The price of glory: Screen icon to reflect on his ‘flawed hero’ of the Australian Outback
Forgotten classic of Aussie cinema Burke & Wills is being revived to open the 2026 Asia Pacific Screen Forum on the Gold Coast, with one of the film’s stars, Jack Thompson, on hand to introduce it.
Aussie film icon Jack Thompson has picked one of his favourite films to open the 2026 Asia Pacific Screen Forum on the Gold Coast.
On October 28 Thompson will take centre stage for the forum’s special screening of the Australian classic Burke & Wills. Thompson will be on hand for a Q&A session at the Event Cinemas Pacific Fair screening. presented by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Australians don’t receive knighthoods anymore, but sometimes some of our icons had a title slapped in front of their name. Chief among these is Jack Thompson or Sir Jack, as he might have been known in a parallel universe. Because if anyone typifies Australian acting aristocracy, it’s him, having bestridden our cultural scene for more than five decades like a (occasionally naked) colossus.
A key film in Thompson’s oeuvre, Burke & Wills is about to be given a fitting tribute. Thompson, who served as president of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards Academy for many years, personally selected Burke & Wills for the forum, calling it “one of the most significant and demanding experiences of my career”.
This 1985 epic, about the greatest, bad decision-makers in Australian history, came along at an interesting time in Thompson’s life. He’d been nationally famous since the early 1970s, thanks to the triple punch of Petersen, Sunday Too Far Away and Caddie, not to mention his exotic private life (orphaned at a young age, adopted by a poet, stints as a soldier, jackeroo and University of Queensland arts student, Cleo nude model, polyamorist).
By the mid-’70s Thompson was getting fed up with playing two-fisted macho types, to the great relief of Bryan Brown who rose to fame in roles Thompson rejected. Instead, Thompson moved into character parts in Australian film and television (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Breaker Morant) while simultaneously developing an international career.
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He narrowly missed out on Flash Gordon and The Thing and popped up in prestige American television (The Letter, A Woman Called Golda) and art house films such as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. By the mid-’80s Thompson was very well established, although he had not reached the level of, say, Mel Gibson and Bryan Brown.
This was in part because he didn’t really care. Jack Thompson was a character actor trapped in the body of a leading man. He then morphed into the body of a character actor, and nothing exemplified that more than Burke & Wills.
‘the role of Burke is one of Thompson’s best – he gets to try his Irish brogue, hop into bed with Scacchi, battle sand and camels and then die spectacularly’
There had been various attempts to film the Burke and Wills story over the years. Tony Quayle was going to do one in the 1950s but could not raise finance. A 1961 attempt from director William Sterling started shooting but ran out of money before it could be completed. Terrence Rattigan wrote a script in the late 1960s, which was almost made a few times but money again proved elusive. It’s hard to do camels in the desert on the cheap.
In the early 1980s, however, the planets aligned. Director Graeme Clifford, one of the world’s top editors (he cut the famous sex scene in Don’t Look Now), who had long wanted to make a film about the Burke and Wills story, became “hot” off the back of his 1982 biopic, Frances. Finance was raised through Hoyts-Edgely, a company formed in the wake of the success of The Man From Snowy River, in which Thompson had played a key cameo.
Clifford gave the actor a copy of the script at Los Angeles Airport. Thompson read it on a plane and agreed to play Burke while he was outside the business class toilet, somewhere over the ocean. British actor Nigel Havers was imported for the role of Wills while Greta Scacchi was cast as Burke’s “girlfriend”, singer Julia Matthews (in the film they are a couple but in real life Burke was more of a stalker).
The reported $9 million budget made Burke & Wills the second most expensive Australian film of all time, just after Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The shoot was difficult, in part because Clifford insisted on filming in the actual locations which, as Burke and Wills could have told you, are a little on the isolated side (there’s a reason why “the Burke and Wills tourist trail” never became a thing).
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The movie’s world premiere was held in late 1985, in front of Prince Charles and Princess Di, who were in town to help celebrate Victoria’s sesquicentenary. Princess Di probably would have preferred to have gone to a taping of Countdown, and Burke & Wills failed to recoup its original cost. It did not help that another Australian film on the same topic was released at almost exactly the same time, the more comic Wills & Burke starring Garry McDonald and Nicole Kidman.
Nonetheless, the years have been kind and Burke & Wills is a film that deserves reappraisal, mostly because we don’t make movies like this anymore – expensive epics that take our nation’s history seriously.
And the role of Burke is one of Thompson’s best – he gets to try his Irish brogue, hop into bed with Scacchi, battle sand and camels and then die spectacularly. If the film’s script gives Robert O’Hara (“I’m going to shoot at those Aboriginals trying to give me food”) Burke more triumphs than he enjoyed in real life, well, that’s the movies.
After Burke & Wills, Thompson never got the opportunity to top-line a big-budget historical saga again, although he came close when he narrowly missed being cast as Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s List.
Thompson has never lacked work, with scores of terrific performances on the small screen (The Last Frontier, McLeod’s Daughters) and large (The Sum of Us, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mao’s Last Dancer). In recent years, the 86-year-old actor has battled various health ailments – prostate cancer, kidney failure – but keeps ploughing on through with the love of his family and his craft, not to mention a dialysis machine.
Jack Thompson’s movie career is a little like his life – unexpected, rich, eclectic and endlessly fascinating. As a proud republican he wouldn’t care about a knighthood but somehow it seems fitting to write … Thank you, Sir Jack.
Check out Burke & Wills on the big screen, the way it should be seen.
Burke & Wills is the opening night film of the 2026 Asia Pacific Screen Forum, October 28 to 30, which runs alongside the Australian International Movie Convention and the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
eventcinemas.com.au/movie/burke-and-wills#cinemas=23&date=2026-10-28
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