Monday, 18 June 2007
The things you have to do to get bombed these days....
It used to be so simple. Take a loaded wallet, put on your falling down gear (as one of my cricket coaching acquaintances observed What’s the use of getting all dressed up if all you’re going to do is fall over?) and head off to the nearest licensed water hole, and several hours later, there you were...
It’s much more complicated than that these days, especially if you’re making a movie....
After the Queens Birthday long weekend things were pretty quiet when I arrived for Volunteer duty on Tuesday afternoon. There were a few structural adjustments going on at Carney’s Corner and piles of dirt in assorted colours lying in the middle of the street.
I imagined someone from the set design crew going shopping at the local earth moving contractor...
We’ll have two metres of that one, three metres of the greyer one over there, one and a half metres of that one....
As the afternoon wore on, it was obvious the facade that had been used to conceal the Queensland Transport office on Carney’s Corner was being moved outwards. Some of the artwork on the display boards provided by the movie’s art department depicts Carney’s Corner on fire, so it seemed reasonably likely that the Fisheries Patrol were not in favour of seeing their office space go up in flames along with the facade...
When the cranes started to move a couple of wrecked Army vehicles into position in the bomb craters and the bobcat started spreading the soil, it was obvious we would end up looking at a scene of considerable devastation.
Which seems hardly surprising, given that the raids dropped more bombs on Darwin than were used in the attack on Pearl Harbour. And the town came under attack another sixty-three times after 19 February 1942.
A bit of basic research suggests that most of those raids occurred during the day, but since burning buildings look better at night time, that’s the way the filming has gone this week.