For a movie that features a brutal battle in a metal cage and countless automotive fireballs, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third in the franchise, has a Saturday matinee feel, with a lot of its conflicts and come-uppances having slapstick elements and few real consequences. Like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released the year before Thunderdome, it has a cast of children for the hero to save, and their resourceful tricks help outwit the baddies.

The Lost Tribe are the descendants of vanished survivors, banded together in a concealed gully. Like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan with their Never Never Land, they dream of another place: Tomorrow-morrow Land, a paradise of progress and comfort they’ve dreamed up from salvaged remnants of the pre-‘pox-eclipse’ world. When Max (Mel Gibson) stumbles upon them, he becomes their reluctant protector and guide, complicating an existence based on ruthless self-interest. While the children’s pidgin language and naïve misinterpretations of Western technologies can edge gratingly close to racial stereotyping, their presence does offer a relief from the dog-eat-dog desert world.

Nestled within a chase-and-fight scene is a poignant sequence featuring two of the children, Anna Goanna (Justine Clarke, who would go on to be a Play School presenter) and Mr Skyfish (Mark Spain). Max shows them how to play a record that they’ve cherished for years, thinking it’s a communication device that will summon them help. In fact, it’s French lessons, which the two bemused children parrot until they find something that resonates: ‘I’m going home.’ Max takes an inexplicable break from the fight to orchestrate and register this moment, a culmination of the glimmers of empathy that his time with the children has stirred. Mel Gibson once referred to Max as a ‘closet human being’ – this is Max cracking the door, a softening skilfully conveyed by Gibson despite his near-total stillness.

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