Travelling North

Plot

An aged couple decide to move from Melbourne to north Queensland.

Play

The David Williamson play Travelling North premiered in 1979, the year that Williamson moved from Melbourne to Sydney. Williamson says the inspiration for the play came soon after he met his second wife Kristin and she took him up to the Central Coast of New South Wales to visit her mother Hope. Hope had recently remarried an older man called Wilkie. Williamson:

There was more than a little hint of disapproval from her two daughters about the new liaison, which I used in the play, but I found them an inspiring couple. Wilkie was a ferociously intelligent man, a former electrical engineer and ex-communist with pronounced opinions on just about everything. Hope was gentler but with a wonderful quality of perception and understanding. They both impressed me and, some years later, the image of them both living in a verdant, sunlit subtropical paradise re-entered my mind and became Travelling North. In fact, by the time I wrote it, Wilkie had died. I asked Hope whether I could write the play and she trusted me and was most cooperative. She told me anecdotes about a busybody neighbour who had annoyed the hell out of Wilkie and a long-suffering doctor who had to answer Wilkie's probing questions about the quality of treatment he was delivering. These characters found their way into the story. I think Hope genuinely liked the play, but my wife Kristin and her sister were a little less enthusiastic, particularly when Frank, in the play, refers to them as "Goneril and Regan".

"This play was not to do with me, and there was no ‘me’ character in it,” he later said. “It was a dispassionate – hopefully – observation of a journey we all must make. I tried to make it as truthful, emotionally, as I could.”

The film was not made until eight years later, with Williamson adapting his own play into a script.

Production

Ben Gannon optioned film rights to the play and hired Leo McKern to play the lead. It was intended that Michael Blakemore direct but after casting was completed he dropped out and was replaced by Carl Schultz. Warren Mitchell was originally cast as the local doctor but was replaced by Henri Szeps.

The film was shot in Port Douglas, Queensland, in July and August 1986. Much of the superb atmosphere of the film was created by the choice of music - the heart-rending slow movement from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's String Quintet No. 4 - which was used repeatedly throughout

Awards

At the AFI Awards the film won the categories Best Actor in a Lead Role (Leo McKern) and Best Adapted Screenplay (David Williamson). Julia Blake was nominated. Montréal World Film Festival awarded the Best Actor award to Leo McKern.

Box office

Travelling North grossed $1,464,000 at the box office in Australia, which is equivalent to $2,942,640 in 2009 dollars.