all population, distance from film processing laboratories in the United States, not to mention its particular climatic conditions, the challenges of shooting a feature in ‘natural colour’ were considerable.
Much of the interest in colour feature films in Australia focused on the possibilities of presenting the unique colours and light-plays of our landscapes and scenery to local and international audiences. Since the 1930’s, via correspondence courses offered by his Chauvel School of Scenario Writing, director Charles Chauvel urged writers to find stories by immersing themselves in the romance and adventure of the Australian bush. Working with the most basic of resources, two of Australia’s most acclaimed cinematographers from the silent film and early sound era invented colour processing systems designed to be reliable and inexpensive alternatives to Technicolor. The two new Australian systems emerged around the same time just as new ‘natural colour’ film systems were becoming available internationally. Kodachrome, in formats primarily suited to amateur use, was released in 1935 whilst in the following year Agfa introduced an Agfacolor negative-positive system for professional production.
Commonwealth Film Laboratories launched a 35mm colour process Mal-comm Colour, named after inventor and cameraman George Malcolm, in 1937.  A bi-pack operation, the processing of Mal-comm Colour involved floating the film in paraffin in one long trough. The film was dipped one side at a time, firstly into blue and then red. The process was reportedly able to “reproduce primary colours true to life”. Although it was intended that Mal-comm Colour would be made available to locally-produced feature films, its use appears to have been restricted to cinema advertisements. A short anti-Hitler animation produced in the early 1940s is the only remaining film produced in Mal-comm Colour identified to date.
Hot on the heels of Mal-Comm Colour, Arthur Higgins, one of three brothers prominent in Australia’s early film industry, announced his Solarchrome system. Higgins, who shot several dozen features and a number of newsreel items, documentaries and advertising shorts in the first four decades of the twentieth century, was one of Australia’s most experienced and highly regarded cinematographers. According to Sheila Higgins, her husband had been preoccupied with perfecting a colour film system for more than twenty years before the founding of Solarchrome.  In 1937, Higgins and business partners registered their Solarchrome Processing Company which would photograph and develop films in colour with a new bi-pack process. Their initial capital was a modest five thousand pounds. The Cinema News Company in Queensland soon purchased the rights to Solarchrome to produce a series of one-reel colour films highlighting the state’s scenery.
One of the surviving Solarchrome titles is the short documentary A Playground of the Pacific (1938). Shot by Arthur Higgins, it featured crowds of Sydney-siders swimming, relaxing in the sun and watching surf lifesaving competitions.  Promoted as an ‘all-Australian colour short’, the film was part of an intended series called Colorlogues of Australia. And where better to begin than Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach? Solarchrome soon found uses in animation as well as documentary. Willie the Wombat (1939), a promotional short directed by Eric Porter, was claimed as “the first Australian colour cartoon”. Porter aimed to devise cartoon characters based on koalas, kangaroos and wombats to rival Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. After a preview of Willie the Wombat, a reviewer described the Solarchrome colours as ‘remarkable’, adding that ‘while lacking the range of Technicolor, it suggested interesting possibilities for the production of full-length Australian films in colour.’  The documentary short, Sydney on Show (1940), photographed by Arthur Higgins, soon followed. It presented glimpses of Sydney during its annual Royal Easter Show.
In the wake of the Second World War, competition to control colour film production and processing int