AustLit

From an original storyline by Ralph Smart, Bitter Springs is a pioneering drama that centres on the conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people over rights of access to water. In the early 1900s, the King family treks some 600 miles to take up the property they bought from the government. When they arrive, they clash with the local Aboriginal tribe. The waterhole on which the local people depend for survival is now part of the Kings' property. When one of the Kings is speared, the family decide to compromise rather than fight, and a deal is struck whereby both parties agree to establish a profitable sheep station around the waterhole.

The story is notably liberal in balancing the point-of-view of encroaching European settlers with Aboriginal claims for land rights, coincidentally contemporaneous with the emergence of the liberal, pro-Native American Hollywood Western with Broken Arrow (1950).