ripted 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 obtain this high-quality ochre. The traditional custodians of the mine supervised access to the closely-guarded site. Men designated to collect the pigment were required to leave their companions at a nominated place and travel the last ten miles without food, water or weapons. They dug out the ochre, dried and formed it into large cakes for the journey home. So significant was red ochre to indigenous Australians that the colour red has been described as the basis of their spiritual beliefs. In the words of a local station owner who advocated for their right to continue to control the mine, red was “as important to Aboriginal Australians as the Bible is to Christians”. 
Kangaroo’s infamous water trough scene, described by critic Deb Verhoeven as the most astonishingly racist in the history of Australian cinema, appears around two thirds of the way through Kangaroo.  At the height of the drought, two groups converge on the station’s water trough. Hordes of cattle appear around a bend in the road. From the other direction, a group of Aboriginal people emerge. An elder steps forward and asks permission to use the trough. They will pray for rain in return for a drink. In this confrontation, and indeed throughout Kangaroo, the white and black actors are mostly shown in separate shots. As Patrick Keating observes in his history of Hollywood lighting, Technicolor boasted of the their three-strip colour stock’s ability to capture a wide range of skin tones. “Filmmakers relied on exotic subject matter to put the technology’s skills on display, turning racial diversity into pictorial spectacle”. 
The water-trough scene in Kangaroo is a long way from any historical reality. When white settlers in this area cleared the land for grazing sheep, indigenous people were dispossessed of the country to which they had been connected for more than forty thousand years. Soaks were valuable sources of water and sites of major ceremonies. In response to the elder’s request, Dell (Maureen O’Hara) intervenes. (Incidentally, O’Hara was cast, in