From an original storyline by Ralph Smart, Bitter Springs is a pioneering drama that centres on the conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people over rights of access to water. In the early 1900s, the King family treks some 600 miles to take up the property they bought from the government. When they arrive, they clash with the local Aboriginal tribe. The waterhole on which the local people depend for survival is now part of the Kings' property. When one of the Kings is speared, the family decide to compromise rather than fight, and a deal is struck whereby both parties agree to establish a profitable sheep station around the waterhole.
The story is notably liberal in balancing the point-of-view of encroaching European settlers with Aboriginal claims for land rights, coincidentally contemporaneous with the emergence of the liberal, pro-Native American Hollywood Western with Broken Arrow (1950).
Bitter Springs : A Novel from the Film Script
Bitter Springs : The Story of the Film
London
:
Convoy Publications
,
1950
Z1182122
1950
single work
novel
A family of white farmers fight to take possession of land and water that is home to a well-established Aboriginal clan.
'This article discusses the term ‘sacred’ in relation to the work of nineteenth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim, for whom the word denoted the objects, practices and assumptions that sustained communal solidarity and fostered dynamic energies, whether or not they were conventionally described as ‘religious’. I then turn to the work of more recent scholars of ‘critical religion’ suggesting that the terms ‘religion’ and ‘the sacred’ derive from a predominantly western, patriarchal and colonial context, forming part of a complex network of interconnected categories that represent a distinctive and dominant discourse of power constructing a privileged identity through hostile Othering or exclusions. Arguably, in the Australian mainstream, a discourse of ‘religion’ imported largely by Christian settlers from the west over the last two hundred years has been employed to exclude Aboriginal ways of understanding the world, for example by promoting the category of ‘land’ as an exploitable, God-given human possession. Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, I understand that an encounter with the Other—whether the Aboriginal or the balanda—can be viewed differently: as a zone of properly disturbing but also creative possibility. It remains very important, however, to acknowledge the power imbalances that are still embedded within such encounters, and the consequent risks to indigenous Australians, of further dislocation and dispossession. This idea is explored through a consideration of the collaborative film-making of David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer and, in particular, of two films: Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie’s Country (2013).' (Publication abstract)
Sheep and the Australian Cinema
Carlton
:
Melbourne University Publishing
,
2006
Z1280812
2006
single work
criticism
'The book focuses on two key 'sheep films' The Squatters Daughter (1933) and Bitter Springs (1950). Both movies are concerned with the national project, in which sheep growing and nation building are seamlessly aligned.' Source: Back cover of Sheep and the Australian Cinema (2006).
'This essay considers the production history and reception of three of Ealing Studios' Australian films—The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, and Bitter Springs—to better understand the films' imperial and colonial underpinnings and to position these "Australian westerns" as examples of a settler colonial mode of cinema.'
Source: Abstract.
