters worn off five or six of the characters through relentless typing.

As my French travelling companion Marcel said in his tiny Paris apartment, circa 1978: “Merde – you write like a machine!”

Merry Christmas. Take care out there.

2018 https://bobwords.com.au/friday-on-my-mind-ring-christmas-bells-and-other-carols/

2017 https://bobwords.com.au/fomm-alt-christmas-playlist/

2016 https://bobwords.com.au/obamas-last-christmas-card/

Camel Racing And The World’s Longest Damper

camel racing-damper — Camel racing at Boulia -Image courtesy of http://www.bouliacamelraces.com.au/camel-racing/

Queensland’s outback towns may still be struggling with the impact of drought, but they are now more than ever engaging communities and outsiders in unique events. Tourist attractions like Winton’s Vision Splendid film festival, Birdsville’s Big Red Bash, Boulia’s camel races, an outback golf tournament and the national silo art trail are just a few of the initiatives. Attractions and events are primarily organised by locals (and sponsors) as a way of attracting cash-spending visitors and giving locals some respite from the hard life on the parched land.

Travel writers tend to visit places for a day or two, then write about them as if they’ve lived there for a lifetime. It’s quite a skill and I’ll admit to doing this presumptuous thing in the interests of whetting your appetite for outback travel. Though we spent only 10 days in Western Queensland on this trip, we picked up more than a few pieces of information and inspiration.

camel-races-damper — Kerosene tin hut at Morven, image by Laurel Wilson

For one thing, there’s a kerosene tin hut built in the grounds of Morven’s historical museum. The hut is made from flattened kerosene tins, held together with staples and built over a light timber framework. There are few remaining examples of Australia’s ‘tin towns’, which sprung up on the outskirts of towns and cities during the Great Depression. (Photo by Laurel).

Small western towns like Morven and Bollon need the support of visitors. Local people have less to spend as a result of the ongoing drought. Some have made an attempt to attract and keep visitors, especially the ubiquitous grey nomads. Travellers are important to the rural economy; they spend money in supermarkets, hardware stores, pubs, clubs and petrol stations.

We were horrified to learn that Bollon, a town of 334 people, has lost its last service station. If you don’t happen to see the sign on the highway between St George and Cunnamulla, chances are you might run out of fuel on the 294-km journey.

Even when outback towns do have a service station, there are no guarantees. On the way home we limped into Charleville with six litres of fuel left, after finding that Quilpie’s service station had run out of fuel – drained dry by the convoy of grey nomads and 4WD adventurers heading 625 kms to Birdsville for the Big Red Bash.

The Bash is a three-day outdoor music festival held in mid-July. This year it was headlined by Midnight Oil, the Living End, Richard Clapton and Kasey Chambers. At $539 a ticket, not to mention the cost of driving 1,600 kms (from Brisbane), you’d want to be keen. Last year, the Bash raised more than $100,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. This year, 9,169 people attended, including volunteers, crew, kids, sponsors and vendors.

Meanwhile, the Boulia Camel Races are now scheduled to follow on from the Big Red Bash. If you are already at Birdsville, all you have to do is drive another 200 kms or so to Boulia, a tiny outpost on the edge of the Simpson Desert.

The 1,500m Boulia Camel Cup was won this year by a local camel, Wason. About 5,000 people came to Boulia (pop 230) for the two-day event, which featured heats over short distances before the main race on Sunday. If you are game, there are bookies on hand to take your bets.

The jockeys (who wear protective head gear), sit on small saddle pads behind the camel’s hump. There are no reins – the camels steer themselves down the racetrack (and can be disqualified for running in the opposite direction!)

July is the main month for outback tourism events, as the weather is at its most stable, with mild day temperatures and cool nights. In Charleville, an intrepid team set about cooking the world’s longest damper. At 153 metres, it surpassed a 125m-long damper made by Swedish boy scouts in 2006. The Guinness Book of Records is yet to officially recognise the attempt, but it’s in the oven, as they say. The event, organised by the Charleville Fishing and Restocking Club, involved a large team of volunteers who made the damper and then baked it in a 153m trench filled with hot charcoal.

