Cunnamulla

The small outback town of Cunnamulla is situated in rural Queensland, 800 kilometres west of Brisbane. As one of the characters in this documentary says, “Cunnamulla is a town at the end of the railroad”, a once prosperous sheep farming territory that now has high levels of unemployment and petty crime. O’Rourke allows the people of the town to speak for themselves. The picture they paint is bleak; a town divided along racial and age lines, where white Australians and First nations people are mutually suspicious of each other, where parents and grandparents can no longer understand the choices their children are making when it comes to sex, drugs and work. Filmed over the approaching Christmas period, “Cunnamulla” has its fair share of eccentric and stoic human beings, but the overriding impression is that the rapid pace of globalisation is exacerbating conflict and leading to the death of the very town itself. Whether it is in the doleful expression of a young man about to enter prison, or in the exasperated eyes of a father talking about his heavy metal obsessed son, O’Rourke’s film creates a vivid, powerful and disturbing portrait of outback Australia.