The huge gulf between those who loved & those who hated Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Australia’ is best explained by reading the comments from the general public on some of the film forums, such as Nine MSN’s ‘Your Movies’. The comments on this blog illustrate two great things – a) most Australians think for themselves rather than swallow whole what someone else tells them and b) large numbers are happy to say exactly what they think even though they feel it may not be a fashionable view.
Unfortunately some hide behind ‘anonymous’ and there’s some astonishingly bad spellers (including those who don’t know the difference between Australian and American spellings); and a lot of people don’t know much about the Australian bush, or our history, so basically they had no idea what was authentic in Baz’s ‘Australia’ and what was not.