The significance of the setting
The journey Nao and Charlie make in No Country for Girls spans over 2000 kilometres of mostly remote country between Whadjuk Country in Perth and Bardi Jawi Country up on the Dampier Peninsula north of Broome. The setting moves from suburban cemetery through pastoral land to cattle and mining country, from coastal plain to mulga scrub and spinifex to pindan, traversing the traditional lands of many different groups of First Nations Australian people. For much of the time the girls are on Great Northern Highway, one of the most remote sealed roads in the world.
For Charlie, the landscape once she and Nao get out on the highway is terrifying, a place where people die and where it’s ‘creepy as fuck, like that movie, Wolf Creek.’ When the two of them are stranded in an isolated location she’s afraid they’ll be ‘toast for a perv’ or have to ‘drink their own piss’ to survive.
For Charlie’s sister Geena the landscape is one of riches, the wide-open country ‘like a kind of gravity’. She knows her plants and can identify them, and she remembers learning about the goldrushes at school, ‘how men would find nuggets the size of their fists lying out on open ground.’
For Nao, the unknown country they are headed into feels more like a lawless freedom. For her, in terms of what she is running both from and towards, ‘north feels like space’ as well as being saltwater country and a possible connection with her father who died when she was a young girl.
Each of these characters is running towards something in the landscape as well as away from what is behind them on the road.
For Charlie’s sister Geena the landscape is one of riches, the wide-open country ‘like a kind of gravity’. She knows her plants and can identify them, and she remembers learning about the goldrushes at school, ‘how men would find nuggets the size of their fists lying out on open ground.’
For Nao, the unknown country they are headed into feels more like a lawless freedom. For her, in terms of what she is running both from and towards, ‘north feels like space’ as well as being saltwater country and a possible connection with her father who died when she was a young girl.
Each of these characters is running towards something in the landscape as well as away from what is behind them on the road.