The Overlanders

The Overlanders (1946)

A dramatic epic that echoes the heart beats of Australia's Greatness!

It's the start of WWII in Northern Australia. The Japanese are getting close. People are evacuating and burning everything in a "scorched earth" policy. Rather than kill all their cattle, a disparate group decides to drive them overland half way across the continent, from Wyndham in Western Australia through the Northern Territory outback of Australia to pastures north of Brisbane, Queensland.

Date of release
1946-09-27
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (23)
Runtime
1h 31m
Genres
Western, Adventure
Director
Harry Watt

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films

The Overlanders is a 1946 British-Australian Western film about drovers driving a large herd of cattle 1,600 miles (2,575 km) overland from Wyndham, Western Australia through the Northern Territory outback of Australia to pastures north of Brisbane, Queensland, during World War II.

Production

Five hundred cattle were purchased by Ealing for use in the film. They were marked with the "overland" brand and later sold off, for profit.

Shooting began in April 1945 at Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station, which stood in for the meat export centre at Wyndham, in Western Australia. The unit was then flown by the RAAF to Alice Springs, where they were based in an army camp.

A second unit headed by John Heyer spent several weeks filming movement of cattle from the air.

Three months later, the unit moved to the Roper River camp on the Elsey Station for another month, where the river crossing sequence was shot. This station was famous from the book We of the Never Never. In mid-September, the unit returned to Sydney after five months of shooting.

During the making of the film, Campbell met and married her future husband.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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