[citation needed] For most of his childhood, Dennis O'Rourke lived in a small country town, where his parents ran a failing business, until he was sent to a Catholic boarding school for his secondary education.

[citation needed] In the late 1960s, after two years of fruitless university studies, he went travelling in outback Australia, the Pacific Islands and South East Asia.

[citation needed] O'Rourke's film Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age was screened at a Leicester Square cinema in London in 1986.

[citation needed] Controversy sometimes surrounded O'Rourke's interactions with, and depiction of, the individuals who were subjects of his documentaries, such as The Good Woman of Bangkok (released in 1991), which concerned a sex worker in Thailand and Cunnamulla (2000), which was made up mostly of monologues by residents of the Queensland town of the same name, discussing everyday life.

Immediately before his death, he had been producing and directing an uncompleted and unreleased feature-length documentary titled I Love a Sunburnt Country... – on the subject of Australian identity, as seen through the "poetic imagination" of "ordinary people".