‘Last Cab to Darwin’ by Jeremy Sims

Taxi driver Rex from Broken Hill, Australia, is given three months to live. Remembering his father’s protracted death in hospital, he decides to drive 3,000km to Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory where Dr Nicole Farmer has developed an assisted dying machine that has recently been legalised. Rex is a white Australian who has never left his hometown. Before he sets off, he leaves everything including his house and his dog in his will to his black neighbour and secret lover Polly. On his way he picks up Tilly, a young drifter and wannabee footballer, and Julie, an English nurse backpacking across the country. Together, they help Rex reach Dr Farmer’s clinic where she tells him he requires several professionals to sign off on his case before he can use her machine. While Dr Farmer is working to secure the signatures, Rex gets through to Polly and tells her he wishes he had married her; she says she would have said yes if he’d asked. Rex is hospitalised in Darwin and asks Julie to (illegally) hook him up to the assisted dying machine, but at the very last minute he pulls out the tube which would give him a lethal injection. He says goodbye to his new friends and returns to spend his last weeks openly living with Polly.

Despite its potentially challenging content, ‘Last Cab to Darwin’ was hugely successful in Australia and New Zealand grossing AUS$8m, most likely due to its strong central performances, its beautiful outback scenery and its satisfying romantic ending. Adapted from a 2003 play of the same name, the film is based on the real case of Max Bell, a taxi driver who made the same journey in 1995 during the short window when Australia’s Northern Territory had passed the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 to become the first place in the world to legalise any form of assisted dying. Dr Farmer is modelled on Philip Nitschke, founder and director of euthanasia advocacy group Exit International, who was then working as a general practitioner. Unlike Rex, Bell was refused access to assisted dying and died in hospital back home in Broken Hill. Nitschke went on to help four people end their lives using his Deliverance Machine before the Australian Government’s Euthanasia Law Acts 1997 effectively overturned the Northern Territory’s earlier law. While Bell’s case has been a rallying point for some assisted dying advocates, the makers of ‘Last Cab to Darwin’ offer a more nuanced scenario in which Rex’s decision to end his life (and, ultimately, not to enact this decision) sits within a typically ‘Australian’ view of life that incorporates self-determination and a cold beer with your buddies alongside the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the mystical qualities of a road trip through the Outback. The film was released in the same year that the first Restoring Territory Rights Act was defeated in the Australian parliement, a bill that led to many states ultimately legalising forms of assisted dying.