o 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 landscape as character though, the shocking final scene in Jedda was not filmed in the remote northern regions of Australia where the story is set but the Blue Mountains, 100 kilometres west of Sydney. In yet another setback, film cans containing footage of the original final scene were destroyed when the plane conveying them to London for processing burst into flames. The Chauvels, unable to afford a return to a remote location, improvised. In a pre-digital era, they spray-painted a section of the Blue Mountain’s cliff-face a reddish hue. And re-wrote the film’s ending.
The production of Kangaroo provides insights into the clash of two colour systems and world views. For decades, Technicolor, at the forefront of technological innovation globally, imposed a pre-determined colour system on filmmakers. While Technicolor was underpinned by a philosophy about standardised colours,however, the chromatic practices of the indigenous people in South Australia who appeared in Kangaroo were connected to a sense of living colour. For the inhabitants of the western desert, colours demonstrate the mutability of all things. Life and relationships in transition. Bright colours – from red ochre to highly saturated acrylic paints – are highly valued. Red objects are not only vivid but fade quickly. The latter, according to anthropologist Diane Young, is part of their appeal. 
Yet there is another kind of indigenous colour in Australia. The inventors, artists and filmmakers – from Arthur Higgins, George Malcolm and Eric Porter to Charles and Elsa Chauvel and Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career) – who sought their own relationship with the distinctive tones and chiaroscuro of the Australian landscape. Cinematic storytellers who looked out across the terracotta rooves of Australian cities to expanses of red-brown earth, stands of gums and scrub, and did not see an absence. For them, England’s green and pleasant land was not home. Instead, they struggled to learn how to use the available materials, or invent new ones, to depict the col