AustLit

'Tasmania's intermittent relationship with the cinema dates back before the first feature film made on its rugged West Coast in 1925, Louise Lovely and Wilton Welch's now lost Jewelled Nights. In many ways what we might call "Tasmanian cinema" reflects the sometimes harsh, depopulated landscape of the island itself. Since the 1920s only a small number of feature films - and a larger number of short documentaries largely made by various state and corporate bodies - have been made or shot in Tasmania, with only the children's film They Found a Cave (Andrew Steane, 1962) standing in for the vast period between Norman Dawn's For the Term of His Natural Life in 1927 and John Honey's remarkable Manganinnie in 1980. But Tasmania also has an interesting place in the global imagination of Hollywood during this period, including its status as the actual birthplace of Errol Flynn, the fabricated place of origin of Merle Oberon, and the largely fantastical landscape of the much-loved Warner Bros. cartoon character, The Tasmanian Devil. Warner Bros.' denial of Flynn's origins, MGM's fudging of Oberon's Anglo-Indian ancestry, and the geographic indistinctness and confusion of the original Tasmanian Devil cartoons, highlight a freer approach to what might be termed the "imagination of Tasmania". (Author's introduction)