Cool Change (film)

Cool Change is a 1986 Australian action film directed by George T. Miller. It stars Jon Blake and Lisa Armytage.

Plot
A park ranger is caught in a conflict between farmers and conservationists.

Cast

 * Jon Blake as Steve Mitchell
 * Lisa Armytage as Joanna
 * Deborra-Lee Furness as Lee
 * David Bradshaw as James Hardwicke
 * Alec Wilson as Bull Raddick
 * Alan Fletcher as Rob Mitchell

Production
The film was shot on location in Mansfield and the Victorian Alps.

Burrowes said "My role is that of an entertainer. What one must not do is confuse the political reality with the entertainment reality. Cool Change I hope is not a polemic, not an exercise in didacticism. To make a low budget love story in the country, which is what I wanted to do... well, it would have been churlish to have turned one's back on the issue. It does not aim to solve the controversy of the High Country."

Critical reception
The critic from the Sydney Morning Herald called the movie "a spectacularly simplistic propaganda piece for the cattle farmers of the Victorian high plains".

According to the Ozmovies website: "The film will perhaps now be mainly of interest to an academic constructing a thesis on the environmental wars in Australia in the 1980s - there's rich pickings in the caricatures, stereotypes and confused treatment of the issues on hand in the film (such as the film explaining how the cattlemen are the guardians of the high country, caring for it, while at the same time the incompetent heroine is overstocking her run, and the cattlemen are conspiring to help her out)."

Box office
 Cool Change grossed $60,868 at the box office in Australia, which is equivalent to $132,692 in 2009 dollars.