Misspelled (as Muloornia) on countless filmographies until it was posted on YouTube by its director David Cobham some fifty years after it was made, the John Barry-scored, British Petroleum-produced short film Muloorina chronicles the aborted attempt by British speed demon Donald Campbell (1921 – 1967) to break the world land speed record in his famous Bluebird CN7 in May of 1963. The venue was Muloorina, South Australia, a rugged outback settlement adjacent to the vast Lake Eyre. It hadn’t rained in the region for an eternity (estimates vary between nine and twenty years) and conditions were said to be perfect on the dried-up salt bed. Cobham’s spry, 27-minute film starts out by focusing on the Price family that farms this inhospitable land, raising livestock—patriarch Eliott Price narrates with a lyrical insouciance. Times are tough, belying the homestead’s name (Muloorina is Australian for “plenty of tucker”), and it is with some financial relief that the family welcomes Campbell and his entourage into their fold, providing food, shelter, and other resources for the latest world-record attempt. The film documents Campbell’s ramp-up towards the final run which never came to fruition, because the rains came instead. Light at first and then torrential, the storm flooded the area and caused the project to be abandoned. Campbell would return to Lake Eyre the following year, however, and finally fulfill his dream (403.10 mph) prior to his fatal world water speed record attempt three years later—I was only five years old at the time but can still recall the shocking footage of Campbell’s Bluebird K7 somersaulting on Cumbria’s Coniston Water in January, 1967. Wall-to-wall music, at times dramatic, playful, and somber, orchestrates Campbell’s first visit to Lake Eyre, and Muloorina proves a capable and fitting tribute to a man who just had to go faster.
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(c) 2016 David N. Butterworth
butterworthdavidn@gmail.com
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