Roderick MacKay hopes his film, which premiered at Venice, can trigger new interest in modern Australia’s complex and brutal history
While researching the
Australian gold rush of the 1800s, director Roderick MacKay came across an image that immediately jumped out at him: men dressed in turbans and flanked by camels stood next to the bushmen of nascent modern-day Australia. “I stumbled upon images of these guys in traditional garb with the camel trains in the otherwise familiar Australian outback and was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’” says the director.
What he’d found was a part of Australia’s history that was largely unknown until recently: the story of the men drawn from all over the
British empire – known as “cameleers” – who helped build links between early Australian colonial settlements.