A baby jacana from the Northern Territory,as shown in Australia’s Wild Odyssey.Credit:ABC
With three hour-long episodes,Australia’s Wild Odyssey offers both a vision of Australia’s complex and diverse natural environments and a reminder of how interconnected – and thus interdependent – they are. The spectacle,of which there is plenty,never goes without testimony to how precious and interwoven it is. You will get exquisite shots of crabs so red that they glow in close-up like an alien artifact,but there is also an explanation for how they help maintain mangrove swamps that are invaluable natural providers of carbon capture.
This is a familiar working model for the show’s director (and director of photography),Nick Robinson,who previously directed 2020’sAustralia’s Ocean Odyssey. The narrative here unwinds the many links,not just natural but also technical and even philosophical. Starting with the rolling impact of monsoon season in Central Arnhem Land in the country’s far north,the show’s research shows how the traditional Indigenous guardians preserved these wildlife spaces with respect – a policy continued today by First Nations rangers – and how science is catching up with the underlying facts behind their beliefs.
Nature,as Deborah Mailman observes in her gently engaging narration,is “the ecological puzzle that keeps us all alive.” The episodes don’t just follow the rain cycles,from condensation over the hot ocean waters to the monsoons they become inland,they move back and forth between a macro and micro focus. For example,the tiniest of insects,notes the second episode,play an invaluable maintenance role in Australia’s Alpine regions – you wouldn’t notice their disappearance,except as the absence of a miniscule irritant,until the ecosystem started to irrevocably collapse without them.
Australia’s Wild Odyssey:the mulgara is a voracious desert predator and,right,a frog found by the Groote Eylandt Bush Blitz team.Credit:ABC
Traditionalists need not despair:the images of nature that illustrate this mapping remain vividly watchable,as if you could just reach into the screen and feel the water or soil on your hand. The elongated,otherworldly toes of Jakana waterbirds disperse their weight so that they seemingly walk on water as they move between lily pads looking for food,but when a crocodile draws near the young retreat under the father’s wings,and they all stand perfectly still until the danger passes. Behaviour learned over thousands of years is displayed in just a few seconds.
Loading
The lesson the show delivers is inclusive:if everything is connected in the natural world,we can’t expect to be excluded as people. Losing natural environments will be disastrous not just for their inhabitants,but humanity as a whole.Australia’s Wild Odyssey doesn’t need to hit you over the head (even if that’s what we deserve) to communicate this – it’s integral to every tie it thoughtfully illustrates. As Gumbaynggirr elder Michael Jarrett puts it:“we should be in awe and appreciate everything that mother nature put in place for us.”