No Worries (1993)

Matilda Bell (Amy Terelinck) is an independent 11 year old growing up on a sheep station in western NSW, during a severe drought. Many local farmers have already gone bust, but her parents Ben (Geoff Morrell) and Ellen (Susan Lyons) are just about holding on – until the Federal Government drops the wool price. A severe dust storm kills a lot of their stock; the rest must be shot. The family is forced to move to Sydney, and Matilda stops speaking. Her only friend is a Vietnamese girl, Binh (Ngoc Hanh Nguyen) whose parents have been killed by pirates during the voyage to Australia. When Matilda runs away from home, Binh and her uncle help to find her.

Stories of life in rural Australia were very common in Australian film up to the late 1930s, but they are much less common in our modern cinema. No Worries deals with the terrible social cost of drought, through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl whose whole life has been shaped by her parent’s outback farm.