The dystopian Queensland of Radiance, discussed in the previous chapter, has not allayed or discouraged the persistence of the trope of Queensland as paradise in other fictions. The mythic island of the mother of the sisters, that vista that Nowra reveals as a ‘fabrication’, has resonances in the setting or sites of production of three fantasies of the holiday tropics in this chapter. Age of Consent, Nim's Island, a children's fantasy, and Uninhabited, a supernatural thriller, were all set and largely made on islands in North Queensland. The fictions extol the islands as remote, and sparsely settled or – eponymously – uninhabited. Island settings in Australian films potentially allegorise the nation through the figure of island geography, especially Uninhabited with its Indigenous ghost, Coral, and its titular resonance with terra nullius. This does not preclude resonances with the literary and cinematic archive of the Pacific region and the South Seas.

The island fantasy in these archives often stereotypes ‘either the doomed erotic figure of the dusky maiden […] or the prelapsarian paradisiacal island and often both’ (Pearson 2013, 154). The maiden becomes a racially crossed figure in mid-century Hollywood films, according to Patty O'Brien (2006; and see Introduction). These tropes figure variously in each of the films. However, this chapter extends earlier work with Chris Mann (Craven and Mann 2009), in which we compared Age of Consent and Nim's Island as films that used locations on the Hinchinbrook coast in Queensland to fictionalise settings in or towards Queensland, and which adapted the symbology of Eden, paradise and epic journey. Both films were made by visiting international interests and represent minor milestones in Australian cinema in periods of change. Age of Consent, made in 1969, has a reputation as a stimulant of the revival film-making of the following decade, while Nim's Island signifies Queensland's more autonomous engagements in the twenty-first century in international runaway production. The contexts of change were signified, we suggested, by the tropical locations and settings, to which we drew attention in difference from the more mythologised bush and desert landscapes of Australian mise-en-scène.