It is said that during the 1951 shoot for Twentieth Century Fox’s Kangaroo, the first Technicolor feature shot in Australia, Adelaide ran out of green paint. The reasons are not entirely clear. Something to do with how the colours of the Australian landscapes registered on the Technicolor of that era? Coincidentally, green was Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck’s favourite colour. He dictated his daily barrage of memos from an office with green walls. He drove a Cadillac painted Zanuck Green, a hue especially mixed by the Fox Art Department. Yes, that’s right, Zanuck Green. This story captured my imagination. The wealth and excess it suggested. The insistence on a uniformity of vision. After all, it was Daryl Zanuck who ultimately called the shots during the making of Kangaroo. I grew up in South Australia and began my career as a writer and director there. Plus, I have a long-standing interest in cinema and its shifting colour palettes. I began chasing the making-of-Kangaroo story through archives in Australia and America, only to discover that it was as much a story about red as it was green. One the after-image of the other. That is, look at a projection of green long enough and an after-image of red will appear.
This essay explores the production of Twentieth Century Fox’s Kangaroo (1952)  in the context of a longer-term quest to make Australia’s first ‘natural colour’ feature film. Around the globe, the post-World War 11 period was a time of experimentation and flux in colour film technologies with a number of new stocks developed and tested. Whilst claims to ‘firsts’ were – are – often used to support nationalistic aspirations, the complexity of colour film systems meant that breakthroughs were nearly always the result of exchange across international borders. Although feature films shot locally in ‘natural colour’ arrived relatively late in Australia, local industry personnel, often working with minimal resources and financial backing, actively sought to develop an Australian colour system from the ‘silent film’ era onwards. Australian filmmakers and commentators frequently expressed the desire to project the authentic colours of the country on screen. But what did they mean by authentic? How were the post-war cinematic palettes projected onto Australia’s unique landscapes and cultures? How can we understand the hues of these mid-century film stocks and systems in the context of the longer arc of the production and use of indigenous colours and pigments in Australia?
Kangaroo (1952), The Queen in Australia (1954)  and Jedda (1955)  all made some claim to being Australia’s first feature film in natural colour. Those claims were suitably qualified, of course. Kangaroo was the first film shot in ‘natural colour’ in Australia. (Albeit with Americans as the lead actors and occupying all the key creative roles.) Processed in the United States, Kangaroo was edited and post-produced in Los Angeles under the personal supervision of Daryl Zanuck. The Queen in Australia, made with considerable input from British filmmakers, utilising Ferrania Color and post-produced in London, was Australia’s first ‘natural colour’ feature documentary.) And Jedda, shot on Gevacolor and processed in London, was the first ‘natural colour’ feature conceived of and produced by Australians who featured both behind and in front of the camera.
Film historian Tom Gunning has observed that, as an art form in which scientific and technological processes play a large role, “cinema has often been described in terms of ‘progress’ from the simple to the more complex.”  As if moving pictures, across the centuries, around the globe, all marched towards a single point in history. And that, in a series of technological breakthroughs, the medium gradually developed from silent black and white to sound and colour. Art forms and media, however, are constantly in transition. Waxing and waning across long arcs of time. Film and photography did not develop in a straight line but through a series of projects and experiments, often overlapping and circling back on each oth