“I’ve been trying to contact them to find out what’s happening, but they just won’t speak to me,” says Ms Limb, 62, who lives on the NSW north coast on a disability pension after a near-fatal accident. “The last email I received said I’d have to seek independent legal advice in respect to any rights." No one, however, has been able to track down who actually owns the copyright, with such documentation missing. Until ownership is proven, the rights remain up in the air. The film came back into the limelight after its negatives, also missing, were tracked down in the US and were restored, with the film re-released in 2009, and the book on which it was based recently made into a TV mini-series. The Wake In Fright Trust says money from the film’s royalties is being put back into the Australian film industry. “Which is what Bobby and Dawn would have liked,” the trust said. “We decided to make a trust to put the money into film and developing programs. I don’t know how much money there is; I would have to go and look it up.”

John Grant, played by English actor Gary Bond, in Wake In Fright. Credit:Madman.com.au The movie, about a young Sydney schoolteacher who becomes stranded in the outback, loses his money and goes on a barbaric kangaroo shoot, was a major critical success, was nominated for the top prize at Cannes on its original debut. Renowned US critic Rex Reed said of it: “In the final analysis, it may be the greatest Australian film ever made.” Mr Limb, however, had his production company with his one surviving partner Jack Neary, deregistered in 1992. He died seven years later and his wife Dawn, who played barmaid Joyce in the film, died in 2006 at the age of 78, with their share of NLT assets of movies and TV programs all left to Ms Limb. Mr Neary also died, leaving his share to his widow June Neary, now 94. She later went on to set up the Wake In Fright Trust with another member of her family and the film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, who’d managed to track down the missing negatives after a 13-year hunt, and then painstakingly restored them. “We set up the trust in 2008 to look after the income from the restored version of the film and income from its future use,” says Mr Buckley, who resigned from the trust in 2015. “Debbie had a very bad accident and that took her out of circulation for quite some time but, to be truthful, I don’t know how the trust money is being allocated.

“There must be some money there. The film’s done well for Madman and the American distributors for the rest of the world.” Wake In Fright has since been re-released in multiple territories including the US, the UK, France and Japan, sold internationally by Madman Entertainment, screened across Australia and played on TV, on both the ABC and Fox. There’s also a DVD. The trust has made regular payments of $1000 to a number of students at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and had invested in a new global media tech hub, The Studio, started by one of the winning graduates. The trust has said in the past that the issue of copyright is “blurred” as it may have been passed on to ASIC during the deregistration. No documents are said to exist to show whether or not it did, but lawyer Beverley Hoskinson-Green says it’s unlikely they would have been given to, or retained by, ASIC. “The film was successful so when [Limb] put the company into voluntary liquidation it wouldn’t seem that there were liabilities, and I would be surprised if the copyright was distributed to anyone but the owners,” she says. “As a matter of principle, it does seem to be to be exceptionally strange that someone would say ASIC would hold copyright to a film. That’s not what ASIC does.”