Imagination

Selling Queensland as an International Production Location

Since the opening of the Gold Coast film studios, many films and television dramas have used Queensland places to ‘stand in’ for somewhere else; or as some imagined fictitious place. The Gold Coast hinterland has been ‘imagined’ as Mexico, South East Asia, Timor, North Carolina, and Montana, USA. Gold Coast’s beachside suburbs have doubled as Malibu, California, Hawaii, Florida, and Sydney; as well as representing the Gold Coast in Coolangatta Gold, Getting Square, Blurred, Goodbye Paradise, Walk the Talk, and television programs H20: Just Add Water and The Strip. Fraser Island played Fraser Island in Eliza Fraser, but it has also played the part of the Caribbean in Fool’s Gold; and when you look closely at Spooky Island in Scooby Doo it is possible to make out Tangalooma, Moreton Island. On the other hand, films such as Peter Pan, Ghost Ship and Fortress have story settings that are almost entirely recreated in Gold Coast sound stages. This map encapsulates the ambitions of the Australian film and television industry to imagine Australian landscape as a variety of story settings. It was created by the marketing agency AusFilm on behalf of a consortium of Australian businesses, regional authorities and state governments focused on attracting international production to Australia. 'Australia, anywhere you want to be', AusFilm, 2006

Plan of the River Brisbane &c by John Oxley, Surveyor General of New South Wales. Published 6 February 1825 by John Murray Albermarle Street London. Insets show the Mouth of the River, and Chart of Moreton Bay with the Brisbane River. Oxley names the area to later become Mount Coot-tha, 'Glen Morrison Range'. Collection of the National Library of Australia.