![]() It had a huge readership.” Funding for Storm Boy came from the burgeoning South Australian Film Corporation, which had been established by Premier Don Dunstan in 1973, and was the first state film corporation in the country. “I then discovered, of course, that the book was required primary school reading. “He was already well known and really prolific, but he didn’t have an agent or anything like that,” Matt Carroll tells FilmInk of Colin Thiele. The book was a huge success both in Australia and internationally. Though he would eventually write over 100 books, Storm Boy would remain Colin Thiele’s key work, perfectly distilling his greatest qualities as an author: humanism, environmentalism, a great sympathy for the young, and a simple yet deeply poetic style. Percival returns, and he and the boy form an iron-strong bond that will lead to tragedy and Storm Boy’s painful coming of age.Ī vintage Storm Boy lobby card featuring Greg Rowe and Mr. Mike’s father eventually forces Mike to release the birds, but Mr. Percival, and nurses them back to health. When he witnesses the shooting of a pelican mother by poachers, Mike – renamed Storm Boy by Fingerbone Bill because he “runs like the wind” – rescues her three chicks, and names them Mr. Free from any proper form of formal education, Mike wanders the waterways of his sea-and-sand blasted home, where he meets and befriends the Aboriginal loner outcast, Fingerbone Bill. Written in just four weeks, but not published until 1964, Storm Boy tells of Mike Kingsley, a young lad who lives in a makeshift hut on a rugged stretch of beach in The Coorong with his reclusive father, a taciturn, self-sufficient fisherman nicknamed Hideaway Tom. There aren’t many places in the world anymore where you can go and see something almost as it was from pristine days.” “From my boyhood, I like solitude and not loneliness, but I like the open space of wilderness. “I felt an affinity for The Coorong immediately,” Colin Thiele told the SA-centric website, Postcards, in 2006. To be more specific, it was The Coorong, a rough, remote national park and lagoon ecosystem 156km southeast of Adelaide. It was during a 1960 trip to The Murray Mouth, where the river slips into the southern ocean, in The Fleurieu Peninsula region of South Australia, that Storm Boy was born. After serving in the RAAF during WW2, Thiele had become a passionate environmentalist before the term even existed, and he had a particularly strong affinity for his South Australian surrounds. When the state’s long serving premier, Don Dunstan, had revolutionised South Australia’s education system, Colin Thiele was tapped to set up a college dedicated to training specialist teachers, and he quickly became a figure of great inspiration in the field. The much loved children’s novel was written by Colin Thiele, a part-time author and full-time schoolteacher who was something of a minor celebrity figure in South Australia. It was the version with all of the wonderful pictures by Robert Ingpen, and we took an option on it.” ![]() “Somebody – I can’t remember who – said to me, ‘Oh, have you read Storm Boy?’ I just went out and bought it. It was a casual comment thrown Matt Carroll’s way that would change not just the course of his career, but that of the Australian film industry in general. Australia’s film industry was still small in the mid-seventies, but the section of it catering to children was practically non-existent, with classics like Dot And The Kangaroo and Fatty Finn still a few years away. ![]() In 1975, Matt Carroll had produced Sunday Too Far Away, one of the greatest Australian films of the seventies, and for his next project, the on-the-rise producer shifted gears dramatically. Peter Weir had triumphed with Picnic At Hanging Rock in 1975, Bruce Beresford had unleashed Barry McKenzie upon an unsuspecting public in 1972, and the likes of Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, and Fred Schepisi were warming up with well received short films. In 1976, things were just starting to get rolling again in the Australian film industry after a long period of flat-lining inactivity. “This sort of thing had never been done before in Australia, but it all just flowed,” producer, Matt Carroll, tells FilmInk on the line from his office at Screen NSW. ![]()
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