Even for the 1950s this was a less than enlightened viewpoint. Still, if Jedda continues to fascinate a wide range of viewers, it is not merely as an historical landmark – Australia’s first colour feature, as well as the first with Aboriginal stars – but as testimony to the pain inflicted by a racially divided society, a still relevant subject rarely handled so bluntly today. The title character (Rosalie Kunoth) is an Aboriginal girl adopted at birth by Sarah (Betty Suttor), the wife of a station owner, who strives to instil her with ‘civilised’ values. But from childhood Jedda longs to join her ‘people’ on their annual walkabout, and as a young woman she is easy prey for the seductive Marbuk (Robert Tudawali), who lures her to his side with the traditional magic of song.

Mills has edited all the Australian Screen Classics monographs to date, but this is her first stab at writing one. Near the start of the book she comments interestingly on the uses of autobiography in the series, noting that most authors ‘need to step outside the film before they can step inside its frames’. As she persuasively argues, concepts of inside and outside are peculiarly relevant to a film in which the main character does not ‘know her place’ and is shifted against her will from one place to another.

Place was important to Chauvel, an addict of shooting location whom his frequent star Chips Rafferty described as a ‘bloody frustrated explorer’. Mills turns out to be a traveller in her own right: originally from Britain, she first saw Jedda shortly after her arrival in Australia in the mid-1990s, when she screened the film to her students as part of a course on the cinema of colonialism. Later, while researching this book, she mounted an expedition through the outback, mainly in the Northern Territory, where the film was shot.

Mills’s own use of autobiography is typically chatty rather than confessional. For all her emphasis on spatial and social vantage points, she makes little effort to analyse where she herself stands. Whatever ironies spring from her decision to follow literally in the Chauvels’ footsteps, she seems secure in her faith that her two-week pilgrimage helped fill the gaps in her knowledge that saw her struggling with the book’s early drafts. While she claims to have sought out the reality behind the Chauvels’ craftily framed and edited images, her effusive descriptions of seemingly unpopulated Territory landscapes often read like straightforward confirmation of the film’s vision: ‘I walked through the spectacular Standley Chasm and waited for the midday sun to light up the dark canyon, just as it did for Marbuk as he dragged the exhausted and scared Jedda after him.’

Travel jottings aside, Mills remains a disarming writer who is able to draw intelligently on earlier scholarship – especially the work of Stuart Cunningham – while retaining a personal voice. Most distinctive is her quasi-maternal concern for characters and actors alike: she worries that Kunoth was sexually exploited (‘the teenage Rosalie would have had no idea how the camera would emphasise her voluptuous breasts’) and that Tudawali might have suffered when required to dive into an icy pool (‘I hope there were not too many takes’).

Inevitably in a short book like this, much territory remains unexplored: I wish Mills had made more of the parallels between Jedda and other Chauvel protagonists, and at least touched upon the later activist career of Tudawali, himself the subject of a television biopic in 1987. Above all, I wish she had looked more closely at Elsa Chauvel, who apparently took responsibility for Kunoth during the shoot: what was her place in the complex behind-the-scenes story of Jedda, insofar as we can know it today?

The strongest passage comes near the end, as a gloss on the most powerful of all interpretations of Jedda: Tracey Moffatt’s short film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), which imagines what might have happened if Marbuk had never appeared and Sarah and Jedda had grown old side by side. ‘Assimilation, the film implies, causes pain to both the black child and the white parent because no-one has worked out that the parent–child relationship is out of place.’

Contemplating this lucid sentence, I wonder how far Australian society has really moved on from the Chauvels, and how far it is possible for a non-Indigenous critic like Mills (or myself) to write about Jedda without succumbing in turn to the curse of good intentions. In any case, the tableau reimagined by Moffatt has lost none of its troubling allegorical resonance: the white mother and the surrogate black daughter, trapped in mutual dependence until death, each yearning for something that the other can never give.