Van Diemen's Land: hunger is a strange silence

First time director Jonathan auf der Heide delivers one of the most impressive Australian film debuts in recent memory with Van Diemen's Land. The true story of eight convicts who escaped from their guard in 1820s Tasmania is realised as an eerie descent into hell as they kill each other one-by-one, turning to cannibalism to survive the lifeless wilderness. Demonstrating a cinematic eye to rival Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, auf der Heide has crafted a visceral and poetic tale that, despite its nature, never lapses into banality or bleakness.

Indeed, Van Diemen's Land can be placed in the proud tradition of Australian Gothic (ala Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout) in that it seeks to both immerse and alienate Australians in their own landscape. The primeval Tasmanian bush is painted in harsh, washed out tones, and the characters’ authentic Gaelic dialogue only adds to the otherness of the setting. The script by auf der Heide and Oscar Redding (who also plays the film's principle character Alexander Pearce) brilliantly fuses a sense of camaraderie with an archaic, alienating use of language. Initially the convicts sing, joke and tell tales, rejoicing in their new found freedom, but as their escape becomes more desperate and paranoid, their language grows increasingly indirect and opaque (“if you have no scars, the crow will eat your eyes”). In these moments of heightened lyricism it’s as if the dialogue itself achieves the quality of the image, that of an impenetrable stillness encroaching the limits of our own subjectivity.

The real violence of the film lies in this haunting and primal stillness. Characters enter the frame rather than guide the camera, while a recurring tracking shot floats endlessly down a river, a voiceover decrying God’s absence. We are completely immersed in this world but without an endpoint. The cannibalism is less the result of hunger than a violent response to the impenetrable landscape and pervasive silence (hunger itself is referred to as a “strange silence”). For the convicts, the silence/stillness becomes a self-consuming void (“it grows fat on itself”), encouraging a psychotic identification. Pearce (whose confession tells the tale) repeatedly describes himself as a ‘quiet man’, yet he emerges the most violent of all the convicts.

And as the silence attains an obstinate quality, sounds are strangely disembodied. Pearce is haunted by a lone “Cooeey” yelled out by a dead comrade, while his own voiceover emerges less from his thoughts than from a disembodied consciousness (“Wasn’t the devil in you when you brought me here?”). Meanwhile, the sounds of nature become increasingly humanised. Bird-calls evoke babies screaming, the roar of the river becomes a sign of its “anger” and leaking tree sap is hallucinated as human blood. Even the recurring sound of crackling fire eerily recalls the sounds of eating, heard so viscerally in the opening scene and realised so horrifically in the cannibalist acts. Humans may have become objectified, “burning alive, like logs for the fire”, but nature/God has found itself personified, “dancing with an axe in his hand”.

In the film’s closing scene, Pearce sits alone, his final victim lying dead as a shaft of light drops from the canopy. Pearce remarks on the beauty of the scene, questioning God as to why it could be so beautiful. When the film’s end notes tell us that Pearce went on to kill and eat another convict after his capture, the troubling ambiguity of this scene is realised: it’s as if in this final act Pearce has attained a new (though horrific) kind of subjectivity, a shedding of what he once was and an opening into another being. While the film leads us to believe Pearce's cannibalism was done out of necessity, the end notes suggest it may also have become a willing act, seeming necessary only because it has become part of his nature.