Bush Christmas on AllMovie

An entertaining and exciting adventure story for any age, Bush Christmas, set in the Australian outback, has three tense situations developing along parallel lines: Ben (Peter Sumner) and Kate Thompson (Vineta O'Malley) have to pay off the mortgage on their homestead by January 1st or they lose everything; manager Bill (John Ewart) and lead singer Sly (John Howard) of a struggling outback band find themselves desperately broke and decide to "borrow" the Thompson's prize racehorse to run a few races and recoup their loses; and finally, the two Thompson children, Helen (Nicole Kidman at 15) and John (Mark Spain) along with a British cousin (James Wingrove) and a ranch hand Manalpuy (Manalpuy) decide to chase after the horse rustlers and retrieve the family's beloved stallion. Most of the film shows the two inept horse thieves trying to make their comic way across an inhospitable terrain, and the children braving unexpected dangers, as when they fall into an abandoned mine shaft that starts to fill up with water. When these various adventures are resolved, the Thompson family is faced with a final, fateful chance to pay off their mortgage by entering their recaptured racehorse in a New Year's Day cross-country race.