PLOT: In 1939, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to northern Australia to force her philandering husband to sell his faltering cattle station, Faraway Downs. Her husband sends an independent cattle drover (Hugh Jackman), called simply "Drover", to Darwin to transport her to Faraway Downs.Lady Sarah's husband is murdered shortly before she arrives, and the authorities tell her that the killer is an Aboriginal elder with magical powers, "King George" (David Gulpilil). Meanwhile, cattle station manager Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) is trying to gain control of Faraway Downs, so that Lesley 'King' Carney (Bryan Brown) will have a complete cattle monopoly in the Northern Territory, giving him negotiating leverage with an Australian army officer, Captain Dutton (Ben Mendelsohn).The childless Lady Sarah is captivated by the boy Nullah (Brandon Walters), who was born to an Aboriginal mother and an unknown white father. Nullah tells her that he has seen her cattle being driven onto Carney's land — in other words, stolen from her. Because of this Fletcher mistreats Nullah and threatens him and his mother, after which Lady Sarah fires Fletcher and decides to try and run the cattle station herself. When Nullah and his mother hide from the white authorities in a water tower, his mother drowns. Lady Sarah comforts Nullah by singing the song "Over the Rainbow" from the film The Wizard of Oz. Nullah tells her that "King George" is his grandfather, and that like "King George" he too is a "magic man".Lady Sarah persuades Drover to take the cattle to Darwin for sale. Drover, a white man, is friendly with the Aborigines, and therefore shunned by many of the other whites in the territory. It is revealed that he was married to an Aboriginal woman, who died after being refused medical treatment in a local hospital because of her race. Lady Sarah also reveals she is barren and can not have children.Drover leads a team of six other riders, including Lady Sarah, Drover's Aboriginal brother-in-law Magarri (David Ngoombujarra), Nullah, and the station's accountant Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), to drive the 1,500 cattle to Darwin. They encounter various obstacles along the way, including a fire set by Carney's men that scares the cattle, resulting in the death of Flynn when the group tries to stop the cattle from stampeding over a cliff. Lady Sarah and Drover fall in love, and she gains a new appreciation for the Australian territory. The team drive the cattle through the dangerous Never Never desert. Then, when at last delivering the cattle in Darwin, the group has to race them onto the ship before Carney's cattle are loaded.Afterwards, Lady Sarah, Nullah, and Drover live together happily at Faraway Downs for two years. Meanwhile, Fletcher kills Carney, marries his daughter Cath Carney, takes over Carney's cattle empire, and continues to menace Lady Sarah. It is established that Fletcher was the actual murderer of Lady Sarah's husband, and is also almost certainly Nullah's father.Nullah is drawn to perform a walkabout with his grandfather "King George", but is instead taken by the authorities and sent to live on Mission Island with the other half-Aboriginal children (dubbed the "Stolen Generations"). Lady Sarah, who has come to regard Nullah as her adopted son, vows to rescue him. Meanwhile, she works as a radio operator in Darwin during the escalation of World War II. When the Japanese attack the island and Darwin in 1942, Lady Sarah fears that Nullah has been killed.Drover, who had quarrelled with Lady Sarah and left, apparently never to return, returns to Darwin and hears (mistakenly) that she has been killed in the bombing. Drover learns of Nullah's abduction to Mission Island, and goes with Magarri and a young priest to rescue him and the other children. Meanwhile, Lady Sarah has sold Faraway Downs to Fletcher, and is leaving for England that day, since she believes there is nothing more to hold her in Australia. But when Drover and the children sail back into port at Darwin, and Nullah plays "Over the Rainbow" on his harmonica, Lady Sarah hears the music and the three are reunited.Fletcher, who is distraught at the death of his wife, attempts to shoot Nullah, but is speared by King George and falls dead. Lady Sarah, Drover, and Nullah return to the safety of remote Faraway Downs. There, King George calls for Nullah, who returns to the Outback with his grandfather.
REVIEWS:

Summary
Early reviews in the Australian press were mixed with the general consensus that Australia was a good but not great film. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that as of 4 October 2010, 55% of critics gave the film a positive write-up, based upon a sample of 199, with an average score of 5.9/10. The site reported that the consensus was that while the film features "lavish vistas" and "impeccable production," it suffers due to its "lack of originality" and "thinly-drawn characters." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 53, based on 31 reviews, denoting "mixed or average reviews."

