Posted by scarlsson at 10:00, September 14 2012.
Excerpt from biography:
“The Jedda story was born around a campfire, by a waterhole called Kundulla. We had bivouacked near the Mainoru River on the southern edge of Arnhem Land, where the receding flood rains of the ‘wet’ leave numerous waterholes – lovely, secuded places adorned by red waterlilies and noisy with bird life. Around our campfire at night, by the light of kerosene lanterns, Charles and Elsa began to meld some of the stories they had gathered into the skeleton of a script. It was 1950, and we had spent the dry season trekking through Western Queensland, the Northern Territory and the eastern part of the Kimberley, on an adventurous five-month search for key locations, testing colour film and listening to peoples’ stories. There were plenty of good Territorian yarns, but every now and then a ‘real’ story, telling of the drama and stark reality of lives in isolated, lonely places.”