Sunday Too Far Away was the first film produced by the South Australian Film Corporation, a subsidiary of the South Australian state government created to spur local film production at a time when other states and the national government were trying to revive the nation's movie industry. Since its founding in 1972, the organization had produced documentaries and shorts, but its management was eager to move into feature filmmaking. Originally, the SAFC wanted to make a film about World War I's Gallipoli Campaign and signed John Dingwall to write a script. That production fell apart, and it would take until 1981 for Australia to film that story (in Peter Weir's 1981 Gallipoli). Dingwall still owed the company a film and suggested a story he called Shearers. Drawing on his brother-in-law's experience as a sheep shearer, he crafted a character study of an aging shearer facing the loneliness of a job requiring constant movement and the encroachment of non-union workers. Producer Matt Carroll green-lit the production and then hired Ken Hannam, who had been working in English television, to return to his native Australia to direct his first feature. The release title was drawn from the traditional lament of sheep shearers' wives about their husbands' lack of attention on the weekends: "Friday night...too tired. Saturday night...too drunk. Sunday...too far away."
Leading man Jack Thompson was already well known to Australian audiences from years of television work, most notably as the star of the popular series Spyforce. He was the only cast member who didn't require lessons in sheep shearing, having worked on sheep farms in his early years. He would be one of Australia's first break-out stars, with performances in this, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Breaker Morant (1980) leading to work in such international features as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). He could have left Australia a lot sooner, but turned down a lucrative film offer from the U.S. in order to make Sunday Too Far Away.
The film went into production in March 1974, with extensive location shooting in Port Augusta and Quorn, South Australia, including locations used years earlier for Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960), which had starred Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as a sheep shearer and his wife. What had been planned as a short location shoot was hit with unexpected heavy rains and flooding that turned the dry locations they needed into muddy lakes. As a result, the six-week shoot stretched out to eight. Despite those location problems, cinematographer Geoff Burton managed to give the film a distinctive look, modeled on classic Australian paintings by Tom Roberts and Russell Drysdale. Interiors were constructed in South Australia as well, with the art direction team turning the basement of the Port Augusta Town Hall into a local pub, complete with running beer on tap.
Dingwall's original script would have made for a five-hour picture, with half the running time devoted to the 1956 shearers' strike. He cut that back to a few mentions at the end, but Hannam still ended up with a two-and-a-half-hour film. At that point, producer Gil Brealey cut half an hour, mostly by removing a subplot. Nonetheless, Hannam and Thompson, who saw the original cut, have complained that before Brealey edited it, the film was much more powerful. The directors' cut has never been seen.
Before releasing the film, the SAFC wisely entered it in the Australian Film Awards. Its victories in the Best Film, Best Actor (Thompson) and Best Supporting Actor (Reg Lye) competitions helped generate word of mouth that made it a hit domestically. The producers also entered several international film festivals, with a screening in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes, where it was the first Australian film ever shown at the festival, as well as the Chicago and Taormina Film Festivals. It won Best Picture at the latter.
Sunday Too Far Away continues to be regarded as one of the high points in Australian film history. Later critics have likened its themes of professionalism and camaraderie among the all-male shearers to the work of Howard Hawks. In 2000, the film was one of 50 Australian film treasures chosen for restoration and preservation as part of the National Film & Sound Archive's Kodak/Atlab Cinema Collection.
By Frank Miller
Producer: Gil Brealey, Matt Carroll
Director: Ken Hannam
Screenplay: John Dingwall
Cinematography: Geoff Burton
Score: Michael Carlos, Patrick Flynn
Cast: Jack Thompson (Foley), Max Cullen (Tim King), Robert Bruning (Tom), Jerry Thomas (Basher), Peter Cummins (Arthur Black), John Ewart (Ugly), Reg Lye (Old Garth), John Hargreaves (bit)
