Essentially large farming properties associated with livestock raising, pastoral stations are very common in Australia’s colonial history as sites of early settler living, Indigenous dispossession, and agricultural management. In addition, the station has featured heavily as a motif in Australia’s screen narratives, being a central setting in films such as The Overlanders (1946), My Brilliant Career (1979), Spirits of the Air Gremlins of the Clouds (1989), Australia (2008), Sweet Country (2017), and the recent television series Territory (2024), among many others.
A commonly used film set on Belmont Station in far west NSW – photo by Melanie Ashe.
Yet, the pastoral station has also been an under studied filming location for Australia’s history of film and television production. Owing to their often remote and vast, arid setting, the sprawling spaces of various stations around the continent have been utilised as common “outback” filming locations. Based on a series of field visits and interviews around Broken Hill NSW, this case study elucidates the role that pastoral stations have played in critical infrastructures of regional screen production in Australia.
Belmont Station in far west NSW is one highly prominent example of a pastoral station that has been utilised significantly since the 1980s, in feature productions such as Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds to more recent mega blockbusters such as 2024 ‘s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, to a broad host of television advertisements and other visual material. With its vibrant red dirt and wide open spaces, the station presents a typical if not cliched “outback” backdrop.
The environmental affordances of this station ensured a highly film-friendly location space for incoming film crews. Such affordances include its convenient location close to the town of Broken Hill, its status as a private leased property outside of local government control (meaning that lease holders had lenient land and environment regulations), and an in-house labour force of farm workers ready to work the land.
As the area was also cleared and degraded by settler extraction and agricultural industry, the common usage of pastoral land for filming sites reveals how land degradation caused by settler-colonial industries has shaped the geophysical environment, and how this has in turn shaped the public imaginary of the “outback”.
For some examples of Belmont Station in both film and advertisements, see below.
“I can see the pub from here!” Castlemaine XXXX Lager Advertisement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJwJc6Yppo
Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989)
Publications
Ashe, Melanie. (2025). The pastoral station: an overlooked ‘outback’ location space in Australia’s regional screen history. Continuum, 39(1), 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2024.240592
Key Quotes
“Environmental histories and the spatio-technical relations embedded in the space of the pastoral station have assisted in developing the site as a critical filmmaking infrastructure for the continent’s regional screen industry”
On Belmont station: “The owner and manager of Belmont during the 1980s, Phil Blore, offers one example. He started soliciting screen productions as an alternative stream of revenue after years of drought had stalled the agricultural business of the farm, making raising livestock difficult. After the ‘red hill’ pub structure was placed on Belmont by a local production manager for the Castlemaine XXXX commercials, Phil Blore purchased the structure so that he could maximize profits from incoming productions . The structure still remains on the property to this day and continues to be managed by the current owners as a location space”.
“These histories are not only evidence of the film-friendly strategies of pastoral station owners but also demonstrate how cycles of environmental variability such as drought have provided cause for the agricultural sector to seek screen production as an alternative revenue. In this way, the geophysical environment actively impacts on Australia’s screen production histories.”