The Territorians
In the early 2000s, filmmaker Sean Brandt sets out across Australia’s Top End in search of a vanishing breed: the last of the true Territorians. These are the men and women who carved lives out of a frontier the rest of the country only knew through legend. Travelling by four-wheel drive, light aircraft and boat, Sean crosses floodplains, escarpments, mangrove rivers and stone country, and tracks down the people who shaped the Territory.
Dave Lindner, the ranger who helped build Kakadu National Park, recalls the battle to protect one of the world’s great wild places. His arch-enemy, the famed poacher Roy Wright, tells the same story from the other side of the law. Buffalo-hunting legend Gerry Baldwin recalls the days when men made a living on the open plains with a rifle and a bull-catcher.
On a remote river, Sean meets an Aboriginal mother who saved her son from a giant saltwater crocodile. It had taken him by the body. With nothing but her bare hands, she wrestled the animal and drove her fingers into its eyes until its jaws opened. Against all odds, her son survived.
The deeper Sean goes, the stranger it gets. The crocodile trade, from hunting and egg harvesting to farming and skins, has pulled in ex-cops, ex-mercenaries and fortune-seekers, all making a profit from the ancient predator. Their stories are hard to believe and often impossible to verify, and they are told with complete conviction.
Shot across some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth, The Territorians is a visual feast and a final portrait of a frontier generation, recorded just before they and their world disappeared.