Main Crew: prod, Charles Chauvel; dir, Charles Chauvel; writ, Charles Chauvel, Elsa Chauvel, Maxwell Dunn; dop, Bert Nicholas, Carl Kayser; ed, Terry Banks; mus, Henry Cripps.
Reflecting the pioneering spirit that has characterised the Australian image for the past two centuries, Charles Chauvel's Sons of Matthew is the resultant product of sheer determination and discovery on behalf of the film's cast and crew. In order to effectively capture the rugged beauty of the Lamington Plateau, Chauvel and his crew became explorers of sorts portraying some of the most unforgiving wilderness on the planet. In doing so, they epitomised the Australian will to tame the wilderness while, at the same time, glorified it, and discovered the truly awesome power of nature; playing unwilling witnesses to the reality of the story that they were attempting to convey.
Sons Of Matthew, much like Chauvel's earlier work, Heritage (1935), is one man's expression of the primordial Australian caricature - that of the 'Aussie battler'. Both in its narrative and in the events that occurred behind the scenes during the film's shooting, the grand Australian underdog is celebrated. During the shooting, Chauvel and his crew were forced to battle with the unrelenting and unpredictable forces of nature and, to some extent, showed little respect to the figures of authority that would have liked to shut down the film's production after it ran overtime and overbudget. Their dogged determination undoubtedly added a certain sense of realism to the events captured on-screen as well as inspiring Chauvel and Bert Nicholas' masterful glorification of the majestic and ruthless mountain wilderness.
The O'Riordan family, based on the real-life O'Reilly family, a group of close-knit Irish settlers, were simple folk who, out of desperation, embraced the seemingly impossible task of taming some of Australia's toughest land. In attempting such, the five O'Riordan sons were both united and pushed apart as their emotions took on a heightened sensitivity. Subject to a number of environmental catastrophies, their entrepreneurial quest was testing the relationships within the group - a matter not helped by the presence of Cathy McAllister, a simple young woman from Deep Creek, the former homeland of the O'Riordans. Shane, the oldest of the brothers, and Barney, Shane's successor to the title, both held strong feelings for Cathy and, in many ways, the high-spirited, virginal Cathy is symbolic of the wild, untrodden wilderness that both men wanted to tame. The Chauvels clarified this link early in the film when Shane, entranced by the thought of owning 600 acres of wilderness, said, "There's something good about cutting into a place where no man's been before".
