Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) leaves behind the finery of the English aristocracy to travel to the Australian outback and confront her husband Lord Ashley on the Faraway Downs cattle station.  nShe finds her spouse dead and a huge property in financial disarray.

On the brink of takeover by scheming King Carney (Bryan Brown), who controls the local cattle market. With the help of a swarthy drover (Hugh Jackman), Sarah decides to challenge Carney’s monopoly by herding 500-strong prize cattle all the way to port in the face of stiff opposition from her rival’s heir apparent, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham).

En route, Sarah and the drover fall passionately in love, becoming surrogate parents to an orphaned Aborigine boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters).  Writer-director Baz Luhrmann pays tribute to his homeland with a sprawling love story set in the years before the Japanese bombing of Darwin, threaded with a critique of the ‘re-education’ of Aborigine children.

Australia is a sweeping, old-fashioned epic that marries Catherine Martin’s ravishing production design with Mandy Walker’s breathtaking cinematography, split loosely into three, tonally distinct chapters.  nJ ackman’s rugged man of the earth generates palpable screen chemistry with Kidman, who has never looked more radiant and demonstrates perfect comic timing.

Brown and Wenham all but twirl moustaches as the villains of the piece and newcomer Walters possesses that rare, unspoiled quality that so many young actors lose as they play out their childhoods in front of the camera.  Pacing slackens perhaps as Japanese bombers descend on Darwin, but by then, viewers are mesmerised.