If YouTube removes this full-length movie again, there's always archive.org to fall back on
I was born both too early and in the wrong country to have grown up with the children's books by Colin Thiele: "Albatross Two", "Shadow Shark", "With Dew on My Boots", "Sun on the Stubble", "Blue Fin", "The Fire in the Stone", and "Storm Boy", to name just a few of more than a hundred titles. The last four were made into films, of which "Storm Boy" is my favourite.
Colin Thiele was born on November 16, 1920 in South Australia. His family was German, and he didn't learn English until he entered primary school. He was just a regular kid who went to school, but he showed a tremendous amount of creativity. In 1941, Thiele graduated from the University of Adelaide and went on to be an educator. He fell in love with teaching children, and he began putting his creative ideas to use by writing children's fiction and books on education. Read more here.
(I have a confession to make: for a long time I mixed up Colin Thiele with that Australian actor known for his resonant baritone voice, Leonard Teale, and I wasn't far off because his birth surname had been Thiele but he adopted the homophone Teale as his stage name. Who does not remember him in his long-running role as Senior Detective David "Mac" Mackay in the TV drama "Homicide" from 1965 to 1973?)
But back to my favourite Colin Thiele story "Storm Boy" which is about a boy, Storm boy, and his father who live alone in a humpy among the sandhills between the Southern Ocean and the Coorong - a lonely, narrow waterway that runs parallel to a long stretch of the South Australian coast. Among the teeming birdlife of the Coorong, Storm Boy finds an injured young pelican whose life he saves. From then on, Storm boy and Mr Percival the pelican become inseparable friends and spend their days exploring the wave-beaten shore and the drifting sandhills.
It is so much more than just a children's story which is perhaps why it was made into a beautiful movie in 1976. I was reminded of it when I found the DVD of a 2019 adaptation of the same movie with Geoffrey Rush and Jai Courtney at Vinnies. It runs a poor second to the earlier version with Greg Rowe, Peter Cummins, and David Gulpilil, but I picked it up anyway to give to a friend together with a copy of the book.
Even children (and adults) in far-away France read the book now!
