cape 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 colours they saw and experienced.
In the end, the story behind the run on green paint in Adelaide during the Kangaroo shoot was not quite as I first heard it. According to the Art Department, “the peaks of the Flinders Ranges in the distance, glowing a hazy purple, with reddish gold tinges under the sun, make the ideal backdrop”. But the foreground country, along the banks of the Cataninga Creek, where the homestead set was located, “was not lush, scenic and splendid. It was flat, sandy saltbush, with some scrubby gums along the foothills”. The Technicolor camera needed more to work with and so the scenic artists directed their spray-painting efforts to the grey-green foliage of Australia’s gum trees.  The muted greens of Australia’s eucalypts were found wanting. Spray-painted a brighter green considered a better match for Technicolor.
Thanks to Simon Drake from the NFSA for his assistance, film historian Graham Shirley whose early research on Solarchrome and Mal-comm Colour provided one starting point for my own investigation. I would also like to thank Dominic Case and Ric Chauvel who discussed some aspects of this article with me and the organisers of the 2nd Colour and Film Conference, London who invited me to present an earlier version of this research as a keynote in 2017 which provided valuable feedback from conference participants. This research began as a result of an Artists and Scholar’s Fellowship awarded by the NFSA.
 Mel Gussow, Daryl F. Zanuck: Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking (London: W.H. Allen, 1971) 80
 Kangaroo, directed by Lewis Milestone (1952; Los Angeles: Umbrella Entertainment, 2014) DVD.
 The Queen in Australia, directed by Frank Bagnall (1954, Australia: NFSA, 2013) DVD
 Jedda, directed by Charles Chauvel (1955, Australia: Umbrella Entertainment, 2015) DVD
 Tom Gunning, “Applying Colour” in Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema ed. Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathan Rosen (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) p. 15
 Gunning, Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema, p. 16
 See 