Award-winning filmmaker Warwick Thornton is making his debut at Red CentreNATS in Alice Springs this year, turning heads not with a polished show car but with a rugged, heavily-modified 1970s Toyota FJ 40 bull chaser that he jokes requires a tetanus shot just to drive.
The festival — a sister event to Canberra's Summernats and a celebration of all things horsepower — kicked off this week, drawing hundreds of amateur and professional car enthusiasts to the Northern Territory's centre and providing a significant boost to the local economy across four days of events.
A decade-long passion project from a mango tree
Thornton, a Kaytetye filmmaker best known for landmark Australian films Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country and a winner of the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, has harboured a lifelong love of cars alongside his celebrated screen career.
His Red CentreNATS entry has been a labour of love for roughly 10 years. He and his son, filmmaker Dylan River, brought the vehicle back to Alice Springs from the Top End after discovering it in a state of near-total ruin.
"I found it under a big old mango tree, covered in bat shit, rotting — just completely rotting," Thornton says.
Where another person might have seen scrap metal, Thornton recognised something worth saving: a piece of outback station history. He has since spent countless hours tinkering in backyards and sheds around Alice Springs, coaxing the vehicle back to life.
The finished product is unapologetically raw. Bull chasers are stripped-down, short-wheelbase four-wheel-drives built for punishment — fitted with heavy bull bars, reinforced steel side plates and gutted interiors designed to tear through rough terrain. Thornton's version retains every bit of that no-frills character, and by his own admission, currently has no brakes.
What is a bull chaser — and why does it matter?
Bull chasers are a product of necessity, purpose-built by station workers to muster scrub bulls across the vast, unforgiving landscapes of Central and Northern Australia.
"These things were built to get in there, give [bulls] a tap with those tyres on the front, or give them a slap on the arse with that big side plate there, and push him out where there would be a bull catcher [with a mechanical arm] waiting," Thornton explains.
Amber Driver, who owns Elkedra Station approximately 400 kilometres north of Alice Springs, says similar vehicles are still in active use on stations today, describing them as "quite an iconic part of the Central Australian and also Northern Australian cattle industry."
For Thornton, preserving this particular example carries deep personal significance. "I have such love and respect for this," he says. "This would have been flogged."
Where filmmaking and car culture collide
Thornton draws a direct line between his passion for cars and his craft as a storyteller. He points out that Australian car culture has long been fertile ground for cinema, and says he was absorbing those films well before he ever considered a career behind the camera.
"Where they intersect is in storytelling," he says. "Lust and envy and a certain amount of madness is the basis of storytelling. There are so many great Australian films about car culture and I was watching that even before I thought I'd be a cinematographer, let alone a director. It's always been a part of me."
The bull chaser he is entering at Red CentreNATS is not his most beautiful car, Thornton acknowledges — but it may be his most meaningful. The Mad Max-esque machine speaks to the ingenuity and hard labour of outback station life, and to a filmmaker who has always found his stories in the Australian landscape and the people shaped by it.
Red CentreNATS continues across Alice Springs over the coming days, with car and motorbike events drawing competitors and spectators from across the country.
