Robert Forster

And he's in Paris in the 1880s as a young man.

And he meets the Lumineer brothers, who are basically the first filmmakers, you could say.

He gets a job with them as someone who they're sending these people out to the world to film almost like natural things.

I mean, there's not much narrative to cinema at this time.

And so it's more spectacle and it's throwing two, three, four minute films up on a screen.

This is in the 1890s.

And so they're sending out these people with cameras, basically, that they've made out to the world.

And Claude's one of them.

And he comes to Australia where he meets one of the characters who will stay with him through the story and through the book.

And it's also obviously a tip to the hat from Dominic Smith and that the country that Claude is sent to is Australia.

So Dominic Smith, as a novelist, has his territory covered because he obviously knows more about Australia than most.

Yep.

She's dying.

Yeah.

Yep.

She's dying and he films her dying, which missed a number of other things that he films to prove to the Luminaire brothers that he's given a camera as a trial.

And so he films her dying, which basically gets him the job because this is an unusual thing to film.

He does, and it brings in another thread to the book of illness because later on Claude will become the father of, in a sense, the stepfather, I guess, of these two children because a character dies of consumption.

Illness sort of plays a role because it comes at the end of the book as well with the Spanish flu of 1918.

So sort of illness comes in, dying, comes in three times through the film.