 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 scripted kangaroo-western. Australian ethnologist Charles Mountford and the production’s research advisor Colin Simpson worked with the indigenous performers to adapt ceremonies and ‘magic songs’ for the screen. Mountford’s script notes for Lewis Milestone describe a ceremony in which the rainmaker would drag a sacred rain-stone across a blood-soaked boulder as three men chanted. Simpson added in his notes that ceremonies not belonging to this specific country had been added for dramatic effect and the required ‘local colour’. As he wrote in Adam in Ochre, Simpson found himself captivated by Aboriginal art when he stepped inside a cave full of paintings on a visit to Inyulak in Arnhem land. “Red ochre, yellow ochre, pipeclay white, powdered charcoal for black, and sometimes another red that was kangaroo blood…Vivid ones painted over and across the fading colours of earlier pictures, yet even those were still glowing across the rock…”. These colours were as old as time. Whilst the Ooldea performers actively participated in traditional ceremonies, on a day-to-day basis they wore western-style clothing. The red garments were the Art Department’s response to the demands of the Hayes Code Assessors. Nudity on screen was not permissible. And red, of course, registered well on Technicolor. The indigenous performers’ on-screen costumes were a mix of ceremonial dress and 1950s Hollywood-art-department wardrobe.
Ironically, not far from the Kangaroo locations are the Bookarto ochre mines, a source of high-quality red pigment used by Aboriginal people since ancient times for artistic, decorative and ceremonial purposes. Red ochre symbolizes the blood of ancestors spilt on the earth, casting a red pigment over the surrounding countryside. In some stories, the local ochre – deep red and with a distinctive sheen – is said to be the spilt blood of a sacred emu chased over country. In others, the emus are kangaroos. Parties of Aboriginal men made pilgrimages of up to a thousand miles, over trails established for millenia, to obtai