Cunnamulla is arguably Dennis O’Rourke’s greatest film, because it was his most purely cinematic and most personal. It takes place in the remote outback Queensland of his childhood where the harsh landscape, the people, and the cadence of their language were in his blood. We are introduced to the characters in the town of Cunnamulla without judgement or sentimentality. They are on the margins of society, at the end of the railroad line both literally and metaphorically. Nothing much happens in their lives and everything happens. Hopes, aspirations, love, and humour coexist with petty animosities, racism, and death. Cunnamulla is deeply intimate and profoundly universal. It was Dennis’s poem to Australia and the people whose value and beauty he believed has gone unrecognised.