Positive
Chris Tookey, in his review for the Daily Mail wrote, "Kidman and Jackman have great sexual chemistry, as well as the glamour of Forties cinema idols." He also rated the film the maximum five stars. The News of the World followed suit by rating the film with five stars, the reviewer Robie Collin praised the casting and camerawork; "The jaw-dropping, picture postcard camerawork, that will have your eyes scouring each scene for every last delicious detail.The uproarious comic interludes (Nicole’s rendition of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and the build-up to it, is one of the best-played comic set pieces of the year)..The magnetic and irksomely handsome Hugh Jackman, the undisputed star of the show."Claire Sutherland, in her review for the Herald Sun wrote, "A love letter to the Australian landscape and our history, Australia has international blockbuster written all over it". In his review for The Australian, David Stratton wrote, "It's not the masterpiece that we were hoping for, but I think you could say that it's a very good film in many ways. While it will be very popular with many people I think there's a slight air of disappointment after it all. Despite its flaws — and it certainly has flaws — I think Australia is an impressive and important film."Anne Barrowclough of The Times (United Kingdom) gave the film four out of five stars, and states the film defies expectation and "in what turns out to be a multi-layered story it describes an Australia of the 1940s that is at once compellingly beautiful and breathtakingly cruel".Megan Lehmann, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, said that the film "defies all but the most cynical not to get carried away by the force of its grandiose imagery and storytelling", and it is "much less earnest than the trailer suggests, layered with a thin veneer of camp and a nod and a wink to accompany the requisite Aussie clichés", and the bottom line is "In epic style, Baz Luhrmann weaves his wizardry on Oz".Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4, noting "Baz Luhrmann dreamed of making the Australian Gone With the Wind, and so he has, with much of that film's lush epic beauty and some of the same awkwardness with a national legacy of racism".David Ansen, in his review for Newsweek, wrote, "Kidman seems to blossom under Luhrmann's direction: she's funny, warm and charming, and the erotic charge between her and the gruff, hunky Jackman is delicious. In a solemn season, Australia's bold, kitschy, unapologetic artifice is a welcome respite".In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, "this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion".

Neutral
Writing for The Age, Jim Schembri had problems with the length of the film: "The film is fine, and never boring but, boy, is it overlong. At a mammoth 165 minutes it feels too much like a work-in-progress. There is a lot of narrative flab and longueurs in the first two hours and the film often has the pace of a steamroller with engine trouble".In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, "this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion".Andrew Sarris, in his review for the New York Observer, wrote, "Australia is clearly a labor of love, and a matter of national pride. It is also a bit of a mess. I must confess that I might have been harder on Mr Luhrmann's film if I had not remained entranced by Ms Kidman ever since I first saw her in Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm in 1989; in my opinion, she has lost none of her luster in the 20 years since".In his review for Time, Richard Schickel wrote, "Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before? Sure you have. It's a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr Frankenstein-style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining?"Ann Hornaday, in her review for the Washington Post, wrote, "A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and revisionism, Australia is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining".

Negative
Mark Naglazas of The West Australian accused positive reviews from News Ltd press outlets of being manipulated by 20th Century Fox, calling Australia a film of "unrelenting awfulness" that "lurches drunkenly from crazy comedy to Mills and Boonish melodrama in the space of a couple of scenes".Bonnie Malkin of The Daily Telegraph stated: "Local critics had worried that the much-anticipated film Australia would present to the world a series of time-honoured Antipodean clichés. Their fears were well founded".In her review for Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, "The second half of Australia, Luhrmann's attempt to pull off a wartime weeper, is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure. I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist".