Both the film and the score album for Australia were highly anticipated during the holiday season of 2008: marketing campaigns promised a massive, sprawling romantic epic, and hopes were high that David Hirschfelder’s score would be the gorgeously melodic and thunderously adventurous score that such a project begs to receive.
But while the score is indeed massive in construct and appropriately harmonious, even utilizing a healthy dose of aboriginal ethnic instruments, it fails to engage the listener whose expectations are too high. It occasionally reaches magnificent heights, and it is a suitably multi-dimensional score: but there remains a lack of a solid musical “hook” to keep the listener actively interested.
Musical Styles and Themes in Australia Soundtrack
To be sure, there is no shortage of melodies, but they are long-lined and often played at drawn-out tempi, making them difficult to pinpoint, much less remember. The score’s most memorable thematic device is probably the snippets of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that only occasionally peek out from the swelling string chords, and the use of the song’s melody is certainly appropriate with the film’s depiction of Australian continent as a real-life Land of Oz.
Some western-inspired, cowboy-style music briefly shines out with welcome nobility and bravado in those portions of the score written for the cattle-driving scenes, showing marked similarities to Bruce Broughton’s best work for the genre.
But for the most part, the music of Australia is deep, heavy, textured, and melodically uninteresting. Distant brass solos and plaintive woodwind meanderings are lost in bass-heavy washes of the string section, and there are many cues that utilize tired dissonance, tense high-range strings and droning tones to accentuate emotional difficulty.
Lack of Melodic Direction in David Hirschfelder's Score
The action cues are grating and suitably compelling, but they rely largely on textural, hugely rendered layers of orchestral rhythm and stabbing mayhem, without even the benefit of a simple anthemic chord progression to give the music a sense of direction. Choir is added at a few select points, and is notable when it appears due to its scarcity in the overall mixture, but it is used in a distant, supporting role rather than an upfront one, making its effect largely negligible.
And that, in the end, is what the score suffers from most: the lack of musical direction, of sonic narrative, of emotionally engaging storytelling. Emotion is apparent, but it feels forced and bland. The music is nearly constantly harmonic, soothing and free-flowing, but it suffers from a certain stagnance and even monotony: there is a great deal of music in the film and very little of it goes anywhere worth noting.
Summary
In an age when a great deal of “epic” scores are simply retreads of outdated anthems and victims of temp-track addiction, one might suppose Australia to be of superior quality: and indeed it is in some respects. It is thoroughly composed and impressive orchestrated, and the performing ensemble betrays no electronic supplements.
But even the most sincere and well-meaning of scores will suffer from an anonymity of this kind, and the fact that there is no official release for the score need not upset collectors: there are other, bigger, tastier fish in the film score ocean.
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