-AUSTRALIA-

I have just watched the movie ‘Australia’ and if I can rate it, I give it 3 out of 5 stars. It is not a really enjoyable movie but not a really boring one neither. We can just say that it is a movie rich with meaningful message. First, it is a travelogue of a wide brown land with sweeping plains and lofty mountain ranges; second, it is a glorious Mills & Boon style romance between an English aristocrat and her love interest of an Outback drover; and third, there is the gut wrenching social justice commentary of the wrongs wrought on the Australian aborigines. This movie was directed by Baz Luhrmann and is rated PG-13 for some violence and a scene of sensuality.

The story begins in AUSTRALIA, where Lady Sarah Ashley, a proper Englishwoman who journeys to Australia in the years before World War II reached the country's shores. She is determined to have her estranged husband sell his cattle ranch to a monopoly-craving businessman named King Carney, but when she arrives, Lord Ashley is dead, and her plan to sell the ranch changes when she sees an employee named Neil Fletcher cheating her husband's business and mistreating a young boy named Nullah because he is of mixed race. Urged on by both pride and a sense of justice, Lady Ashley wants to drive her herd of cattle to Darwin so she can sell them to the troops, but she'll require the help of an independent cowboy known as The Drover to get them there. The drover is not really a fan of Sarah's either, but they are forced together due to their mutual dislike of the competition. Of course, being that this is a romantic epic, they soon discover there is an attraction between them that can't be denied.

I would like to talk about The Drover which is played by Hugh Jackman. Drover, in the story is narrated as a muscular and handsome drover, with unshaved beard making him look fierce. He is the one who helps Lady Sarah Ashley move the cattle across the property. In the story, he is essentially an outsider; in his back story he was married to an Aboriginal woman who died. It was illegal to marry an Aboriginal woman back then, so he was not accepted in white society, however he was not fully accepted into Aboriginal society either because he is a white man. So he was truly an outsider. He became known just as the best drover around.

A drover is the Australian version of a cowboy and his journey involves taking cattle a long way across one of the most inhospitable parts of the planet for a long period of time. Drovers, these men who do this for a living, are as tough as you can’t imagine. Jackman had really done a good job in this movie.

Now, let's go through his characteristics in this movie. The drover is an independent person. He never depends on other to survive in his life. His works as a drover needs him to drive herds of cattle across hundreds of miles of brutal, unforgiving terrain. The Drover is a superb horseman who prefers to live under the sun and stars, a nomad and a solitary man. He is more comfortable out there with his horse and the cattle than he is with people. He doesn’t want to be beholden to anybody. He said once in the movie which described himself : “No man hires, no man fired”. He struggles by himself to live.

Besides that, The Drover hates the wealthy, land-owning establishment, and Sarah is the poster girl for the aristocracy. He takes delight in shocking and teasing her, because everything about her annoys him. She is arrogant, pretentious, frustrating and impossible in his eyes. Actually, The Drover has spent years trying to bury his anger over the loss of his wife, who died from tuberculosis because Aboriginal people were not allowed in hospitals. But those walls start to break apart as he comes to know Sarah better and becomes a kind of father figure to Nullah. At the end, under the awesome power of the landscape, transformed by the love of a child, Sarah and the Drover fall in love.

The drover is also a person who disagrees on the discrimination towards the aboriginal people. He never treats the aboriginal in bad ways as the other white men did. For him, it is easier to be friend with the aborigin other than the white men. Even his ex-wife was an aborigin woman. There was a scene in the story at the last part of the movie where he went to the bar after he knows that Sarah was bombed while working. With him is Magarri, one of his aboriginal friends, was first not allowed to be in the bar as the bartender refuses to serve blacks. But, he said “Just because it is, doesn't mean it should be.”- actually, it was Sarah’s word. He bravely stands up for Margarri. This show that he never agrees with the way the white men treats the aboriginal badly.

Next, we can see in the movie that the drover is the one who lead the journey to drive all the 1500 cattle-if i'm not mistaken, to Darwin. He possesses the great true-leadership skills in himself. To drive a big crowd of cattle with just a small group of people in not an easy job to do. But, he still managed to do it. They succeed to bring all the cattle down to Darwin and sold them to the army corporation.

The Drover is really an amazing person right? ^^