AustLit

'We make Westerns for the same reason the Inuit make igloos: because the landscape disposes us to. The immense sky, the rust-coloured earth, the vast, barren spaces of our interior ... how could Australian filmmakers not feel compelled to use these! Hollywood claims the genre as its own, as distinctly American as jazz and school shootings, bat history argues otherwise: the first Australian feature film - the earliest feature-length narrative film in the world, in fact - was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang, made in 1506. (And two years before that came a sort, Bushranging in North Queensland, made by the Salvation Army's Melbourne-based Limelight Department. Which, improbably enough, was one of the first dedicated film studios on the planet.)' (Introduction)