IMAGINED IDENTITIES: FOCUS ON AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

Mückler Hermann and Gabriele Weichart (eds).  Forthcoming 2012.

Australien. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert.  [Australia.  History and Society from the 18th to the 20th Centuries].  Edition Weltregionen,  Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,  Universität Wien [University of Vienna].

National cinemas are generally contrasted with a universal cinema which refers largely to US/Hollywood films.  National identities are reflected on film through the use of distinctive symbols and narratives which convey hegemonic meanings underpinning a sense of collectivity and mutual recognition. The national cinema approach is useful in some ways, but in the case of Australia fails to grasp the complex interplay of narratives and myths which construct Australia in the broader historical context (cf O’Regan 2002). Australian films brim with complex meditations on the question of “Australianness”, rarely celebratory, more often full of ambivalence, silences, doubt, irony, parody and the embrace of failure.

There have been many book-length studies of Australian cinema (Pike and Cooper 1980; Shirley and Adams 1983; Moran and O’Regan 1989;  Jacka and Dermody 1998a and 1998b; O’Regan 1996; McFarlane Mayer and Bertrand 1999;  ; Rayner 2000; Moran and Vieth 2006). These works usually include historical elements, consideration of industry development, funding, genre, production and acting. This paper will not engage with industry issues, except where these have materially affected the kind of films being made, but rather will focus on the films themselves, pursuing a cultural analysis.  Australian films do appeal to a system of conventional symbols and representations, but these are often inconsistent and contradictory, reflecting anxiety and traumatic residues of unresolved historical events and struggles over their memorialisation.

In an earlier paper (Hamilton 1991) I referred to the contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards culturally constructed “Otherness” in Australian cinema.  That paper was concerned with the dilemmas of representation with regard to the indigenous inhabitants (“Aborigines”) and the Asian immigrants who had settled much more recently.  I proposed the use of the concept of the national imaginary to refer to the way contemporary social orders produce images of themselves against others through new screen technologies which circulate as commodities both internally and internationally.  This followed from Benedict Anderson’s insights into the way imagined communities arise from the spread of representations through print media (1983) and has been widely applied in the context of  contemporary mass media and national identity.

In the following discussion I will focus on the way the Australian cinema has engaged in a constant struggle for self-definition both with, and against, an outside world of Anglophone societies especially the United Kingdom and the United States. The suppressed presence of the indigenous Other creates a third element.  Australian film seeks to perpetuate an identity as a “white” society, defining its inherent qualities as egalitarianism, fairness, courage in the face of impossible odds, abilities to survive in a dangerous physical environment, commitment to justice and a hatred of snobbery, fakery and elitism.  Yet, in order to sustain these images, which make the Australian a “better kind of white man”, the suppressed presence of non-white alterity has increasingly demanded recognition.  A crisis point was reached during the years of the Howard Liberal Government  (1996-2007) with acts of violence and racism particularly against Muslims seemingly reflected in national policy.  Hage suggests that the struggle over national identity reflects a “white fantasy” (Hage 1998).  In cinema, the “white fantasy” has only slightly been displaced in the past decade or so.  Most of Australian film history has reflected a kind of adolescent struggle against a parental order represented by the UK and the US, with occasional recognition of the problem of internal alterities. In the ambivalent silences of Australian film history, the question returns again and again:  What is a “real” Australian?

Early cinema: 1890-1914.

A travelling German exhibition showed the first films in Australia in 1896, but filmmakers were soon at work in several arenas, experimenting with the potential of the new technology to tell both universal and specifically Australian stories.  Some of the first filmmaking in the world occurred when the Haddon Expedition to the Torres Straits Islands, north of Australia, took remarkable ethnographic footage of an Aboriginal ceremonial dance in 1888. Four and a half minutes of this footage survives, some of which can be seen on Youtube. 

Pioneering anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer and his associate F. G. Gillen also grasped the potential of film for showing what Aboriginal societies and people did.  First in 1901, and later in 1912,  in the face of unbelievable difficulties many hours of film were shot as Central Australian tribesmen were inveigled into performing sacred ceremonies for the purposes of the camera (Dunlop 1983).

Later, as a feature film industry emerged, the conflicts between the immigrant settler society and the indigenous inhabitants were almost entirely ignored.  Even when filmmakers began to address these issues the most sincere efforts at sympathetic narratives and characters constantly foundered on a reluctance to fully explore the dangerous terrain of racism and genocide which lay at the heart of the historical record. In the 1960s and 1970s, largely due to the efforts of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, ethnographic reflection sought a dialogic relation using ‘participatory cinema’.  This included indigenous people but did not belong to them (Bryson 2002).  Only in the very recent past have indigenous people themselves been able to take up the camera and make their own films, to be discussed later in this paper.

Early Days: the Silent Era.

Prior to the beginning of World War One (1914-18), Australia had one of the largest film industries in the world.  In 1911, 51 locally-made movies were released.  A global market for films had sprung up, and Australian films were soon circulating in many exhibition markets.  Silent movies had no language barrier.  It was easy to present a film with live commentary in the host country’s language.  Inter-titles, texts on screen between scenes, were also used to tell the story.  The developing industry was interrupted by the war, and then the intrusion of the Hollywood distribution system, which arrived in Australia in 1915.  By 1918 all the major Hollywood distributors had opened offices, and the import of cheaply made American film quickly monopolized the Australian cinema screens.

