The Torres Strait Islands feature in the archive of the earliest media in Queensland in A.C. Haddon's ethnographic films of Islanders in 1898 (see Introduction). Much later, the Torres Strait Islands were fictionalised in the ‘South Seas’ films identified by Landman (2006; 2013), and discussed in the previous chapter with respect to Sanctum and its comparable use of Landman's notion of scenic melodrama. The television mini-series discussed in the present chapter, the six episodes of RAN: Remote Area Nurse (Caesar and McKenzie 2006) and the 10 episodes of The Straits (Andrikidis, Ward and Woods 2012), invoke the imperial romance of exploration in unknown territories, but within a postcolonial frame and with contrasting insights on the places and people of the regions depicted. As expansive small-screen dramatisations of the Indigenous residents in contemporary settings, these productions also offer perspectives on the idea of paradise in Queensland, and reinscribe in various ways the tropes of eccentricity, excess and epic journey to diverse ends.

In RAN the spectacle is confined, in depth, to the location of the production, the tiny island of Masig (aka Yorke Island) in the Torres Strait. In The Straits, in contrast, the action moves in and out of Far North Queensland, and the (fictional) Montebello family's kinship networks and business dealings in the Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG), although the production was largely filmed in and around the city of Cairns in Far North Queensland. The liminality Landman associates with the Torres Strait Island setting of some of the South Seas films is detectable in The Straits in the movements and modes of transport that convey the Montebello family around the narrative places, and, in RAN, in Helen Tremain (Susie Porter), the Gaibuis and other islanders, to and from Masig Island. While such movements are not unusual in Australian television that situates its subjects in remote locations, the liminality of the region is embedded in the numerous scenes in each series that begin or end with plane or boat landings. A signature gaze in each series, in the edit breaks and establishing views, grants a perspective on the places of action as if from a low-flying aircraft.