When Bachelor of Film Production graduate Roe Bonnici was considering a queer bushranger story for their capstone film project at SAE University College Melbourne, they floated the idea with a classmate.
“We were talking about how I wanted to do a bushranger film and make it a bit gay, because I can. He came back and said, ‘There’s no such thing as a gay bushranger. There were no gay bushrangers’,” Roe said.
With a laugh, they added: “I’m a very spiteful person, so I began diving into research just to prove him wrong,”
What Roe found was an often-forgotten history of bushrangers who fell outside the typical white, heterosexual male presented in Aussie westerns and historical dramas.
“There’s written accounts [of queer bushrangers], most notably Captain Moonlight. There’s notable accounts of female bushrangers as well; Jessie Hickman, Mary Anne Bugg, Mary Winter. They existed, but their stories aren’t nearly as known. I wanted to change that.”
The film Roe went on to make was Ballad, a tender, romantic period drama which shows love blossoming between two women, one of them a bushranger disguised as a man on the run from authorities.
“In my research, I realised that there was such a dominance of violent, male-focused stories presented in screen media, reflective of a narrative that was pushed even to the British settlers; that Australia was a rough ‘man’s’ world. Indigenous Australians and women didn’t exist in that hypermasculine fantasy,” they said.
“I wanted to tell a story that focused on the woman we knew were there but were not reflected in storytelling.”
Film festival success
Clearly, others saw the same value in the story; the short film developed as part of Roe’s Bachelor of Film at SAE has screened at some of the country’s, and the world’s, largest queer film festivals.
“We premiered at Perth Queer Film Festival, which was great, and then we were in Geelong Queer Film Festival, which was amazing,” Roe said.
When they got an email to say they were in the LGBTQ+ Los Angeles Film Festival (and had taken out the title of Best Short Film) it was hard to imagine a bigger moment. But in November, the film showed in the Australian Shorts and Awards package at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, nominated for Best Short Film.
“That was like a dream come true,” Roe said. “To have something screening in my own city where I can take my friends and family and kind of celebrate the success. But also the prestige of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival was massive. I look at the lineup of other films that Ballad is sitting alongside and it’s just, it’s really validating as a filmmaker.”
Asked if the comment from the classmate was really the driving force behind the film, Roe said it was also about paying homage to their mother, and all the romance films they would watch together growing up.
“It was a little bit of a love letter to my mum and her love of the genre, and also to myself as a teenager,” they said.
“It was about making a film that reflected my experiences. I just wanted to see a film that I might have watched as a teenager that would have provided more clarity or more reassurance to me.”
SAE supports diverse students
Roe said studying with SAE had been a central ingredient in their success.
“I’m a neurodivergent person so the hands-on, project-based learning at SAE was huge, I don’t think I could have done it at another uni to the same level of success,” they said.
- Roe Bonnici, Bachelor of Film graduate
Ballad continues its festival run next year at Queer Screens Mardi Gras 2025.
