A light aircraft, two days, and somebody else’s job
Exploring remote Australia, and telling the stories of the people who live there.
The series
Australia is mostly a very long way from anywhere
From the air you see it properly: an hour of nothing, then a strip, a shed, a set of lights, and someone working. Then another hour of nothing.
Every one of those lights is somebody who chose to be there. Some for the isolation. Some because their family has worked that country for four generations. Some because they saw an opening and gave it a crack. What does it take to make a living out there, and what keeps them going?
The Outback Aviators are a group of pilots and film makers, flying across that vastness and landing on whatever is there, dirt, grass or bitumen. We spend a couple of days in each place helping out the people who do it every day. Harvest. Hauling net at four in the morning. Heading underground with opal miners, or mending fence.
What we are after is the raw, gritty work of providing for Australia, and the people who power it.
The work
We do the job with them
Not a demonstration. The actual day. Mustering, drafting, shearing, lamb marking, running a bore, hauling net at four in the morning, fixing whatever broke overnight.
The work is the spine of the episode, not a segment inside it. People stop performing and start correcting you, and the conversation happens sideways while both pairs of hands are busy. We have not done most of it before, which is the point. The audience learns at our speed.
Some of it we will not be allowed to do. Tickets, licences and plain competence rule out plenty, and we would rather film a job properly from a metre away than pretend to do one badly. We turn up as an extra pair of hands, not a crew that needs looking after.
Two full days on the ground in every place, on their schedule rather than ours.
The leg in
The planning, the weather, the fuel and the strip. The distance is real because you watch it happen rather than hear about it.
The job
Days alongside the people who do it every day, on their schedule, until the work has a beginning and an end.
The leg on
What the place looked like after all that, and the flight to whatever comes next.
“An interview gets you answers. A day spent failing at someone’s job gets you the person.”
Where we are headed
Season one, in planning
Queensland first. Twenty towns across five flying loops, and the kind of work that keeps a long way from anywhere running. Six of them here, to give you the idea.
Manufacturing / Bundaberg, Queensland
The Build
Jabiru Aircraft is one of a handful of companies anywhere that builds both the airframe and the engine, and it does it in a shed in a Queensland coastal town. Composite layup, machining, assembly, and a test flight off the strip next door.
Two days on the floor, making the parts that become the aeroplane the rest of the series is flying.
“Everything that flies out of here started as a roll of cloth and a drum of resin.”
Agriculture / Roma, southwest Queensland
Sale Day
The largest cattle selling centre in the southern hemisphere. Thousands of head through the rail in a morning, sold in a language most Australians cannot follow at a speed they certainly cannot. Around it, coal seam gas wells going in on the grazing country that feeds the yards.
Two days: a sale day at the yards from the four o’clock start, and a muster on a property that supplies them.
“You get about four seconds to decide what an animal is worth.”
Resources / Boulder opal country, Quilpie
The Dig
A claim is a few hundred metres of dirt and a theory. The work is machinery, dust and repetition, and it pays nothing at all until the day it pays.
Two days on the claim: moving overburden, cutting, washing, and looking at rock that is almost always just rock. The people who do this have usually done it for decades and can tell you exactly why this seam, this depth, this direction.
“You can be wrong for three years and right on a Tuesday.”
Aviation / Longreach, central west Queensland
The Hangar
Qantas was a shed and two aeroplanes here before it was an airline, and the hangar is still standing. Around it is some of the best sheep and cattle country in the state, and a town that has spent a century working out what to do when the wool price moves.
Two days: in the hangar, on a station, and in the yards. The reason an airline started in a place like this is the same reason we are flying to it.
“There were no roads worth the name. That is why it had to be an aeroplane.”
Marine / Mackay, Queensland
Marine Services
Four in the morning on the wharf, fuelling boats that are about to go a long way out with no second chance at it. Trawlers, reef tenders, the vessels that service the anchorage.
Two days on the water and on the hardstand: the pre-dawn turnaround, the run out, and what happens to every schedule on the coast when the weather closes in and nothing moves.
“The water is a dangerous place, and they still go in knowing what is under them.”
