Winter '08 :: England in the Outback

Production designer Catherine Martin arranged all the flowers for the set. Shown here is an arrangement of Lady Sarah’s favorites, orchids and palm leaves.

Perhaps the English writer Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1957) had something else in mind when he wrote of Australia in his book A Land of Plenty, “Earth is here so kind that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.”

Catherine Martin would probably beg to differ.

The Academy Award-winning costume and production designer recently added landscaping to her already impressive résumé while working on the recently released epic Australia. Directed by husband and collaborator Baz Luhrmann, the film is the saga of Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat (played by actress Nicole Kidman) who travels to Australia to inherit a dairy farm the size of a small country. Accompanying her on the treacherous journey to move 1500 cattle across the continent is “the drover” (played by fellow Aussie Hugh Jackman) and naturally, love tags along.

Set against a backdrop of the World War II bombings in Darwin, the African Queen-style film is a literal banquet of romance, action, adventure and a feast for the senses. The Land Down Under has never looked better as the outback becomes a metaphor for the transformation of the British baroness who submits to the charms of the land. Ironically, that same land posed its own challenges for the film crew.

No stranger to Herculean tasks, Martin (known as CM) was responsible for the surreal sets and eye-catching costumes of Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge and the Chanel campaign with Nicole Kidman (all directed by Luhrmann). From diamond studded corsets and can-can petticoats to the black and white world of Paris’ Montmartre, the multi-talented designer has successfully conquered it all. But designing the landscaping and gardens for her latest film would prove to be one of the most daunting as she turned a vacant field into a lush homestead in just 14 weeks.

The designing mother of two notes that while “my grandmother had the most amazing green thumb, and she would just strike a cutting and in three days it would grow,” she herself confesses to having a brown thumb.

Tethered to her Apple computer, CM studied her detailed drawings, renderings, and computer-generated images of the film’s design plans. Her files were filled with hundreds of photos taken by her “greensman” who visited local sources and snapped shots of every type of indigenous rock, flower, filler, hedge, tree, and planting known to Australia. She would then base her selection on color and how it would look on camera.

The filming took place in Kununurra, a parched, barren outpost in Australia’s Northern Territory filled with prehistoric rock and Boab trees. CM and her crew of 300 built a Queenslander-style homestead literally from scratch, transporting every piece of lumber, furniture, and plantings from Sydney and beyond. Known as Faraway Downs (think Gone With The Wind’s famed Tara), the working sets depicted all the accoutrements of a self-sustaining life—horse corrals, blacksmith house, servants quarters, clay tennis courts, and, of course, vegetable and English flower gardens.

Since Lady Sarah hails from England, the flower and vegetable gardens were certainly in order. CM researched historical traditional homesteads of Australia as well as English gardens with a landscaping plan to merge the two theories. She found inspiration from Fossil Downs, a 1930s home in neighboring Kimberly, as well as Carlton Hill in Kununurra, a homestead that dates back to the 1890s.

“I wanted the plan to be both whimsically and mythically pleasing and the gardens more formal like Lady Sarah,” the designer relates.

The resulting scheme for the set was a traditional English theme with a twist of Australiana and splashes of badly needed color to contrast the earth brown palette of the natural landscape. Standard roses and gardenia hedges were used as borders while magnolia and frangipanes mixed with 40-year-old palm trees brought in via semi-trailers from Queensland.

“Baz liked the idea of the juxtaposition of cows and palm trees,” CM explains. She also added the iconic signature Boab tree—artificially made from Plaster of Paris (after all, its on celluloid)—to frame the house. Pink and white bougainvillea arbors (again, both real and artificial) graced the lawn while lilies and roses were formed “in central clumps in a diamond geometric style,” according to CM, and symmetrically balanced the corners of the property.

Lady Sarah Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman) entertains under the Boab tree in the recently-released epic Australia.

Seemingly glamorous to the outside world, the production work was rigorous and weather conditions demanding to say the least. The shoot came with 100-degree plus days (actors were fainting at the drop of a hat, including a newly pregnant Kidman), dust storms, flies the size of small birds, scorpions, and a neighboring lagoon filled with crocodiles, which was located literally outside of Hugh Jackman’s trailer.

The crew had to pump the dangerous river to keep the clay-based (and surprisingly fertile) gardens watered. While we gardeners in the States deal with deer and all sorts of interesting wildlife, our Aussie friends have to cope with kangaroos against which no chemical deterrents were used.

“We usually had to put up a fence or someone on the crew stayed up all night to watch over the gardens,” CM explains.

While the camera may pan on a shot for a fleeting moment, attention to detail is still paramount. Since Lady Sarah was a gardener, an actual vegetable garden was built, complete with corn, tomatoes and herbs.

“I had to tell the crew not to eat anything as we had to push the growth with fertilizer,” she details, and “there was a constant struggle to make it all look established as the size can give it away [on camera].”

If that weren’t enough, the crew had to painstakingly recreate the gardens months later for the “pick up shots” (that’s Hollywood speak for reshoots) on a soundstage in Sydney.

A hands-on designer, CM arranged all the flowers for the interior sets, an activity she said she absolutely loves. Orchids were Lady Sarah’s flower of choice and therefore casually arranged with palm fronds in vintage vases all throughout the house. The veranda (a hallmark of the period) boasted “the dreaded hanging basket” which CM was surprised to find originated in the 1930s and not the ‘70s.

Currently, CM’s love of native floral and fauna has creatively spilled over from the movie. On a much-deserved hiatus, she hatched the idea of a line of home accessories inspired by the cinema that celebrate all things Australiana.

While turning a plot of brown dry earth into a visually stunning landscape in the middle of the outback is no easy feat, the efforts of this designer turned reluctant gardener might well earn her a third Oscar. And though our backyards are not movie locations, the same tenets to landscaping apply—research, discipline, creativity, and a perhaps a little luck. Moviegoers will no doubt find inspiration in the designs of Australia and hopefully look to the cinema in the future as yet another artistic resource.

Winter 2008 | By Cathy Whitlock | Photos by James Fisher