Jedda by Jane Mills

Author:Jane Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press

Imaginative geography

Before leaving Mongala with his police posse to join the hunt for Marbuk, Fitzer explains to Doug where he believes this outlaw is going: ‘He’ll work back around the swamps, through the red mountains, and across into the hidden city.’ Revealing Marbuk’s total disregard for all law, black and white, he adds, ‘Of course that’s taboo country, but he’ll break all taboos if he knows the police are after him.’

Fitzer’s sense of geography adds confusion to the landscape. None of it makes sense to anyone who knows the actual locations and where they are in relation to each other. The three parties—Marbuk and Jedda, Joe and his helpers, and the police posse led by Sergeant Fitzer—are filmed in a number of locations that make no geographical sense whatsoever. Not that this matters necessarily—filmmakers do it all the time. To use a term coined by Edward Said, Jedda’s cartographic license is the product of Chauvel’s rich ‘imaginative geography’, an idea that helped me understand Chauvel’s relationship to land and landscape when I was doing my own bit of locationism.18

According to the images on the screen, Marbuk and Jedda’s journey starts at the buffalo camp at Marrakai, north-east of Katherine. Next we see them at Mataranka, a small township on the Roper River, a few kilometres southeast of Katherine. They then travel southwest to the West Macdonnell Ranges, a hike of several days. We then find them back north again in territory to the northeast of Mataranka, where they encounter Marbuk’s tribe. From here they apparently float down a river that in the real world ends in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north-east, but in the film takes them to Katherine Gorge—this would have meant, improbably, floating upstream.

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