On Our Selection

A sun-scorched slab of Queensland scrub, half-cleared by calloused hands, becomes the stage for a sprawling, comic-pastoral saga in which the Rudd clan—patriarch Dad, iron-willed Mum, and their brood of flaxen-haired urchins—wrestle drought, dingoes, and their own calamitous optimism. Steele Rudd’s yarns, once inked for city newspapers, here unfurl as episodic cinema: a cow that refuses to stay bought, a bush fire that paints the night blood-orange, a selection dance where lace dresses snag on every splinter, and a magpie’s mocking aria that punctures every boast. Between the slapstick of a barn-raising that collapses like a drunk soufflé and the hush of a funeral held under a wilting jacaranda, the film stitches together a patchwork of larrikin humour and frontier melancholy, letting each frame breathe red dust and eucalyptus perfume. Lottie Lyell’s scenariostructures the chaos into picaresque movements: arrival, cultivation, calamity, carnival, loss, hard-won truce. Raymond Longford’s camera, hungry for horizon, tilts up to swallow an opal sky, then swoops low to catch a child’s bare toes curling in hot earth. The result is a celluloid folk-ballad—part hymn to endurance, part irreverent caricature—where every gag carries splinters of truth and every sorrow is salted with absurdity.