By Iain Blair

Flew to Perth across the red, sun-baked interior of Oz —five and ½ hours, like going from NY to L.A., but the climate in Perth is similar to Sydney’s, tho’ a bit hotter and a lot drier, so very like being back in LA, even down to the palms and jacarandas everywhere. The main difference? Much different wildlife and tons of squawking parrots everywhere.

The big news here is the release of Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s epic that many local movie buffs are calling Oz’s Gone With the Wind, or, Oz’s Lawrence of Arabia, or, Oz’s Out of Africa. You get the idea. But with a huge budget, the Fox release is also coming under fire from locals here. Why? Because, the film was largely shot on location in the remote North-West and the Kimberley and used spectacular scenery including the Bungle Bungles and the Cockburn Ranges.

Though local film commissions and politicians reportedly plowed some $500,000 into the film through WA’s ScreenWest funding body to secure production in the area, it turns out that the area never even received a credit. A local filmmaker here also told me that some people are “very upset” because the film has digitally altered and enhanced a lot of the WA locations, “unnecessarily.”

But not all involved are unhappy. ScreenWest chief exec Ian Booth was quoted in a local paper as saying, “It’s estimated that during production more than $4 million was spent in WA” – a huge boost for the sparsely populated area which now wants to increase production with help from more government grants.

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