GETTING PICTURE FILMS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 227, 23 March 1912, Page 7

GETTING PICTURE FILMS.

* ■TOURNEY OF 30,000 MILES. Thirty thousand miles is a long way to no for a cinematograph film'(savs the London Standard). Add tribes of savage and treacherous black men. an si [most unknown country, and a superabundance of venomous reptiles, and one is able to form a very fair idea of the kind of enterprise cheerfully undertaken bv the cinematograph operator in pursuit of striking lilms. The gentleman making tin's particular trip is Mr. A. L. Haydon, who has written books about various .quarters of the globe, and is making a special study of the world's mounted police. He is going out for the Warwick Trading Company with recommendations from Sir George Reid. High Commissioner for Australia, and from the Minister for the Interior at Melbourne, to spend two or three months up country in the Northern Territory of' South Australia taking cinematograph pictures. The Northern Territory remains t.e this day a geographical enigma. Practically nothing has been learned of vast stretches, of the region since Burke and Wills crossed it on their disastrous expedition of forty years .ago. A few vast ranches are scattered over a great silent land of tropical forest, wide grass stretches, bird-covered lagoons. To the rest of Australia this Northern Territory

is a hinterland of romance. From time to time stoekmen on the overland route enter Queensland from it. The few stories that have been extracted from these silent and saturnine men have fired the imaginations of the residents in the more familiar and settled regions. It has become a commonplace to say that nobody can tell what is to be found in the Northern Territory. ■Mr. Ilaydon, therefore, should get some striking films. He hopes to get a picture of one particular remarkable thing of which he has never seen a photograph, though drawings have been done by naturalists. This is a snake corroboree. It is now pretty thoroughly established on several excellent authorities that at a certain season of the year one may, in the midst of a desolate marshy plain, come suddenly on an old tree stump, on and around whicj} are several hundred snakes so densely intertwined as to form a solid mass. The snakes are conducting what appears to be some sort of solemn tribal dance—hence the name of corroboree. Another of the sehemes Mr. Haywood outlined to a Standard representative is to lie in wait all day hidden with his cinematograph apparatus beside a water hole. At one period of the day the animals and birds of the plain and forest troop to the water hole to drink. . This is what Mr. Haywood hopes to get. 'Certainly a living picture of "all Australia" parading down to the water-hole should be fascinating. He is also going to make scenic pictures—the Macdonnell Range, in the centre of the country, is rumored to contain some of the finest scenery in Australia—pictures of the snakes at home, and pictures of native life, including the various elaborate tribal dances. Mr. Haydon, who was to start last month, will go first to Perth, then northward along the coast to Broome and the "ninety-mile beach," the Asiatic corner of Australia, where he~will' take pictures of the Japanese and Polynesian pearl fishers at work. He will then go on to Port Darwin, and from there start his 800mile journey into the interior. Afterwards he will go to Sydney. Fronf Sydney he will leave for South Africa, where he is to be the guest of the Natal Mounted Police,; who have promised to' take him all over Natal and Zululand, showing him native life there.