A deeply unsettling and resonant tale of barbarism from Australia’s convict past, Van Diemen’s Land is a hugely impressive debut. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks its director, Jonathan auf der Heide, and lead actor/co-writer Oscar Redding, about their vision of hell.


VAN DIEMEN’s LAND is a hugely impressive feature film from Australia telling the tale of Alexander Pearce. Pearce escaped from a convict camp in Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) with seven other inmates. However they end up lost in the wilderness, totally unprepared in terms of food and warmth. The ensuing tale has become one of Australia’s most notorious tales, but it’s only recently that it has become shown on film. However, Van Diemen’s Land refuses to engage in the sensationalist elements of the story (e.g. cannibalism), instead providing a dark, dark vision of hell on earth.

Co-written by the lead actor Oscar Redding and the director Jonathan auf der Heide, Van Diemen’s Land began as a twenty minute short film made by auf der Heide called Hell’s Gate. auf der Heide says “it had to always work as a short film, but the plan was to make a short film and use that as a selling tool to get the feature.” Redding acted in that film, but had already performed the story as a theatre piece prior to auf der Heide’s short film.

auf der Heide was attracted to story having grown up in Tasmania himself. He says “it has a bit of a mythical cult status in Australia, but hadn’t really been done on screen before. It had been touched on a few books and a few songs, but never on screen. It seemed like a gold mine.” Redding heard the story as a teenager. “I heard about it by chance. A guy was helping us on a farm where I was growing up when I was fourteen. It is one of those things where you can be chatting in a bar and people talk about extraordinary survival tales and it would sometimes come up.”

However, auf der Heide admits “it’s not Australia’s proudest moment. It’s not that well known. A lot of people had heard of it, but they don’t know the facts. There’s no clear understanding – it certainly doesn’t have that Ned Kelly thing. You don’t hear it at school. It’s just not mentioned.” Redding says the story was so fascinating because “there’s a lot of stuff that triggers your every possibility of your imagination to hear the story. It takes your imagination to the absolute extreme of human possibility.”

The story doesn’t change too much from Pearce’s memoirs (except for the beginning which was simplified a little), and the extensive memoirs written just before Pearce’s execution were the starting point for their project. Redding says “the story only changed slightly from what possibly went on. In some ways, you are imagining what took place. There is always conjecture over how much truth is within the confessions of Pearce – being the only survivor, he changed what that story was to suit himself. I get the feeling that most of what he’s saying is pretty much true because he’s obviously confessing to cannibalism and murder. That’s quite intense anyway.”

The collaboration between the two came easily. auf der Heide says that they were “very much on the same wavelength with the story. We had the same vision for what we thought the story would be. It made for a really easy writing experience, probably the easiest part of the whole filmmaking process.” The script was written in three months. There was a bit of external pressure though at the time which helped. Redding says “there were seven [other] feature scripts at the same time of the same story. I thought we would be very lucky if we got there.” auf der Heide says “it was a bit of race. We set a deadline to finish the feature the following year by July, six to seven months to get the money and get everything ready. There’s meant to be another film on the story out later this year apparently, but I think that it’s sitting around waiting to see how our film went.”

Redding also learned Gaelic to assist in writing and performing the role (Pearce was Irish). “I think it helped us with some of the language. A lot of people, even the way in which people in Ireland speak today, a lot of that is based on the Irish way of speaking, the sentence structure. People today, even the people who can’t speak Irish, would often say ‘do you be going down to the shops?’ Which is just how it’s said in Irish, which is how it has flown through. It certainly helped us with the way Pearce spoke when he did speak English, and a few of the other Irish characters, so that certainly helped. It was one of things when you do those things as preparation, you don’t know how much it’s going to help. You spend as much time and effort as you can, doing what you can, so when you get to the shoot and we’re rolling so we don’t have to act. I can’t say it helped me ‘fifteen percent’ knowing the Irish or not knowing the Irish, I just know I was comfortable doing it. I felt like I was saying exactly what I was saying, I didn’t have to think about it.” Redding adds that “it’s a beautiful language. It’s like learning any language, you always get a different sense. It’s like standing on top of a table, you get a different sense of the world.”


auf der Heide adds that the Gaelic dimension was importantly thematically. “It’s really important not only for the authenticity for the film, but to alienate the Australian audience to their own landscape. And remind them these guys were from another country. The people who built this country were completely alien to the wilderness and were most probably terrified by it. That has to have some sort of ramification on our cultural identity today.”

