by
Megan Poore, Anthropologist, at MCH, May 24 2002
Ceduna People’s understandings of landscape were emphasised in their reactions to the release of the Australian Film Industry’s Best Film for 1997, Kiss or Kill, a road movie about two young people travelling (ostensibly) across the Nullarbor to escape the police. Much of Kiss or Kill was filmed in and around Ceduna, with other parts of Eyre Peninsula also making appearances. Ceduna residents were employed in bit-parts for the picture, and many local buildings were used for sets. The anticipation of the film’s release in the town was tremendous, and when it was finally available on video (there being no cinema in Ceduna), the local video shop had trouble keeping up with demand. Most Ceduna People, though, were exceedingly disappointed, and it was not because the jumpy style of editing was seen as too arty. Rather, Ceduna People could not fathom how the protagonists were meant to be driving from east to west, stopping off at various roadhouses and motels along the way, when in actual fact - and for the purposes of making the picture - they simply moved between the BP service station on the Eyre Highway just before the fruit-fly roadblock, the Pine Grove restaurant and motel on McKenzie Street and the Ceduna Community Hotel on O’Loughlin Terrace. Further, parts of what was meant to be the Nullarbor Plain were clearly stretches of road between Wudinna and Minnipa - there were trees on the treeless plain, for goodness’ sake! Ceduna People are so tied up with their landscape and know it so well that they could not understand why the film’s makers would want to present it all the wrong way around. If you needed to show stopping-off points on a journey which was meant to be heading towards Perth, why not film at the pub at Penong and then at the roadhouses at Nundroo, Yalata and Nullarbor? The sequence would be right, then. To do it all in the one place simply did not make sense.
Filming on the Eyre Peninsula as opposed to not heading out west to the Nullarbor proper gained more demerit points from Ceduna People, as the splendour of the Far West Coast was denied true expression. The film’s denouement, which saw the protagonists seemingly travel five hundred kilometres or so from the Ceduna pub to the outskirts of Port Augusta in a matter of minutes, was further rendered incomprehensible due to the fact that our heroes had (in real life) headed east when, according to the film’s script, they were supposed to be heading west. Many communities or neighbourhoods probably experience a similar sense of indignation at the overturning of the familiar, but for Ceduna People the eagerness with which the film’s release was awaited somehow seemed to augment the community’s outrage. In addition to this, Ceduna People’s far-reaching knowledge of this immense region, their intense familiarity with its landmarks and their extreme mobility within it, coupled with the film’s patent utilisation of the setting as both character and metaphor, meant that the landscape had somehow been devalued, abused, exploited. Because Ceduna People see themselves as emotionally tied to their environment, they extrapolated their reading of the picture to conclude that this was a further manipulation - even misrepresentation - of the community as a whole. It was hard for them not to take it personally.
Ceduna People see the landscape as beautiful - harsh, but beautiful. They love it for its hidden splendour and they respect it for its ruthlessness: the ocean is full of sharks, the shallows might have deceptively strong undercurrents which will tow you away if you don’t know where to swim, there are nasty, bitey creatures on land and in sea - crabs, sand flies, snakes, mosquitos - and if none of these things gets you, then the sun and heat very likely will. This understanding of potential menace inspires awe and respect in Ceduna People. A healthy regard for the land- and sea-scapes that present many hazards to human endurance might just stop you from succumbing to them in a physical sense … it might just help you to survive. The one sure thing about the landscape is that it is always there, always ready to be related to at some level or another. The landscape represents both a certain infinity and the transience of life where the only sure thing is not necessarily survival but the struggle to survive:
“I’d go away from Moomba, or around Coober Pedy, and there was this little blue flower that everything around it, and it’s dead flat up there, everything around it’s dead. Can’t see a kangaroo, can’t see an emu, it was that bloody hot you couldn’t see ants, but there was this little blue flower. I’d never come across it before. I used to squat down beside it. And every time I come across one, I used to sit down beside it and have a smoke. Could never fathom that out. How that thing lived when everything else was dead”.
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