MAKING Australia was a journey. I grew up in Herons Creek, a small town in New South Wales, but I spent most of my adult life in Sydney, and then Paris and New York. I hadn't really got to know my own country. Making the movie was my whitefella walkabout.

I started in Broome. It transformed my view of the Outback. Growing up, I had always thought of the Outback as a red-earth, fly-infested kind of place. But it's not like that up there. Broome is fresh, clear. It's one of the few places where the desert simply disappears, flat, into a sea that is so azure that you cannot look at it. The beaches, such as Cable Beach, are the best in the world.

I rode camels along the beach. I went up to Cape Leveque peninsula. The Buccaneer archipelago is a must. You fly over these rock formations and grave sites of Dutch buccaneers from the 18th century. There is a great boutique hotel in Broome called McAlpine House, and a few local breweries make great home brews.

I found Nullah, the Aboriginal boy, in Broome. Before I could cast him, I had to go to the bush to meet his family. I went ripping down off-road from the Great Northern Highway in a four-wheel drive. I stopped at a roadhouse where people passing through had nailed the sleeves of their shirts to the wall. I've no idea why.

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I ended up at Eighty Mile Beach in traditional Aboriginal land south of Broome. We went hunting kangaroos. We ate bush tucker. We fished for barramundi. One day we were on the water and I was sitting next to Auntie Doris. I saw out of the corner of my eye a flash and thought: “That looks like a shark.” But then I thought: “No, it couldn't have jumped that far.”

Later that day I went swimming and then passed out from the heat under a blue tarpaulin. I woke up to find the kids pulling an old fisherman out of his boat because he had almost had his leg bitten off. I told Auntie Doris I thought I had seen a shark. And she said: “Yes, I saw it, too.” I thought: “Doris, you could have told me before I went swimming.”

From Broome, I went farther east to Kununurra, which has this huge dam with more water than Sydney Harbour. It's an amazing oasis in the desert.

The best places to stay are these giant old mansions that used to belong to the diamond mining bosses. They look like German cathedrals. In the morning we had to fire an air cannon to scare away the 10,000 cockatoos that would fill up the trees.

I created Faraway Downs (the homestead owned by Lady Sarah Ashley, played by Nicole Kidman), on Carlton Hill Station, a working cattle station in the Kimberley, a two-hour drive from Kununurra.

The cattle stations there really are the size of small countries. The main place to stay in the region - and where I shot the cattle-driving scenes - is El Questro Station. There is another station, Home Valley, which is run by an indigenous group.

It sounds corny, but it's true that you can discover yourself in a place like that. You can't try to impose your schedule, your will, on it. If you do, you are going to end up very unhappy - and maybe dead.

But if you surrender to it, you suddenly find yourself all right with yourself. It's easier to like yourself out there than it is in your world because you realise there is just you. You spend a lot of time in your own head.

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