Unspecified
When the Australia crew arrived a spotlight hit on an unassuming town, writes Megan Anderson.
There's no cinema in Kununurra, a pinprick on the map in Western Australia's remote north-west. Celluloid interludes in the sunbaked town are strictly the domain of the drive-in theatre. The only red carpet is the region's famous fine pindan dust.
But the celebrity count was high during the filming of Baz Luhrmann's Australia for months last year. Locals grew accustomed to seeing Hugh Jackman and wife Deborra-lee Furness at the supermarket, and Keith Urban at the gym. Urban and wife Nicole Kidman shed their bodyguards to wander the streets, lining up for coffee at the town's only brekky joint - the Boab Bookstore and Cafe - like everyone else.
While the action took place largely across Western Australia's vast east Kimberley region - all 121,189 square kilometres of it - sleeping and down time was spent in Kununurra, population 7775, the regional hub gazetted just 60-odd years ago in the wake of the Ord River irrigation scheme.
So while the melons and mangoes ripened for another year, several of Kununurra's well- heeled residents vacated their riverfront properties to supply homes away from home for Australia's A-list cast and crew. The main drag, Konkerberry Street, got a new Rodeo Drive ring to it, as its unassuming shopfronts became the favoured haunts for those of the Kidman-Urban-Jackman ilk seeking mementoes of the place.
It might look like a small aircraft hangar from the footpath, for example, but Kimberley Fine Diamonds stocks some of the world's rarest and most dizzyingly expensive diamonds from the nearby Argyle Diamond mine, including the coveted pink diamond.
Proprietor Frauke Bolten-Boshammer, whose own decolletage and fingers have a distinctly rosy tint, is too discreet to say what her famous clients bought (rumour has it that Kidman had a diamond ring designed, but failed to collect it - stay tuned, eBay), but visits were long and numerous.
Ms Bolten-Boshammer vacated her own Riverfarm Road house for director Baz Luhrmann, who adopted it as his creative refuge. While the saltwater crocodiles lurked a decorous distance from the back yard, he viewed the daily rushes each night. Come shoot's end, Ms Bolten-Boshammer gave her famous tenant a diamond-encrusted 18-carat gold pendant fashioned into the shape of a boab tree. Testament to the optimism radiating from the locals, she intended it as a good luck charm for the Oscars.
Luhrmann's parting gift to the town was a real boab tree, planted in the Celebrity Tree Park, where about 150 notables are immortalised in bark and plaque on the banks of Lake Kununurra. He told townsfolk that boabs - gnarly, bulbous-trunked trees which can live for more than a thousand years - have a spirituality that spoke to him. The trees became central to the film's visual idiom.
Luhrmann's intention to make Australia a calling card of sorts - a filmic acknowledgement of an extraordinary locale - will doubtless inspire a flurry of pilgrimages to Kununurra and the wider region whose assets have hitherto lurked under a very remote bushel.
Along the sleepy 60 kilometre stretch of the impressive Ord River, for instance, finding a deserted fishing spot with an embarrassment of silver cobbler and exotic bird life is a cinch. The man-made Lake Argyle is so vast - more than 100 square kilometres - it contains its own archipelago and can generate waves of up to two metres. It's almost unimaginable that the stripy, dome-shaped Bungle Bungle range, now considered among the world's most significant geographical landforms, was barely known to white inhabitants until the 1980s.
Now, scenic flights there pass nonchalantly over the Jurassic terrain speckled with diamonds. And where else in the world can you waterski alongside timid freshwater crocodiles?
Kununurra artist and gallery owner Nadeen Lovell knows the beauty well. And the extent to which the film and the town at its nerve centre will remain inextricably linked.
A regular with her easel at House Roof Hill, a much-painted scene close to where the film's fictional homestead was built at Carlton Hill Station, she was privy to a conversation with set designers about the vegetable patch they were establishing there to give the homestead authenticity.
Lamenting their failure to make the vegetables grow fast enough, Lovell volunteered produce from her own garden to help things along.
The next day at 5am, crew arrived at her house with a truck and a shovel. They left with a load of fully grown greens destined for a film set more than 100 kilometres away.
Now, like many residents of the Kimberley, Lovell is awaiting the film with bated breath. Not just to see local landmarks writ large on the big screen, or to ogle Kidman and Jackman inhabiting the distinctive Kimberley landscape; she can't wait to see the end of it.
The closing credits in particular.
Will "Lettuce by Nadeen" be the town's final crowning glory?
See http://www.westernaustralia.com.
The writer was a guest of Tourism WA.
ON THE SET
Other places of note in the Kimberley for Australia tragics.
* Gibb River Road. Nicole Kidman's character travelled in a Chevy along this legendary route to her inherited homestead at the fictional Faraway Downs. Once a cattle droving track, the 665 kilometre unsealed road traverses vast pastoral country, hidden gorges and boab-riddled landscape from Derby to Wyndham. See http://www.kimberleyaustralia.com/gibb-river-road.html.
* El Questro Station Famous for its unfair share of gorges, waterfalls, thermal springs and luxury accommodation, this huge cattle station was the scene of the film's dramatic cattle-mustering scenes. Kidman tried repeatedly to book a weekend at the exclusive homestead (think gourmet cliffside dining and outdoor baths overlooking the Chamberlain River) but was knocked back because of a dearth of vacancies. See http://www.elquestro.com.au.
* Cockburn Range Director Baz Luhrmann had his epiphany watching the sun set over this formidable rocky fortress - 1.9 billion years old, 660 metres high and a 200 kilometre round trip. When he saw it from a lookout on Home Valley Station he knew he had found the epic film's backdrop.
* Home Valley Station The film's art department descended on what is now colloquially known as Luhrmann's Lookout and toiled over the authenticity of tea canisters, vintage Prada luggage and Kidman's 1930s Chevy. Jackman's Jump-up and Kidman's Krossing are other locally appropriated sights at Home Valley. See http://www.homevalley.com.au.
* Diggers Rest Four-wheel drivers can visit the makeshift cricket pitch on the mudflats at this remote, horsy outpost, where crew members blew off steam between takes. See www.kimberleypursuits.com.au/index.html.
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