The excitement generated by productions like Mystery Road exudes in publicity for its follow up film, Goldstone. ‘We are seeing a whole new “Queenslandgenre” film mixed with outback western grit and characters who survive in our tough yet spectacular outback terrain. Goldstone showcases the very best in Queensland storytelling, craftsmanship and, indeed, our unique cultural diversity and voice on screen,’ says the CEO of Screen Queensland, Tracey Vieira (quoted in Press Release 2015). The praise is fully warranted for Ivan Sen, except that it is not for Sen, it is for Queensland. It is no slight to Winton or to Sen to observe, as the previous chapter shows, that the same film was nearly set in Moree. In fact, some of it was filmed in Moree, which, in any case, sits very close to the border between Queensland and New South Wales. The Proposition was made in Winton in preference to Bourke in New South Wales.

The competition for film spaces goes back much further than this to Buddies (see Introduction), for instance, which was made in Queensland in preference to South Australia, and South Australia won out for Bitter Springs over Queensland (Verhoeven 2006). There are stories, too, of the local film-makers who could not make their films in Queensland and had to go elsewhere (see Craven 2013). Ivan Sen, moreover, is a case study in how these distinctions of state-based identity can be arbitrary and fluid. He is not usually identified as a Queenslander, although his birthplace, the small community of Toomelah, is on the state border and he spent his early life ‘about 60kms upstream in […] Queensland’, and later lived in Tamworth and Inverell, in New South Wales (Mills 2015). While he acknowledges the impact of the Winton landscape on the development of his script for Mystery Road, Queensland's contribution is mainly infrastructure, in the form of locations, and the local impetus of the townspeople and local authorities (see Chapter 8). Attribution of all the ‘storytelling’, ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘voice’ to Queensland suggests a consuming influence of infrastructure.