The most expensive film in Australian history had its glitzy premiere in Sydney last night and while the locals are running out of superlatives for Australia, the rest of the world may not be similarly smitten.

The film – two years in the making, about $30 million (£20 million) over its $100 million budget and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman – has been awaited with anxiety bordering on neurosis in its home country.

Expectations for the definitive cinematic depiction of “the lucky country” are huge. It has been described as a balm for the injured national psyche and even as a potential saviour of Australia’s flagging film industry and tourist trade.

However, as thousands gathered outside the Sydney premiere, the sneak previews were underwhelming. The word on the critics’ grapevine is thatAustralia is a good film, but by no means a great one; an epic rather than a classic.

The film critic David Stratton said in The Australian: “It’s not the masterpiece that we were hoping for.” Others have gone farther, lambasting the film. At times it is said to descend into kitsch and is jammed with every Aussie cliché in the tourism brochure, from herds of kangaroos to Rolf Harris’s wobble board.

Good or bad, Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann, is destined to become a box-office smash Down Under. Fiercely loyal Aussies, who speak of “Baz” and “Nicole” as if they are members of their own family, are already besotted. “I just want it to be a success,” sighed Amber Ward, a 32-year-old hairdresser. “For Baz’s sake.”

At the very least, Geoff Brown, executive director of the Screen Producers’ Association of Australia, told The Times: “It is a calling card to the world for the Australian film industry.”

But is this 165-minute film, which opens in Britain on Boxing Day, really the triumph its producers claim, or merely an Antipodean mishmash of Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa?

No one denies the sweep of its plot or the soaring beauty of the landscape it depicts. Set in the Second World War, Australia tells the story of Lady Sarah Ashley, a passionless English aristocrat (Kidman), who inherits a vast cattle station in the Northern Territory. To prevent her land being taken over she enlists the help of an enigmatic stockman known only as “Drover” (Jackman) and together they drive her cattle hundreds of miles across the desert to Darwin, falling in love along the way.

Their romance is set against a dark story of the country’s stolen generations of Aboriginal children. The tragic attempts by an orphaned Aboriginal boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters, 13) to escape being put into a mission home give the film some of the power lacking in the trite romance between Lady Sarah and Drover.

But at times the film, made entirely by Australians and filmed on location in the Outback, does appear to be little more than a showcase for Australian stereotypes. Jackman is a decent bloke, standing up for sheilas and Aborigines. A purely gratuitous shower scene showing off his soaped-up torso will do much for his hunk status, just as Daniel Craig’s swimming trunks did for him in Casino Royale.

Luhrmann admitted yesterday that his desire to make a great movie had become inextricably linked with the idea of selling Australia as a tourist destination. “It didn’t begin like that,” he said. “But you can’t make a film using this country in the way we expected to at this scale without thinking the tourism board is going to come knocking.” Kidman added: “It is not the second coming. But it’s meant to be, ‘let’s have some fun’.”

All eyes will now be on box office returns, particularly in the crucial US market where, Mr Brown said, the film’s narcissistic obsession with the country of its makers could backfire.

Mr Stratton felt, however, that the film’s faults might even boost it in the American market. “I think probably it has the potential to be quite successful in America because it is, I think for Australians, a rather simplistic view of this whole period,” he said.

Trend setters

— A tourism boom after the release of The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King helped to boost New Zealand tourism earnings by £74 million in 2003

— In 2001 the number of girls at boarding schools increased and the number of boys fell by 1 per cent, the smallest decline in 20 years. This was attributed to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books

Source: Times archives

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