1. Source:

According to John Heyer, in an interview for Cinema Papers in its Sept-Oct 1976 (No. 10) edition:

Back of Beyond grew out of a brief from Shell's public relations manager. They wanted to associate Shell with Australia and to do that they thought: "Let's make a film that is very Australian, one which would demonstrate by the fact of making it, 'we're with you.'" Not something superimposed on Australia, but as if it were with you and seeing your vitures and your weaknesses. They hoped the Australianism would rub off on to the company's image.

Heyer was given a budget of £9,000 and told to find a suitable subject that he could do well for the money. It took him a while to find the subject but it's unsurprising he eventually settled on the Birdsville mail run. 

Heyer had worked on The Overlanders in 1946 - an epic tale of the outback - before joining the new Australian  National Film Board as a producer, and there was a fashion in documentary circles at the time to explore the outback as a defining image of Australia.

Heyer himself later described the film as part of a tradition (along with Francis Birtles' In the Track of Burke and Wills) that saw the true image of Australia as Man against Nature. Heyer also cannily worked in a story of lost children, a motif which had haunted the Australian outback since the nineteenth century.

When Heyer joined the Shell Unit in 1948 as producer in charge, the unit had considerable success for Shell with producer Geoffrey Bell's 46 minute 16mm 1950 documentary, Alice through the centre, which used an English girl's reactions as a way into various aspects of Australiana and Australian life.

Heyer brought in well-known Australian poet Douglas Stewart (see his ADB biography here, and his wiki here for biographical details) to assist with the film's narration. The head credits also list Heyer's partner Janet Heyer as a "script collaborator", along with Roland Robinson, also a poet (wiki here).

Robinson was an adventurous poet, something of an anthropologist, and comfortable with life in the bush as an odd-job man. In the 1940s he spent time in the Northern Territory studying aboriginal legends and paintings, and helping Eric Worrell catch snakes for museums.

Unlike observational documentary work, Heyer wrote a detailed shooting script after travelling the track with mailman Tom Kruse. He explained the process in his 1976 interview with Cinema Papers:

I make the film in my mind, shot for shot before I start. By scripting a practicable basis, you save a lot of money and give yourself more time to be fluid. I always know that if anything goes wrong, I can shoot what I have written down and it will be all right. Also, you need something more tangible than what is in your mind so as to communicate with, for instance, the cameraman.

Drafts are good because they make you stop waffling and become definite. Once you have the first draft you can make the film. But in my view the film is never finished; there just comes a logical time when you stop. You know it when you get there - and you know it when you don't. 

Preliminary research and an early story outline for the film was done by Robinson, and then in the editing phase, Stewart worked on the narration with editorial interventions from John and Janet Heyer.

2. Inspiration:

The inspiration for the film was definitely the John Grierson-inspired school of British documentary film-making which saw the production of films like Night Mail. (The wiki on Grierson here provides links to other influential British documentary film-makers of the period).

As well as being a prime mover in the GPO Film Unit and the Canadian National Commission, which turned into the National Film Board of Canada, Grierson also played a significant role in the establishment of the Australian National Film Board, which down the track turned into the Commonwealth Film Unit (which later became  Film Australia, and was then abolished by a Labor government).

While the influence of Grierson and others in the British school in Australia has been disputed in academic works, a simple comparison of techniques shows that Heyer was deeply in thrall to the school of romantic documentaries celebrating human activities. In this particular case the notion that the Royal Mail must get through, no matter what, was celebrated in the form of an outback mail-man with an almost mythical Australian can-do aura about him …

This is not to say Grierson was welcomed in Australia when he arrived and attempted to create interest in documentary funding via the Government, in the same way as the Crown Film Unit in Britain.

John Heyer (in his interview in Cinema Papers in 1976)  noted that Grierson returned to Britain very bitter, and said, as he stepped into the plane to return: "I have always said this would happen if you exposed cockneys to the sun", or words to that effect. 

The use of well-known Australian poet Douglas Stewart (with the help of poet Roland Robinson) to shape the narration and dialogue directly parallels the use of W. H. Auden's poem in Harry Watt's and Basil Wright's Night Mail, and similar British experiments.(See the Night Mail wiki here) 

The only irony is that at the time private corporations such as the Shell Film Unit were setting the pace, as a kind of benevolent institutional sponsored promotional activity, leaving behind government instrumentalities labouring to make federal government propaganda.

It would take many years before the Commonwealth Film Unit/Film Australia would make a feature-length documentary of similar quality and impact, and in later years Film Australia went to some trouble to brand the film on its DVD releases as coming from Film Australia, with the Shell credit retained, but downgraded on the packaging.

3. The Production:

John Heyer explained his production schedule in his September-October 1976 Cinema Papers interview:

Back of Beyond took three weeks (sic - years) to make: one year thinking about it and planning, one year in production and one year to finish it. Of that three years only six weeks were on location shooting. That's the hard, mechanical side. I don't think we needed more time than that. What you need a lot of time for is to get to know your subject before you start.

Location filming involved about twenty technicians and actors, serviced by five trucks carrying supplies and equipment, including a wind machine, a dolly for tracking shots, and a tower for high angle shots.

