SINCE his eye-catching 1992 debut, the ugly duckling fairy-tale Strictly Ballroom, Australian writer/director Baz Luhrmann has left us in a swoon with beautifully crafted stories of romance across the social and cultural divide.

His daring reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes married dazzling spectacle with devastating emotion, qualities echoed in the Oscar nominated musical Moulin Rouge! Now, the master filmmaker works his magic on his biggest canvas yet, paying tribute to his homeland with a sprawling love story set during the years before the Japanese bombing of Darwin.

Australia is a sweeping, old-fashioned epic that marries Catherine Martin's ravishing production design with Mandy Walker's breathtaking cinematography - a shoe-in for the Oscar.

Split loosely into three, tonally distinct chapters (comedy, romance, action), the film casts a heady glow for well over two-and-a-half hours as Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman generate enough sexual tension to melt the celluloid.

Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) leaves behind the finery of the English aristocracy to travel to the Australian outback and confront her husband Lord Ashley on the Faraway Downs cattle station, where he spends most of his time.

She finds her husband dead and a huge property in financial disarray, on the brink of takeover by scheming King Carney (Brown), who controls most of the local cattle market.

With the help of a swarthy drover (Jackman), Sarah decides to challenge Carney's monopoly by herding 500-strong of prize cattle all the way to port.