Director Baz Luhrmann says his epic Australia combines comedy, romance, action, social activism and “a big dollop of drama.”

Twentieth Century Fox / Douglas Kirkland

Its director is Australian. Its stars are Australian. Three of its writers are Australian. It’s set in Australia. It takes an epic lens to a rough-hewn era in Australian history. And, oh yeah: It’s called Australia.

But Baz Luhrmann wants us to get one thing straight. The film is not actually about Australia. In making it, he wasn’t trying to capture the scope and richness of his homeland.

“Strangely, no,” he says. “It’s called Australia in the same way it’s called Casablanca. Casablanca is not really about Casablanca. It’s Casablanca as a metaphor for refugee people — people going somewhere, coming somewhere from somewhere else. Australia is a metaphor for the far away.”

By this thinking, the country is just the canvas for the story — a place of wide, forbidding landscapes where characters embark on their own hazardous emotional journeys. The film, Luhrmann says, “is about people who are unhappy in their life and have lost the ability to feel. And so they put all of their energy into their Ferragamo shoes or their horses or their material goods. And then they find themselves in the far away of the far away, and have a relationship, and engage in experiences, and force themselves to step outside their comfort zone.”

Just who, exactly, is doing all of this relating and engaging and stepping? Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, well-known to American audiences as X-Men’s Wolverine and Satine the courtesan in Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! In Australia they play a rugged cattle herder (or “drover”) and prim English noblewoman who meet, argue, join forces against a villainous rival and drive 1,500 cows through the Northern Territory to the port city of Darwin — just a few years before its bombing by Japanese forces in 1942.

Along the way, they fall in love. It’s inevitable: Both of them are, to put it mildly, gorgeous. Luhrmann laughs when he’s asked about this — why are Australians so good-looking? — and then hems and haws about Jackman’s good humor, fine nature and healthy lifestyle. (Sure. That’s why People magazine named him this year’s “Sexiest Man Alive.”)

Getting Luhrmann to expound on the Australianness of Australia, is a bit fruitless. But he does describe it as “Australian in its DNA.” And with a cast that includes several aboriginal actors, the movie directly addresses the nation’s mistreatment of its native peoples — in particular, the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous and mixed-race children who were removed from their families and reared in missions, orphanages and foster homes.

Back in February, Australia was in post-production when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to the aborigines — roughly 40 years after the practice ended. “That’s the great scar of our history . . . an undealt-with issue,” Luhrmann says. He worked those stolen children into the script, but “I wanted not to be didactic about it — in the same way as Gone with the Wind and slavery.”

The mention of a film from 1939 is not accidental. Neither is Australia’s obvious kinship with other chestnuts of American cinema, from broad-shouldered Westerns to The African Queen. Luhrmann isn’t surprised by the comparison between John Huston’s beautifully crabby riverboat tale and his own film’s opening act — in which a Bogarty Jackman ferries a Hepburnish Kidman across the Outback, quarreling along the way. He isn’t surprised because that was his plan all along.

“This is what I tried to make!” he says. “It’s what I wanted to make. In fact, I look upon the first twenty minutes — it is The African Queen.”

The movie is meant to be a feast, he says — a large and sumptuous repast offering a splash of comedy, a helping of action, a forkful of social activism, “a big dollop of drama” and a simmering vat of romance.

The result is “a huge entertainment, a banquet of cinema” that begs comparisons with a certain national holiday. “The bottom line is,” he announces, “I’m inviting all of America to Australia for Thanksgiving.”