Guide tracks for dialogue were recorded on location; professional actors later dubbed the dialogue in Sydney. This surprised Kruse and others disconcerted by hearing different voices dubbed over them.

The reason was simple. The locations were particularly difficult for filming, with sand a constant problem. Audio tapes recorded on location were ruined by the sand. It was also a struggle to keep cameras and film free of damage, and away from swarms of flies.

Heyer did his editing and polishing in Sydney at Mervyn Murphy's Supreme Sound Studio, and post-synching with professionals was infinitely easier than trying to involve the original people in the work. 

4. John Heyer:

John Heyer was born in Tasmania and started in films in 1934 as an assistant in the sound department of Efftee Films in Melbourne. By 1939 he had worked on a dozen feature films an assistant sound engineer and assistant sound editor, and in 1944 he collaborated with Harry Watt on the shooting script for The Overlanders.

He directed the second film unit shoot, and the next year was appointed producer for the Australian National Film Board, directing his first film, the award-winning Native Earth.

From 1948 Heyer directed some 12 films for the Shell film unit, and helped develop a nation-wide distribution audience which it was estimated reached some 900,000 viewers annually.

After the success of Back of Beyond, in September 1956 Heyer headed to London to run the Shell Company film unit there. He worked there until 1967, producing and directing a large number of award-winning documentaries and commercials.

He then returned to Australia, working for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and commercial networks. He spent three years making a feature-length documentary The Reef, released theatrically in 1979, about the history, features and state of the Great Barrier Reef.

5. Tom Kruse:

Mailman Esmond Gerald 'Tom' Kruse MBE died at the age of ninety six on the 30th June 2011.

Kruse was awarded his M.B.E. on January 1st 1955, in recognition of his work as a mailman, but also no doubt as a result of the attention paid to Kruse following the production of the film. The official citation read in part:

In all weather, each fortnight, he makes the 450 miles journey between Maree and Birdsville, calling at all properties adjacent to the track, delivering mail, provisions and supplies for the families scattered through this remote area.

Tom Kruse is not only a romantic figure, but something of an institution, having earned the love and respect of all residents of the outback.

He has risked his life on many occasions in carrying out his service.

His restored truck is now kept at the National Motor Museum in Birdwood, South Australia.

6. The significance of Back of Beyond:

On a personal level, it was certainly the best work done by John Heyer and by cameraman Ross Wood, who would later shift over to commercials production.

Equally importantly, it was the first feature-length Australian film in the post-war environment to win festival awards and attract serious critical attention. As well as the favourable domestic response, British and European reviews were almost unanimously favourable (the film's wiki here publishes some excerpts).

While films like The Overlanders had also been critical and commercial successes, this was the first Australian film to tap into the burgeoning European festival circuit, and take pride of place in the new domestic film festival and film society movement. It could almost be construed as an audience revolt against the dominant distribution model, and Heyer had in fact hoped that the film's success would lead the Film Board to establish small theatrettes everywhere (but they didn't start one, not one. They just didn't see the message).

Television would make this idea redundant, but what didn't go away was the notion of documentaries as a popular way to reach an audience. While the Federal government led by Robert Menzies was never interested in helping finance feature films, the success of Back of Beyond did lead it to think more about the role the Commonwealth Film Unit might play in devising government propaganda, documentaries and dramadocs.

Along with sporadic work in television drama, this became the main way for Australian film-makers to gain hands on film-makingexperience.

It was from the ranks of the CFU alumni that many of the people who led the 1970s revival came.

Peter Weir made a number of films for the unit (ncluding one episode in the 1971 trilogy Three To Go, and documentaries such as Whatever happened to Green Valley?, while it was producer Gil Brealey who headed off to the South Australian Film Corporation to begin a series of significant feature films (Sunday Too Far Away, Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock).

The feature film industry in the late 1950s and 1960s was effectively dead in Australia, dominated by the occasional blow in UK or US production (Robbery Under Arms, On the Beach). It was the success of The Back of Beyond (as well as films like the federally backed The Queen in Australia) that gave documentaries credibility, and that helped them become a staple of the industry during the lean years.

7. Spin-off:

In 1955, Douglas Stewart published a volume of poems, The Birdsville Track and other poems (available here at time of writing) which reflected his work on the film. The work was dedicated to Tyrone Guthrie and contained this Author's Note:

The Birdsville Track runs three hundred miles northward from Marree in South Australia to Birdsville in Queensland, passing through semi-desert country of red and purple stones packed hard and flat like a Roman tessellated pavement, and touching the fringes of Sturt's Stony Desert and the red sandridges of the Simpson Desert. Along it live a few cattlemen, holding immense tracts of country, whose herds are fattened on the wildflowers that blossom after the spring rains and watered at artesian bores or the scattered waterholes of Cooper's Creek.

The poems about it were written after I had visited the area in connection with the script of the Shell film The Back of Beyond, on which I was working with John Heyer and Roland E. Robinson. These and all the other poems in this book were first published in the Bulletin, to the proprietors of which my thanks are due for permission to reprint.

D.A.S.

The work, though rare, can still be occasionally found in the second hand market:

(Below: Douglas Stewart, and further below, Roland Robinson in 1983):