I saw John Hillcoat's Nick Cave-scripted The Proposition ( 2005) over the Xmas break. It was shot in the central-west Queensland town of Winton and is a graphic representation of the brutal 19th-century Australian outback of the 1880's. Its nihilistic and intensely brutal narrative mocks the conservative or pioneer version of Australian history. In the violent foundation of Australia as a nation men live and die by the gun, and justice comes at the end of a hangman's rope.

Though it references the western and Sergio Leone, The Proposition, as an Australian western, is a grim brutal treatment of the clash between the British Empire and Aboriginals and bushrangers. The landscape shapes the people who live here more than they can ever affect it. It takes western themes—outlaws, isolation, taming the landscape, civilization and progress and transposed them into a thoroughly researched, unique Australian vision.

I haven't seen the earlier Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead about a maximum security "containment facility" located in the middle of a desert, or To Have and To Hold, nor the recent post-apocalyptic The Road.

The visual representation of the sun-scorched landscape landscape by