Indigenous colour: the quest to make Australia's first natural colour feature film

This essay explores the production of Twentieth Century Fox’s Kangaroo (1952) in the context of a longer-term quest to make Australia’s first ‘natural colour’ feature film. Around the globe, the post-World War 11 period was a time of experimentation and flux in colour film technologies with a number of new stocks developed and tested. Whilst claims to ‘firsts’ were – are – often used to support nationalistic aspirations, the complexity of colour film systems meant that breakthroughs were nearly always the result of exchange across international borders. Although feature films shot locally in ‘natural colour’ arrived relatively late in Australia, local industry personnel, often working with minimal resources and financial backing, actively sought to develop an Australian colour system from the ‘silent film’ era onwards. Australian filmmakers and commentators frequently expressed the desire to project the authentic colours of the country on screen. But what did they mean by authentic? How were the post-war cinematic palettes projected onto Australia’s unique landscapes and cultures? How can we understand the hues of these mid-century film stocks and systems in the context of the longer arc of the production and use of indigenous colours and pigments in Australia?