Hundreds of locals and visitors attended the event, which made news bulletins far and wide. No doubt, that was the whole point. She Who Drives Most Of TheTime once amazed some Belgian backpackers at Carnarvon Gorge. She mixed up a batch of damper (flour, water, herbs and baking powder) in our 12-foot caravan. She then wrapped it in a piece of tin foil (first manufactured in 1910, in case you were wondering), and threw it in the camp fire. The primitive nature of this kind of cooking, the sweet smell of burning wood and campfire camaraderie perhaps convinces us that it tastes better than it does.

Damper is a traditional Australian soda bread, enjoyed in eras past by swagmen, drovers and stockmen. The basic recipe, one could suggest, was derived from bread prepared and baked in the coals of a campfire by Australia’s indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

Yelarbon rural oasis scene by Brightsiders

Small towns in grain-growing districts are increasingly embracing the idea of having artists paint murals on grain silos. The most recent example of this is at Yelarbon, 300 kms south-west of Brisbane. The first stage of the silo art project by artist group Brightsiders was completed in May.

A viewing station is being built so visitors can get off the highway and admire this artwork on the edge of the spinifex desert. The rural scene is titled ‘When the rain comes’. Local sources tell us that 100 visitors a day are stopping in Yelarbon to view the artwork, funded by the Federal Government’s Drought Communities Programme.

If film festivals are your thing, Winton’s Vision Splendid festival in June is quite an experience. Maleny residents Robyn and Norm Dobson spent 10 days at Winton’s Vision Splendid film festival this year. They took a train from Nambour to Longreach and then a coach to Winton – a 24-hour journey.

“We booked a sleeper,” Robyn said. “We couldn’t do that trip sitting in a recliner for 24 hours.”

She observed that a lot of the people in Winton for the festival were grey nomads, strengthening her theory that the survival of small outback towns depend on annual festivals. Films are shown at Winton’s famous open air theatre, with day-time films shown at the (new) Waltzing Matilda Centre.

Robyn and Norm were impressed with the 1949 British-made film, “The Eureka Stockade” starring Chips Rafferty, with a yet-to-be-famous Peter Finch in a minor role. The other highlight of the festival was the now-traditional silent movie feature. This year it was the 1906 film, The History of the Kelly Gang.

Our country town of Maleny had its own tourism event in July – Knitfest (a yarn and fibres art festival). Preparations for this included dressing street trees (and cow sculptures) in knitted garments. This event predictably saw visitor numbers to the town swell.

On the Southern Downs, the Jumpers and Jazz Festival will be winding up this weekend. This Warwick-based festival is a bit like Stanthorpe’s Snowflakes (July 5-7), in that both make a celebration out of being among the coldest places in Queensland.

I guess it could have been easier to do that instead of trekking to Thargomindah. But we did get to see green grass in several areas and most of the creeks we passed had at least a little water in them – not something we’ve seen on our previous outback treks. Ed)

Longreach to Winton via Mystery Road

longreach-winton-mystery road — Apex Park outside Longreach (photo by Bob Wilson)

From Hughenden: No 3 in an outback adventure series

So we’re driving into Longreach from Barcaldine, a journey rarely punctuated by a bend in the road, when snippets of a song jump into my head.

“I dunno why they call it Longreach, it doesn’t seem that far to me,” goes the line from one of Mick O’Halloran’s songs. .

Unlike much of the outback, at least you know when you’re coming into Longreach, 1,175 kms north-west of Brisbane, because of the unmistakable landmark which is the Qantas Founders’ Museum. We found our way to the town information centre and paid $6 for the privilege of camping for two nights at Apex Park, 4 kms west. The photo doesn’t quite do justice to the sight of 90 or so caravans, fifth-wheelers, slide-ons, camper trailers, A-vans, converted buses and the occasional tent, squatting in the dust alongside the Thompson River.

There’s a barbecue and covered picnic tables, flushing toilets and it’s only five minutes from town. But we were all a bit too close together for comfort and there were irritants like drifting smoke from camp fires, the grumble of generators, the untimely crowing of feral roosters and the bloody flies! I’ve been on a quest for a pair of his and hers fly swatters but so far on this trip they’ve been out of stock everywhere we looked.

