There’s a kind of town you come across in the Northern Territory now and then. A pub, a few weather-beaten buildings, maybe a servo if you’re lucky, sitting alone beside the highway as if the rest of the country forgot about it years ago. Larimah is one of those places. Blink while driving north from Daly Waters and you’d miss it entirely. But after watching Last Stop Larimah, you’ll never forget it.
The film circles around the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty, a hard-drinking bush character who vanished one day in 2017 along with his little dog. In any ordinary town it would’ve been odd enough. In Larimah, where the population could nearly fit around a card table, it turned into something between a murder mystery and a bush ballad.
What makes the documentary work so well is that it understands the Territory instinctively. It doesn’t arrive with a clipboard and a superior attitude from Sydney or Melbourne. It lets people talk. It lets silences hang in the air and it understands that Territorians often say the funniest things completely by accident, and that half the truth out bush is hidden inside exaggeration, gossip and old grudges.
And Christ-on-a-Bike, there are grudges in Larimah.
The townsfolk eye each other off like characters from some subtropical western. Everybody’s got a theory about Paddy. Everybody’s got a complaint about somebody else. One woman keeps a collection of homemade dolls hanging from trees that would frighten the life out of you after dark. Another resident carries on like a frontier publican from 1953. There are barking dogs, rusted machinery, warm beer, old caravans and enough personal feuds to start a small war.
The remarkable thing is that none of it feels forced. Australians of a certain age will recognise these people instantly. Every small town had a few once upon a time. Blokes who’d gone north after marriages collapsed. Women tougher than wire. Old bush workers who drank too much, talked too loud and somehow survived everything the country threw at them.
The Territory itself hangs over every scene. Those huge empty distances. The glare coming off the road. The sense that civilisation is a very thin arrangement out there and could blow away in the dry season wind. The filmmakers are wise enough not to overdo it. They let the country speak for itself.
What stays with you afterwards isn’t really the mystery, though that’s compelling enough. It’s the feeling that you’ve glimpsed a fading Australia. Not the tourist-brochure version with infinity pools and sunset cocktails, but the old north where people could still disappear into the scrub and where communities ran on gossip, resilience and sheer bloody-mindedness.
There’s a sadness underneath it all. Larimah feels like the last flicker of a world built by fettlers, drovers, station hands and wanderers who preferred hard country to easy company. Towns like it are disappearing now. The highways got better, the traffic got faster, and modern Australia slowly flowed around them.
But for an hour and a half, Last Stop Larimah takes you back there. Back to the beer-stained bars and dusty verges of the old Territory. Back to an Australia that was eccentric, suspicious, hilarious and strangely free.
A wonderful documentary. Funny without trying too hard, unsettling without becoming morbid, and full of affection for the people of the north. Exactly the sort of story the Territory tells best.
By David Ironside
Available to view in the UK on Netflix.
Picture credit: By http://www.impawards.com/2023/last_stop_larrimah.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78798121
