Australia’s Wild Odyssey is a new high water mark in nature documentary

A beautifully filmed and informative series shows how water has shaped and transformed this continent.

Dingoes are an important predator in the desert ecosystem. A scene from Australia's Wild Odyssey

Australia’s Wild Odyssey is a new three-part wildlife series which follows the flow of water across the Australian continent to uncover the connections that link our stunning ecological diversity.

As the series dramatises so entertainingly for a science project, if sometimes rather dense in detail, water is the great shape shifter in this land. As ancient as life itself, the water cycle is replenishing, cleaning, infiltrating, sustaining, collecting and transporting.

We take it for granted, but water is the lifeline of our communities, an ecological puzzle if we care to think about it that allows life to thrive. As W. H. Auden said, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

And this beautifully filmed series, as beguiling and watchable in its visual splendour as it is scientifically informative, takes us across the driest inhabited country, following the rain, rivers and underground aquifers as they transform and connect distant ecosystems, putting together pieces of the biological mystery.

How is it possible for inland floods to affect mountain possums 1000km away? How can dingoes change the shape of desert sand dunes, and just what is the remarkable process by which a tiny crab helps keep the earth’s atmosphere stable.

Australia’s Wild Odyssey is from a group of filmmakers who first came to attention with the ABC’s Kakadu almost a decade ago. The series took us behind the scenes following the heavily armed rangers who patrol the flood plains and ancient sculptured escarpments of Australia’s largest terrestrial park, danger and beauty often connoting the same thing to their wary eyes.

The new series is again directed and co-written by award-winning Nick Robinson, also one of its cinematographers, whose films over the years demonstrate an audacious kind of visual storytelling. Peta Ayers, who has also won numerous awards for her natural history films, was co-producer and co-writer.

Electra Manikakis, another long-time colleague of this creative team, was executive producer. (Her career is certainly somewhat unusual in that, apart from 30 years of making documentary films, she’s also a voice-over actor and has the odd distinction of being the voice for Apple shops around Australia.)

The editor is Bobbi Hansel who also edited their multi-award-winning three-part series Australia’s Ocean Odyssey, the epic program which told the story of a great river of water called the East Australia Current, which most of us have never heard of, even though we may have swum in it at some time in our lives.

The new series is narrated beautifully by Deborah Mailman, who while usually so vivacious and mischievous as an actor, can also bring a heartbreaking integrity to her roles. And her narration here is clear, carrying scientific details with poise and a clear understanding, and just the right sense of awe.

Narrator Deborah Mailman.

Robinson studied marine science and ecology at university, and found that having that understanding of how the natural world works transformed his everyday experience of nature.

“The whole world became so much more interesting to me when I started to see the beauty and the intimate relationships that link all living things,” he says in the show’s production notes.

And in the series he wants to open that same door for the many viewers of his films, “in the most beautiful and engaging way possible”.

Water is his vehicle here to explore the country’s ecology and biodiversity and he presents a journey ranging from the rainforests of the Great Dividing Range, all the way to the wild tropical savanna of the Kimberley.

“Most documentary films about Australia concentrate on a few well-known sites,” says Robinson. “In this series I really wanted people to get a sense of the incredible diversity of landscapes and the huge number of stunningly beautiful places most people have never seen or heard of.”

The first episode, Arteries and Veins, takes us to the Arafura swamp rangers of Gurruwiling, who patrol a wetland of national importance and the largest paperbark swamp in Australia. Gurruwiling was formed about 6000 years ago in a large shallow basin on the floodplains, fed by underground springs and the wet season run-off from the Arnhem Land plateau.

The rangers look after the area’s catchment and the adjacent sea country using an ingenious blend of traditional and modern approaches. They strategically burn the bush for carbon abatement, manage the ferocious feral animals like the rampant Asian water buffalo and collect scientific data and eggs from crocodile nests. No easy task, D. H. Lawrence once described “the heavy, reptile-hostility” that comes off the wetlands, as “something gruesome and infinitely repulsive.”

We follow traditional owner and ranger Otto Campion Bulmaniya as he patrols the flood plains, the monsoon bringing the precipitous rains that will flood his country. Floodwater fills thriving wetlands, feeding rivers that carry us on a journey thousands of miles towards Lake Eyre. The saltwater crocs take advantage of the wet season explosion to breed.

Water in Lake Eyre in August. Picture: Wrights Air

Bulmaniya is a lovely character instructing young people in his “bush university” in the arcane arts of creating fire and fishing in the swollen waters. Menace lurks beside the banks of every watercourse, those deadly predators lurking lazily beneath the surface of the pretty billabongs festooned with lilies.

His humour is wry and understated, just disguising a hardness, some kind of self defence maybe against the harshness of the environment in which the rangers operate.

“You do right by country, country will reward you,” he says.

We also follow the gregarious frog biologist, Dr Jodi Rowley as she heads out with a Bush Blitz team to search Groote Eylandt, off the coast of Bulmaniya’s country, named by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. Bush Blitz is the world’s first continental scale survey – a multimillion-dollar partnership to document the plants and animals in hundreds of properties across Australia’s national reserve system.

Adam Burke, another scientist, explores the Groote Eylandt mangroves, discovering that tiny crab that plays a key role in the enormous success of this forest as a carbon sink. He quotes Einstein: “The deeper you look into nature, the more reality makes sense.”

Groote Eylandt, in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

It’s easy to get that sense of the outback that so captivated Charmian Clift: “A thousand million years at least it takes to make something so rich and strange, so profound, so unbearably potent with dreams.”

However the series at the start was problematic to say the least: the script was written when Australia was in the midst of the worst bushfires the country had ever seen. “I was genuinely worried about following the flow of water across the continent when there really wasn’t any – we had just come off the back of terrible droughts,” says Robinson. But serendipituously a wet cycle eventuated and Robinson and his crew were able to begin filming in the wettest year on record.

It wasn’t always an easy shoot, the crew travelling light, spending hours together finding the right vantage points from which to film, enduring all the travails and privations of the outback.

“Seeing the desert in full bloom and huge flocks of budgies and zebra finches more than makes up for any small inconvenience and a filthy car and caravan. It’s really a dream come true to travel with cameras to so many incredible places and meet so many inspiring people,” Robinson says.

The scale of the operation to capture both the spectacular and the intimate ecological details created by the enormous flow of the current of water across the land, was an enterprise closer to a large scale drama shoot. The crew used the latest high definition RED cameras providing both the intimacy and the highly wide screen cinematic look the filmmakers were after, along with cameras on drones, time lapse photography and the magical slo-mo Phantom camera, now a Hollywood staple, capable of shooting up to 1000 frames per second.

“You’d be rolling the camera and see a flash of movement, and it wouldn’t be until you played the footage back that you’d know what you captured – a mulgara snatching a moth out of the air, or a lizard licking its eyeball with a tongue perfectly shaped for the task,” says Robinson.

It’s some achievement and like Australia’s Ocean Odyssey, it’s elegant and captivating, propelled by the magical voices and compositions of musicians William Barton and Sonya Holowell.

Australia’s Wild Odyssey, Tuesday, ABC, 8.30pm.