-production. 
The Queen in Australia, released in cinemas in Australia, in other British Commonwealth and the United States, was considered by many as a promotional reel for Australia. Local newspapers quoted reviews. The documentary would be “a magnificent overseas advertisement for Australia”. The audience would see “fine panoramic views of the Australian countryside and ‘superb colour’”.  Royal tours with their pageantry have been a popular subject for film, and especially colour film, since the earliest days of cinema. The association with recording royalty, for example, was critical to the success of Kinemacolor in Britain in the early twentieth century. 
Watching The Queen in Australia now is to glimpse another era. One million Australians lined the streets to greet the Royal visitors, cheer and wave flags. (There has always been a lot of flag-waving in the history of colour film. So much so that I think its evolution could be told through that subject alone.) As critic Paul Byrnes observed, The Queen in Australia was intended to demonstrate that Australia would stay British. Despite the influx of tens of thousands of migrants from Europe after the War, Australians were British citizens first and foremost. Always had been. Always would be. The New York Times, whilst describing the documentary as rather uninspired, complimented its colour palette. “The glimpses of cities, villages and the outback made fitting subjects for the Italian Ferrania Colour process in which The Queen in Australia was filmed. Its panchromatic hues vary in shading from pastel to vivid and compare favourably with better known processes”.  British Pathe’s Welcome the Queen documenting the same Royal Tour via Eastman Color, makes a useful comparison. It registers a far more restricted palette, skewed towards blue.
In late 1952, the Film Division of the Department of Interior carried out tests with Gevacolor in response to growing interest in colour film. The Department’s cameramen were reported to be “taking advantage of spring weather to get colour shots of wildflowers, wattle and fruit blossom”.  The following year, the short documentary Switch on Bigga was produced in Gevacolor. It was widely considered that most film production would shift to colour in the next five years. Jedda would be Australia’s first feature-length production using the Belgium-devised system.
When Jedda finally did make it into production, it, too, faced daunting financial and logistical challenges. As the unit moved from one remote location to another, exposed cans of film were packed in ice and stored in caves to prevent damage from extremes of heat. Crew members frequently drove hours each night to store the film in the cool room of a local butcher’s shop. Footage was sent irregularly to London for processing and there were long delays in receiving rushes reports. Chauvel was shooting in the dark. Six weeks into the shoot it was discovered that an inexperienced camera assistant had loaded film into the camera emulsion side down. All the rushes were lost. 
Watching the restored version of Jedda, shot and processed using the Gevacolour system, my eye is initially drawn to the reds. (This film, like many others, has been through successive restorations as technologies and viewing platforms have changed.) Its beautifully designed red opening titles. Key items of clothing; Marbuck’s red loincloth (necessitated by the cameras and notions of public decency) and the young Jedda’s red-checked dress and hair ribbon. And, most of all, the distinctive earth and rock formations of central and northern Australia. But, just as red is the after-image of green, the reverse is also true. As the film’s story unfolds, a remarkable range of greens also register on the Gevacolour stock. From the grey-greens of eucalypts to the bright greens of tree-ferns and water-lily pads. Chauvel mapped the Australian landscape with near military precision and, as he said, the landscape was a central character in Jedda. His stories are as much travelogues as dramas.
For all Chauvel’s attention to lands