Of all the filming locations in Australia – the cities, rainforests, outback, beaches, bush and mountains – Broken Hill is one of the most iconic.
It has been famously used as the setting for Mad Max 2, The Adventures Of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Razorback, A Town Like Alice and the classic version of Wake In Fright.
Had not heavy rain turned the desert into a flourishing garden, George Miller would have shot Mad Max: Fury Road there instead of shipping the cast, crew and scores of vehicles to Namibia. More recently, hopes that he would film two new instalments in the outback city have been blocked by a legal battle with Hollywood studio Warner Bros over payment for Fury Road.
But such is the appeal of the area – the desert, mines and what one local calls “a whole town that’s like a movie set” – that Broken Hill has attracted shooting for the films Last Cab To Darwin and Strangerland, the US television series The Leftovers, the Ten Network’s remake of Wake In Fright and the Foxtel mini-series Fighting Season since Fury Road was forced to leave.
And now Locusts has landed.
