 South Australia and be a wonderful advertisement for the state overseas”.  Playford expressed his disappointment with Bitter Springs which was filmed in black-and-white. Given the considerable assistance provided by his government, Bitter Springs had done little to advertise the state. “It would have been a great thing for South Australia had the scenery of the Warren Gorges been filmed in colour”, the Premier said.  So strongly did he hold this view that Playford had hired a cinematographer to shoot colour footage of the key locations as part of a campaign to entice Bitter Springs to South Australia. He expressed confidence that Kangaroo would be the first of many more ventures with Twentieth Century Fox.
In December 1950, the American and Australian cast and crew for Kangaroo made an epic journey across the interior. From Sydney, where they had completed a studio shoot, to Port Augusta, a mining town in South Australia. A film colony was soon established on the edge of town – one of the most desolate locations imaginable. Premier Thomas Playford flew in, raised the flag and named the new Hollywood Down Under. It was called Zanuckville. Zanuckville, South Australia. It was hoped that the first ‘natural colour’ feature to be shot in this country would not only attract tourists, but also migrants in great numbers. An arduous shoot soon began. In a newsreel produced by the Department of Information, the breathless narrator announced that ‘real wild aboriginal tribesmen’ would feature in the film. A corroboree would be one of the film’s highlights, “the multi-hued markings showing up well in Technicolor”. It was hoped that Kangaroo would put “Australia’s colours on the world screen”. 
If there is one colour associated with the Kangaroo exterior locations in South Australia it is red. Red earth. Red dust. Red haze. The country near Port Augusta and the Lower Flinders Ranges was famed for its wind storms or whirli-whirlis. Early colonists in the region reported “we could see nothing before us but a great wall of dust which seemed to reach from earth to heaven”. Some other accounts: “The gloom was eerie. People walked about in a red twilight”. “On all sides, the view was obscured by a swirling red haze. The town was in semi-darkness”.  “A red glow from the flying dust was observed”. But in the prints of Kangaroo that I have seen – except for the opening titles, the reds are strangely muted.
Kangaroo’s opening sequence displays vivid red titles over footage of the Aboriginal cast performing a corroboree. The Aboriginal performers white-clay body markings and red bandanas stand out against the softened backgrounds. Kangaroos are seen hopping through the scrub. Maureen O’Hara, as Dell, rides back to the homestead where she rather improbably greets pet native animals. The filmmakers had no choice but to take Daryl Zanuck’s instructions to heart. The studio head’s cables to the creative team, including director Lewis Milestone – exiled to Australia because of being grey-listed in Hollywood as a suspected Communist sympathiser – were clear. He wanted local colour. Buckets of it. Zanuck communicated his notes on rushes to Milestone in cables from the film’s producer like this one. “You should milk balance of scenes in bush for all the individual business and colour you can. Stop. Suggest again a koala bear for a pet around station and inject Australian animals like kookaburra bird dingoes platypuses and like wherever you can. Stop. This is very important as actual countryside seems to resemble California”.  Zanuck was consistently on-message. Another cable read: “We must not overlook a bet of getting into it occasionally an ostrich comma bear or what have you as well as interesting natives and anything else that will exploit Australian back country”. “Nothing fancy or arty”. An aim perhaps in which he was only too successful.
The most striking scenes in Kangaroo are undoubtedly those that feature Aboriginal performers re-enacting a corroboree. So much so that they are almost like scenes from another film spliced into Fox’s lazily sc