ABOUT THE FILM

​A vivid and intriguing look at this genre, even if you usually only listen to country music under the threat of death
                                                           Shane Danielson, the Australian
 
The documentary is very powerful and moving, and there are particularly poignant moments that are virtually guaranteed to move the viewer to tears
                                                     Susan Jarvis, Capital Country News
 
Utterly compelling                                         Misha Ketchell, the Age
 
Riveting                                                            Holly Willis, LA Weekly
 
An agreeable somber-sweet account, like The Buena Vista Social Club, of Aboriginal country-and-western singers               Bob Ellis, Encore

Never gets polemic or hysterical… a mature and melodic examination of Australian racism and how music helped tear down the reign of injustice against a long-oppressed people                                                  Film Threat

​In the late 1990s I was simultaneously working on Buried Country and on Long Way to the Top, the ABC’s Oz-rockumentary series that would become a water-cooler hit when broadcast in 2000 and the year’s best-selling local DVD. Ever since the BBC produced Dancing in the Streets in 1996, the rockumentary had quickly became a TV standard, and it was partly because I had cast around my own proposal for a doco series on the history of Australian rock called Real Wild Child that I was recruited by the Long Way… production team, to serve as principal interviewer and a co-writer. With other films like 1999’s The Buena Vista Social Club having just unearthed a forgotten marginal music history and become a hit too, and having myself worked on an ABC-TV special on Aboriginal music in the late 80s called Sing it in the Music, I’d always envisaged Buried Country as a film as well.
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​And so when I got together with Andy Nehl, a friend whose radical politics had long tested the patience of his oft-employer the ABC, it started to roll. We sold the pitch to Film Australia, whose then-boss Sharon Connolly was well aware of the significance of Aboriginal music since her brother, the late Steve Connolly, then Paul Kelly’s guitarist, had co-produced with Paul the debut album by a then-unknown singer-songwriter by the name Archie Roach. With Andy directing, we hired Liz Watts as line producer, and most importantly got in key personnel like cameraman Warwick Thornton (long before he was world famous for his own films like Samson and Delilah) and, to do the narration, Kev Carmody, and these two contributors proved a total coup, Warwick with his eye for a beautiful frame that’s always characterized his work, and Kev with his mellifluous voice of vernacular authority.

ON THE ROAD ON THE SHOOT, 1999: Bob Randall, Stanwell Park...

Lionel Rose, Bon Beach

Troy Cassar-Daley and Warwick Thornton, Brisbane

Vic Simms, LaPerouse

​We went on the road in 1999 and shot a score of interviews on location and while the film was being edited, with a wealth of archival material also being tipped in, I started work on producing the ‘soundtrack’ album.

The film was premiered at the 2000 Sydney Film Festival and got a standing ovation, and was broadcast by SBS. I wrote a news item on the premiere for the Bulletin that you can read below. The DVD was released by Film Australia and then when FA was absorbed by the National Film & Sound Archive, the NFSA re-released it. Yet even as Buried Country is reputed to be one of the most popular products Film Australia has ever produced, the NFSA has more recently and very determinedly withdrawn it, even despite protestation. For a government body that's ostensibly the great repository/disseminator of Australia's film and music history, this would seem to be a complete betrayal of its raison d'etre. 

AT THE FILM PREMIERE: With Kev Carmody

Kev with Bobby McLeod

With Bob Randall and Auriel Andrew

Roger Knox, Jimmy Little, Andy Nehl

The film has enjoyed many encore screenings and especially in the last few years I have been kept busy presenting it at festivals, schools, boxing gyms, pubs, conferences and even very posh lawyers’ chambers. It’s won no awards unlike it seems every short by some kid straight out of film school wins a prize, but it has proved itself in the ultimate test, of legs, of not just surviving but thriving in a way that so many worthy topical documentary films, like yesterday's papers, are once-seen/promptly forgotten .