I recently came across Carolyn Lake’s review of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, and found it interesting. As she writes in her article “Colonial Nation”:

Although Drover is at home on the land, Sarah is not. The character of Neil Fletcher reminds us of this when he remarks on Sarah’s arrival in Darwin: “She won’t last, a delicate English rose withers in the outback.” But Sarah does last, and this can be attributed to her partnership with Drover. It is Drover who literally comes to the rescue to transport Sarah’s cattle to Darwin after she fires Fletcher. It is Drover who gets her served a drink in the front bar, and it is Drover who manages to save the children from Mission Island. Although Sarah does try to recapture Nullah, her passive approach does not compare with Drover’s action- packed search-and-rescue escapade. Drover and Sarah’s relationship ties back again to the land. When the two characters kiss, rain falls on the drought-stricken Darwin. When they consummate their relationship, monsoonal storms appear, the land becomes rejuvenated, birds fly and rivers flow. When Britain is soon to leave Australia defenseless against Japanese attack, it is the very British Sarah, together with the very Australian Drover, who save the land.

This relationship between myth and land has deeper consequences, creating a settler discourse around land that displaces any notion of dispossession from Indigenous peoples. Early in Australia, Nullah tells Sarah that she is like the Rainbow Serpent, that she will heal the land. But Sarah will do more than heal the land; she will own it. Do Sarah’s healing powers justify her ownership? Sarah’s mythic propensity to cultivate the land is curiously similar to the settler’s ability to develop agriculture. The broad meaning of Terra Nullius is land belonging to no one, land over which no one has sovereignty. This includes but is not limited to an expression of sovereignty through the development of agriculture. Sarah’s adoption of the title of Rainbow Serpent, the title that seems to distance her from the status of colonizer, invader or dispossessor, comes eerily close to the doctrine of Terra Nullius, the doctrine that “justified” European colonization of Australia. Rather than attempting to circumvent Indigeneity, by naming Sarah the Rainbow Serpent, Indigenous discourses are appropriated by European ones, constructing these alternative meanings and histories.