Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman)
Lady Sarah Ashley is a beautiful and charming lady. She is an inspiration too. This can be shown when all the men are smitten with her at the charity ball of the "Children's Island Mission”. Besides that, Mr. King Carney of the Carney Cattle Company willing to offer 500 pounds to have the first dance with Lady Ashley at the charity ball. Besides that, Lady Sarah Ashley is a headstrong British socialite. She spends her life in pursuit of superficial perfection, but a loveless and childless marriage has left her bereft of anything meaningful beyond her stable of horses. The only thing that she truly loves is her horse. Convince that her husband, Maitland Ashley is cheating on her during his trip to Australia to sell Faraway Downs, Lady Ashley travels from London to the remote tropical outpost of Darwin, Australia to confront him. When she arrives at the Faraway Downs, she finds that her husband has been murdered.
When in the Faraway Downs, she finds herself caring for an enchanting young orphan called Nullah, a half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian boy adrift in a segregated society that treats him as an outcast. She protects Nullah. This can be proven when Nullah yells that Fletcher lies. Fletcher runs after Nullah and hits him, and in the process, hits Nullahs mother and grandmother. Sarah runs over and smacks Fletcher with a riding crop, and fires him on the spot. She knows that if she fires Fletcher, she will have no one to help her to drive the 1,500 head cattle to Darwin, but she still fires Fletcher instead to protect her property and Nullah’s family. She also loves Nullah like her own son. She is a good mother, but she is unable to have a child on her own. So, she shows her fully mother love to Nullah like her own son. She is willing to sell Faraway Downs to Fletcher, believing that it will aid her in gaining Nullah back from the Mission Island. She is also willing to stay and work in the city for the Army at their radio headquarters. She has made friends with Fletcher’s wife. She hopes that one day she gets to see Nullah. When the Mission Island was attacked by Japanese Air force, she worries and fears that Nullah is dead. In turn, Nullah is the catalyst that opens Sarah’s heart and brings her and the Drover together. Nullah causes them to really look at why they are here in the world. Sarah’s newfound warmth and openness transcend the barriers she has put up between herself and the world around her, allowing the Drover to see another side of this complex woman. The Drover comes to really respect and admire her. That’s what Nullah does for Sarah and the Drover on a deeply emotional and spiritual level.
She has determination to help the Aboriginal children. She thinks that the treatment of the Aboriginal children by the authorities which called Stolen Generation is very bad. They capture the Aboriginal children and put them in the Mission Island. They take away the children from their mother. She loves Nullah, so she has a will to adopt Nullah. Although she knows that adopting aboriginal child is much more complicated, she still wants to adopt Nullah. She meets up with a doctor who runs the mission, and she tries to convince him to stop taking children away from their mothers. She attempts to make the upper class whites realize that half-aboriginal children belong to their mothers and not the government, but the organizers of the mission insist that Aboriginal women forget their “offspring”, comparing them to animals more than people.
She is a responsible person too. After she fires Fletcher, she knows that she needs to drive the cattle to Darwin. She needs to find ways to solve this problem. The only way she thinks is to find someone to help her to drive the cattle. She thinks that Drover is the most suitable person. She faces some problems when asking him to help to drive the cattle. First, Drover unable to drive the 1,500 head cattle with just him and two other men .Second is Drover thinks that she can’t win against Carney, so he advises Lady Ashley grabs King Carney’s offering and goes back to England. She begs Drover to help her. At last, Drover agrees to help Lady Ashley with a condition that Lady Ashley gives him her horse, Capricornia. To complete the task of driving the cattle to Darwin, she is willing to give her beloved horse to Drover.
Lady Ashley surprises herself and others around her when as she rises to the challenges of her new life and responsibilities. To save Faraway Downs, she joins forces with the Drover and drive 1,500 head of cattle across Australia’s breathtaking yet brutal landscape. The Drover’s trusted Aboriginal stockmen Magarri and Goolaj, the alcoholic accountant Kipling Flynn, Nullah and Nullah’s grandmother Bandy help to drive the cattle, while the cook Singsong helps to carry their belongings.
Transformed by the power and beauty of the land and her bond with Nullah, Sarah becomes the woman she truly wants to be, and her contentious relationship with the Drover gives way to grudging respect, admiration and finally, loves. But during the course of the story, she sheds a lot of the barriers that she’s built up to protect herself. She becomes the woman she truly wants to be, and she finds love – for a child, for a man and for the land. But when the sinister machinations of war reach the shores of Australia, she feels that she is fighting against the world, she is at her most authentic and true because she realizes that she has something to fight for and it will take passion, courage and determination as great as the mysteries of the ancient continent to protect the people she loves. She needs to protect her new family. When the government authorities capture Nullah and spirit him away to the Mission Island to live with other banished half-caste children, she only think that she need to bring Nullah home. She not fears to the war.
At the end of the Australia movie, she is able to meet back Nullah and Drover. She gets back what she wants: child, man, land and love. They go back to the Faraway Downs. She agrees to let Nullah to follow King George runs off because she knows that walkabout is the Aboriginal’s traditional. The government finally ended their Stolen Generations policy in 1973.
