Sons of Matthew
As one who has not seen Sons of Matthew for several decades, I find that Barnaby Smith’s lively and thoroughly researched account inspires me to renew acquaintance with one of Australian cinema’s legendary titles. The article not only offers a considered critical response to the film, but also places it in several revealing contexts. These include Charles Chauvel’s own background, the difficulties in financing the project, the sheer physical challenges of shooting in a daunting landscape and the cultural climate of the film’s production in matters such as racism, sexism and emerging nationalism. It is a film that may offer rewards to a range of historians – of cinema or otherwise.
Brian McFarlane, Series Editor
In March 2019, a special screening of the newly digitally restored version of Charles Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew (1949) took place at Home of the Arts (HOTA) on the Gold Coast. The event marked the seventieth anniversary of the film, much of which was shot in nearby hinterland to the west. The evening also included a Q&A between Gayle Lake, senior curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), and Ric Chauvel Carlsson, the grandson of Charles and his wife, Elsa.
This was a fascinating occasion – and not just because it offered the opportunity to view the upgraded version of the film and hear Chauvel Carlsson’s potted history of it. The Q&A was imbued with a pleasant community spirit, as this appeared to be a reunion, of sorts, for local residents with memories of the film being made in the region and its release in cinemas. A couple of nonagenarian women spoke of watching scenes being shot in the small town of Numinbah; a man stood up and revealed that he was the son of the one of the cast members, Tommy Burns; a woman said she was the niece of an actor who played a minor role; another man recalled seeing the film in a Gold Coast cinema over Christmas in 1949. If ever proof were needed that shooting films in regional areas leaves a legacy, this was it.
Sons of Matthew can be regarded as Chauvel’s most personal project. Born in 1897 in Warwick, Queensland, he grew up amid the landscape shown in the film, with parents who faced the struggle and reward of farming this arable land. Therefore, Sons of Matthew might be interpreted, in part, as a paean to his childhood. It also allowed Chauvel to celebrate what we might warily call the ‘common’ Australian man and woman. His previous film, The Rats of Tobruk (1944), a propaganda piece about three drovers who go off to fight in World War I, also did this to an extent.
Chauvel turned fifty in 1947, the year Sons of Matthew went into production.1 This was the eighth feature film he would direct in a career that started with the silent films The Moth of Moonbi (1926) and Greenhide (1926) and progressed with In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), Heritage (1935), Uncivilised (1936), Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) and The Rats of Tobruk. By 1947, therefore, Chauvel had earned himself a substantial reputation that would afford him creative freedom as well as industry relationships that would yield financial support.
To watch Sons of Matthew today is to be struck by its immense ambition, from its elaborate set pieces to its expansive cinematography that elegantly romanticises the Lamington Plateau and surrounds. Furthermore, the legendary difficulties of its making come across palpably, with actors struggling up escarpments and dodging charging brumbies. The film is also significant for the modern viewer as it is, as stated in John Doggett-Williams’ documentary The Big Picture (2014), ‘the only record of a lost landscape’,2 given the environmental changes in this region over the following decades.
Sons of Matthew does, however, contain several troubling aspects for the twenty-first century viewer, even if the film should be understood as an ideological and social product of its time. Chief among these must be its attitudes towards women, its glorification of what amounts to environmental vandalism and its treatment (or lack of treatment) of Indigenous peoples.
‘A heritage for his country’: The plot
Sons of Matthew opens with a hand turning the pages of what appears to be a family album, introducing us to the main characters. Matthew O’Riordan (John O’Malley), an Irishman, is married to Jane (Thelma Scott), ‘from a gentle village in soft Devon’. With their five sons and two daughters, they live in an unspecified region of New South Wales (NSW) at ‘Deep Creek’, a small homestead with a farm, roughly around the turn of the century. Their neighbours include Jane’s brother Jack Farrington (John Fegan) and the McAllisters, Angus (Robert Nelson) and his wife, whose daughter Cathy (played as a young child by Charmian Young) is frequently at the O’Riordan home due to her mother’s poor health (and subsequent death) and her father’s commitments working the land.
The first section of the film shows the O’Riordan siblings during childhood: happy and pious, though afflicted with poverty and the ravages of drought and bushfire – which ultimately force their uncle to move away. Shane (played as a teenager by Tom Collins), the eldest of the sons, is de facto leader of the household when his father is away mustering or droving, and is established early as a voice of reason and maturity.
The film then jumps to