I could not help noticing how many more vans there were in the morning, implying that some arrived late (or early), as it the habit of the lesser crested grey nomad, nabbing the best sites. I’m not suggesting they do it to avoid paying $3 – nobody’s that much of a tight arse.

Apex Park is reached via the Landsborough Highway west of Longreach across a series of bridges forming a long causeway across the Thompson River flood plain. The Thompson is a 3,500km long inland river that runs across channel country into Lake Eyre. While Longreach, like other western Queensland towns, has relatively low rainfall (average 450mm a year) floods are common because the many tributaries of the Thompson join and spread during heavy rain. The causeway’s 16 interlinked bridges stretch 24 kms across the flood plain, one effort to minimise flooding in the town.

We drove to the other side of Longreach for a late afternoon walk through Iningai Nature Reserve. Named after the traditional owners, this example of Mitchell Grass Downs country along the Thompson River has been allowed to regenerate since goats left it a dusty desert in 1950. There’s a fine example of a Coolibah tree, under which one can pose for the inevitable photo. The reserve is touted as a bird watcher’s paradise but we didn’t see many, maybe because night was gathering fast. Tip for bushwalkers – always carry a torch.

Onwards to the town seeking to claim the crown of South Australia’s Quorn as the country’s best known outdoor sound stage. Major films like Mystery Road and Goldstone were filmed in the Winton district. We were in Winton primarily to enjoy the Outback Film Festival, established in 2013 after the successful premiere of the aforementioned Mystery Road, starring Aaron Pedersen as a surly black cowboy detective. Some 400 people packed in to Winton’s famous open air theatre for the event, which remains the main venue for the film festival. Some films are also shown in a theatre at Winton’s rebuilt Waltzing Matilda Centre.

We saw some great films in the four days we were in Winton including Mystery Road, Sweet Country, Brothers’ Nest (starring Shane and Clayton Nicholson), documentaries (Night Parrot, Black Panther Woman and Backtrack Boys stand out), and a gory sci-fi film, Upgrade, which was a last minute replacement for That’s not my Dog.

If you get bored with the show you just look up, let your eyes adjust and take in nature’s starry, starry night. When Upgrade finished about 10.20 we were heading to bed but noticed that comedian Lawrence Mooney was doing an R18 late show at the North Gregory Hotel. Mooney came out in character as PM Malcolm Turnbull and wasted no time establishing the tone with a few swear words.

“Are there any kids here?” he asked. “If there are, f*** them off because this is an adults-only show.”

Mooney’s sharp satirical sword spared no-one; Millennials and Gen Xers copped it, so too the Greens, Labor and a few Senators singled out for special mention. Two people walked out when he made a joke about farmers and suicide and one heckler in the front row kept up such a running commentary Mooney resorted to telling her to shut the f*** up. You attend late night comedy shows at your own risk.

Grey nomads also copped a spray, although they were so under-represented in the Monday night audience there was little risk someone would take offence at his suggestion that serial killers should stop preying on backpackers and focus on grey nomads instead “because nobody cares”.

The telling part near the end of his show was Mooney asking the audience of 30-40 people how many actually lived in Winton. One woman raised her hand only to say she used to live in Winton but had moved away.

I had vague ambitions about driving out to Middleton, where Mystery Road was shot, until I figured out it was a 360km round-trip. Every place of interest around here is at least two hours’ drive away.

The Outback Film Festival, A Vision Splendid, is a bold project for a small outback community to sustain. It deserves to be supported (and you can still find time to go fossicking or dinosaur spotting).

On Wednesday night we got glammed up and went to the 100^th Anniversary celebrations of the Royal Open Air Theatre, which included dinner and a special screening of the silent film classic, The Sentimental Bloke.

It meant skipping the spectacular sunsets you so often see in the flat country spreading west, but there are sure to be more as we head north to Hughenden and the Gulf country.

The alert among you will observe that this was posted on Thursday, as we’re going bush and will be out of WIFI range for a few days. I’m off to buy some block ice as our caravan fridge decided to cark it (Aussie expression meaning it died). After our visits to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Longreach and Barcaldine’s Australian Heritage Centre, which tell stories of the hard life of country people in the 1800s, getting by without a fridge for a few weeks is no great hardship (as long as you don’t forget to buy the ice-Ed.)