Filmakers [sic] welcome. Winton is a film friendly town. (Close 2015)

Film Acres

The western Queensland town of Winton recently has acquired a résumé as a centre for film production. A website details the several productions made or partly made since 2004, and proclaims the ‘film friendliness’ of Winton and its district. Its film-historical past is acknowledged in a reference to the production of Bushranging in North Queensland in 1904 (see Introduction). The annual ‘Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival’, held in the town's historic outdoor cinema, celebrates the growing attention of the film industry to the region. The ‘vision splendid’ alludes to Banjo Patterson's poem, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, about a shearer in the outback. It bespeaks the attractions of heritage culture and landscape spectacle and the role of the region in settler history, in grazing and agriculture. Like all small towns in remote regions, Winton's economy is prone to fluctuations due to the effects of droughts or floods, and other fortunes. For some years, Winton, along with a number of similar towns in western Queensland, has attracted tourism to its extraordinary archive of dinosaur fossil finds in the region. Its reception of the film industry represents another stage in diversification of its economy.

The production that stimulated this rebirth of Winton as a film town in 2004 was The Proposition. It is listed on the website in the gallery of the mounting number of domestic and international productions since, and it is one of the focal films of this chapter, along with the more recent production of Mystery Road, which will be followed up by Goldstone (Sen 2016). These films exploit the stark landscapes that surround Winton, rather than the town itself, for the resemblance to the landscapes of the classic American Western. Among other (non-Western) titles is the outback thriller Gone (Ledwidge 2006), and a heritage title, Banjo and Matilda (O'Neill, forthcoming), is currently in production about the writing of the folk song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, which is believed to have been first performed in Winton in the 1890s.