Aviation / Burketown, Gulf of Carpentaria
The Cloud
Once a year, around the end of the dry, a roll cloud a thousand kilometres long comes in across the Gulf at dawn. Glider pilots fly in from everywhere to ride it. It is called the Morning Glory, and nobody can tell you which morning it will arrive.
The rest of the year this is a barramundi town at the end of a road that shuts for months. Two days: in the air if it comes, and on the water if it does not.
“You cannot book it. You can only be standing here when it happens.”
Season one is in production planning. These are the kinds of places and work we are building it around, and every location depends on the people who actually do the job saying yes.
The map
Five loops, twenty towns
Each block is a self contained flying loop out of Bundaberg, set in one region and shot in one run. The aircraft comes home between each one, which is what keeps a weather delay costing days instead of a whole block.
Block one / four locations / 947 nm / shot in one run
The South
- Goondiwindi. Cotton at scale
- Cunnamulla. Behind the fence
- Charleville. Shooting at the sky
- Roma. The biggest yard there is
Block two / four locations / 1,480 nm / shot in one run
Channel Country
- Quilpie. The dig
- Eromanga. Oil and dinosaurs
- Birdsville. The end of the track
- Thargomindah. The town that lit itself
Block three / four locations / 1,570 nm / shot in one run
Central West
- Longreach. Where the airline started
- Winton. Matilda and bones
- Bundaberg. Home of aircraft manufacturing
- Boulia. The Min Min light
Block four / four locations / 1,444 nm / shot in one run
The North
- Mackay. Marine services
- Charters Towers. The World
- Hughenden. On the Flinders
- Julia Creek. The bore run
Block five / four locations / 1,899 nm / shot in one run
The Gulf
- Karumba. Where the prawns come from
- Normanton. The Gulflander
- Burketown. The Morning Glory
- Adels Grove. Lawn Hill
Why Queensland, why fly
Most Australians cannot picture outback Queensland
They can picture the reef, the islands and the rainforest, because those have been filmed for fifty years. Ask them to describe Winton, Birdsville or the Gulf and you get very little, because almost nobody has put it on a screen.
One state runs from the Gulf to the Granite Belt, and roughly half its people live outside the capital. Cotton, cane, grain, cattle, sheep, prawns, coal and opal inside a single border. A season crosses every industry in this series without ever leaving Queensland.
A light aircraft reaches those towns in hours instead of days, which is the only reason a small crew can get to twenty of them. It is also the first difficulty in every location. The weather, the surface, the fuel, the daylight. The flying is planned on camera and it is not made to look easy.
Watching it
A fixed slot, and we keep it
Episodes land online, free, on a day that does not move. The slot is a promise, and going dark once costs more than starting late.
A new episode, same day, same time. Every episode resolves on its own, so you can start anywhere in the series and not feel behind.
A vertical short cut from Thursday’s episode, for Shorts, Reels and TikTok. The quickest way to find a channel you have never heard of.
Who makes it
Light Studios
A Queensland film and production company that has spent a decade making factual series about flying and the people who do it. Outback Aviators is directed and shot by Stephen Limkin.
The Will to Fly
Thirty five years of Jabiru Aircraft, from two men in Bundaberg who wanted flying to cost less to one of the very few companies anywhere that builds both the airframe and the engine. Told by the people who lived it.
Touch the Sky
Eight women from different backgrounds learning to fly, featuring Catriona Rowntree. Financed by Screen Australia in association with Documentary Australia and Screen Territory. Winner, Online Series Production of the Year, Screen Producers Australia Awards 2024. Winner, Best Documentary, International Online Web Fest. Held in the National Film and Sound Archive.
The Aviator
Bob Tait OAM has put more pilots into Australian skies than almost anyone alive. The film follows him taking one last journey through the system he helped build, sitting for a Recreational Pilot Certificate himself.
Fading Sands
Climate change and the loss of land in the Solomon Islands, made with World Vision across three trips and seven communities. Broadcast on SBS and NITV. Winner, Prix Okeanos, 14th International Oceanian Documentary Film Festival, Tahiti.
Taking Flight
Twenty two episodes inside a Sunshine Coast flight school, following a film director who is frightened of flying and decides to get his licence anyway. Shot week by week from the seat, with the fear intact and the theory not yet learned.