llaborator Elsa Chauvel, announced they were moving their cameras and writing pads to the outback. America had more than its fair share of stars. But for Australians, the landscape deserved star billing. Inspired by a year-long trek across the country supported by the Federal Government, the duo would make Australia’s first all-colour, all-Australian feature in the country between Alice Springs and Darwin.  The project was tagged The Northern Territory Story and the Chauvels initially looked to the U.S. for financial backing and colour processing. In something of a David and Goliath story, the Chauvels’ Northern Territory Story and Fox’s Australia Story (another working title for Kangaroo) slugged it out for the title of ‘Australia’s first natural colour feature’. The odds though, were stacked against the Chauvels in comparison to their Hollywood studio rivals.
Leveraging profits from exhibiting pictures in Australia during the war, Twentieth Century Fox ultimately secured generous support from both the Australian Commonwealth and South Australia Governments and relocated its production to Port Augusta and the Lower Flinders Ranges. The cash and concessions helped the Hollywood studio beat its local rivals to the finishing line for the first colour feature film made in Australia. (The project was also known as The Australian Story, The Sundowners, The Bushranger and The Land Down Under before Fox settled on Kangaroo.) A stagecoach western, penned in Hollywood and transposed to Australia, Kangaroo was set around 1900, during one of the worst droughts the country had experienced since European settlement. In the script, the rain-making ceremony staged by Aboriginal performers would break the drought. But in the storyline of post-war Australia, Kangaroo would break the nation’s feature filmmaking drought.
Announcing the deal in Parliament, South Australian Premier Tom Playford said that the first full-scale Technicolor film ever produced in the country would “convey to the world an idea of the scenery to be found in 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