The film is a very physical one, and the actors are fearless in their confrontation of the Tasmanian environment. auf der Heide says “we planned the shoot to be around the coldest time of the year. We all knew what we’d be in for. Going in with those high expectations, that this is going to be freezing. It was exactly that, but people were prepared and willing to go there. Their commitment was just amazing seeing these actors waist-deep in water the whole day not complaining, purely because they believed in the film.” Redding says “there’s no doubt when the water is five degrees celsius and you’re standing in it for two hours, and have a five minute break and getting back in it, your body is feeling everything that’s going on. The more extreme it got, again there was this excitement that we were getting better shots. And also as an actor, there’s this luxury to be on set and the camera’s rolling and know you don’t have to any acting whatsoever. They were such great actors to work with.”

The film could easily have been a thriller, turning the journey into cheap chases and exploitation of its cannibal storyline. auf der Heide says “it was very much about these guys being thrown into this landscape and how they adapt to it. The wilderness does have a brutality that rubs off on these guys.” This meant that they didn’t want the cannibalism to be the major focus in the film either – Redding gets asked about what it’s like playing a cannibal quite frequently (or the “c word” as auf der Heide calls it). Redding says “it wasn’t ever our particular focus. I don’t think it was ever their focus either. Obviously it would have been a pretty confronting thing to eat another human in your life, whether the person’s dead or they had been killed. Obviously their focus and their necessity was making it to the other side. I don’t think it was ever a study on ‘why am I a cannibal?’”

That said, the film’s violence is quite unsettling. Redding says “the violence in the film is not indulged. It’s not like watching Saw or anything like that. We’ve always been fascinated by the telling of the story as honestly as we could. If we are going to tell a story of people murdering each other, you kind of have do that. I love my Hollywood film as much as anyone, but there is this strange thing of watching Hollywood violence, there is no cause and effect. You get the disease but not the symptoms. You have this thing where someone gets shot and they’re dead and then move on with the story. Then you get these amazing stories come out of Iraq or wherever, and you have soldiers talking about how people don’t die, they just don’t die unless they’re really lucky. They’ll get shot through and they’ll take three hours to die. It’s going to take a long time. Our main focus with all these violent deaths, is not the violence but the way in which a man dies. In Pearce’s confessions he alludes to these people – who they were when they were living, and who they were when they died. Most of them almost died in exactly the opposite way to how they lived, which I found unbelievably fascinating.”

The film subsequently steers clear of moralising the men’s behaviour. The ending refuses to let us see civilisation judging Pearce for his crimes. auf der Heide says “for me, what I wanted it to be was that Pearce was drawing back into his visions of hell. The voiceover is him re-living the circles of hell, and his descent into the heart of darkness, rather than being there in the moment. It’s very much his hell. To get out of that and have him making it back to civilisation would immediately put a moral judgment on him and what they’ve done. I thought that the story is a bit deeper than that. It is a conversation between Pearce and his own nature and nature itself. That conversation that Pearce has, for him would be for God, and for us the audience. To place on some sort of judgment from the British Empire would have missed the point for me.”

The film makes amazing use of its landscape, showing its characters crawling like insects in the landscape. In this respect, it bears visual similarity to the work of the Terence Malick. auf der Heide says that he watched “a lot of Werner Herzog films and Terence Malick. As soon as I thought this is really about violence and nature and human nature I immediately thought of his stuff.” While Dead Man wasn’t a direct influence, auf der Heide can see parallels to the story and Jim Jarmusch’s film. “It was similar in that I did want them to feel like the ghosts of Australia past and the convicts are the ghosts of this landscape who built this country, Australia.” The film is causing a stir for its unflinching and astute way in which the story is told, and Redding suggests that it’s important to confront stories like the Pearce story. “There seems to be a reluctance to talk about these stories, to go over our past for some very strange reason. Most Australians take a certain amount of pride that they possibly had convict relatives who were transported over, yet for some reason the authorities try, not so much to hide, but say ‘let’s forget about things like that.’”

See also:
» Harsh Frontier: Van Diemen’s Land