Radiance was the first feature film Rachel Perkins directed, and she co-wrote the screenplay with Louis Nowra, the author of the play Radiance (1993) on which the film is based. Marcia Langton has noted the significance of familial narrative in Indigenous women's film-making, and she places Radiance in this context, describing the film as ‘melodramatic’ and ‘redolent with its theatrical origins’ (2003, 53). These qualities are apparent in this chapter, but are approached through the relationship between locations, setting and narration, as well as the process of transposition from play to film. It is a film that readily draws the local gaze, and North Queensland audiences fall for its recreation of the setting in North Queensland. The house, the sugar cane fields, the beach and the island are regional sign systems, to use Whitlock's phrase; some audiences experience these features as familiar. The director, Rachel Perkins, who grew up in Canberra and trained as a filmmaker in Alice Springs, tells how she set the film in Queensland to honour the original setting of the play, and she speaks of travelling to Queensland to gain the ‘atmosphere’ of the place, and to choose locations (‘Interviews’ 2003). In fact, the locations chosen were far from North Queensland, and closer to Central Queensland: Agnes Water, Rosedale, Childers, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay, as well as Max Film Studios in Sydney. Nora Island, a key location in the fiction that is seen in the distance in some scenes, was ‘a fabrication although some people swear they recognise it,’ says Nowra (2000, xiii). Radiance therefore comes to stand for the power of film to suggest a reality, and for the sometimes uncanny role of settings in film narrative.

Little in the dialogue of Radiance explicitly anchors the setting, apart from Nona chiding Cressy for not referring to Queensland in publicity about her origins: ‘[N]o mention of Queensland. Here. Mum. Mae. Me’ (Perkins 1998). This is incidental to the illusion of North Queensland in Radiance, except for the way it is homologous with the illusion of home around which the drama is constructed. Radiance curls through gothic passageways that evoke the disturbing history of the region of North Queensland. It challenges the pre-Mabo cinema myth of Queensland as paradise.