Nevertheless, locally-made films still attracted Australian audiences.  If ethnographers began by making films of indigenous customs and practices, other filmmakers were not far behind in recording the customs and culture of the “white” Australians, who provided an endless source of fascination.  The world’s first feature film was the quintessential Australian tale The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).  It has recently been partially restored and an excellent copy is available on Youtube.  Information about the making of he film is also available.

Ned Kelly was, and remains, a great “underclass” hero in Australian legend, a bushranger of Irish origins who defended his family against the depredations of the colonial authorities.  Bushrangers remained a popular theme in Australian film for many years and in many styles.  The story of the Kelly gang was made over and again.  Censorship was in place by 1920 as so many bushranger films depicted the bushrangers as heroes and denigrated the police and judicial system. For a time bushranger movies were banned by the police for encouraging and glamorising anti-social and criminal activities (Goldsmith and Lealand 2010 p. 91).  Underclass heroes including convicts, bushrangers and urban and suburban criminals have occupied a central place in Australian cinema ever since. In the 2000s the “criminal” films included Chopper (Andrew Dominick, 2000), Dirty Deeds (David Caesar 2002) and Getting Square (Jonathon Teplitzky 2003).  While convict origins were considered a source of shame by the ruling class British and their elite descendents, today a convict history is recognised as something to be celebrated, if only for the courage and endurance shown by the unfortunate convicts in the face of almost unbearable cruelty from their jailers.  For the Term of his Natural Life (Norman Dawn, 1927) adapted from a popular novel by Marcus Clarke, was the earliest major film to establish this proposition. 

Australian audiences sought their own self-reflection, one which might make little sense to international audiences.  “Australianness” took on a particular quality.  Although Australia by 1920 was becoming an increasingly suburbanised nation, with an affluent and largely British-identified middle class in its main cities, films did not take these people or their lives as subject.  Even when the central characters were not convicts or criminals, they were usually uncouth, ill-educated and part of the poor working class or its rural counterpart.  Australians preferred these films, which spoke to their own sense of self, although international audiences were more interested in films showing kangaroos, emus, and noble white bushmen.

A romantic comedy The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford and Lotte Lyell 1918) based on a popular poem by C. J. Dennis was a big hit (Bertrand 1989; Brisbane 1991). Its characters were exaggeratedly low-class people living in the slums and tenements of Melbourne (although it was filmed in the Sydney slum area of Woolloomooloo). Its romance between the lead characters, “the Bloke”, a classic inner city larrikin and his lady love who works in a pickle factory was absurd, a parody of traditional romances.  The inner-city slum theme remained popular for decades.  The Kid Stakes (Tal Ordell 1931) told a charming tale based on a popular graphic artist’s work which appeared in the local Sydney newspapers.  The main characters were a gang of young children wanting to enter their prize animal in a goat-race.  The elite with their glamorous houses overlooking Sydney harbor provided the counterpart to the poor crowded tenements in which the children live.

Another popular series was known as the Dad and Dave comedies.  The first On Our Selection (Ken Hall 1932) shows the Rudd family pioneering untouched bushland to develop a farm. Dad is a strong father figure, and Mum struggles to keep a civilized domestic environment in the rough circumstances of the bush.  Dave, the son, is a simpleton, but one of the daughters is a strong bushwoman, capable and able to work hard and triumph against the odds.  Dad and Dave re-appeared in the 1970s but the sense of anachronism was too strong for the late twentieth century and no more Dad and Dave films have ever been made (although one later film, The Castle,  discussed below, owes much to the Dad and Dave sensibility).

 These films and others like them began the customary depiction of “real” Australian characters through a kind of gross stereotyping, offering  simplified images supposedly typically Australian although everyone in Australia recognises them as highly exaggerated and unrealistic.  They become a kind of reverse parody, as if the viewer is able to laugh at the characters’ mistakes and misapprehensions because in spite of their similarities, they are not the same. In later years some of the most successful films internationally have utilised the same exaggerated parodic figuration most notably the hugely successful Crocodile Dundee (1986).  Australian audiences took a kind of pride in identifying with this supposedly intrepid bushman, while recognising that its lead actor Paul Hogan was a famous local comedy figure renowned for his exaggerated “Australian” style and the events shown in the film were mostly absurd. Moreover, Hogan was also Australia’s official tourism representative (Rattigan 1988; Lucas 1998).

Crocodile Dundee can be seen as a kind of national advertising directed at the external world, mainly the United States.  The first half features an American in Australia (the female love interest, played by Linda Koslowski) and the second half features an Australian in America (Mick Dundee in New York). In The Man From Snowy River (1982) George Miller had tried to do the same, employing a famous American star (Kirk Douglas) and playing with the conventional Western genre to the extent that it is often termed a “Kangaroo Western”.    The film is based on a much-loved Australian bush poem which many to this day can recite by heart. Although it did well enough at the Australian box office, some critics were scathing.  Tom O’Regan described it as “ideologically bad, technically bad, masculinist, poorly scripted and shamelessly commercial” (O’Regan 1996: 137).  The desire to meld with US traditions (and markets) was too obvious; the film went too far in its attempted seduction of a foreign audience.

Embracing defeat: the war film

In the creation of its imagined identity, Australian participation in war has been a leitmotif.  While nations frequently draw strength from their war history, in Australia memory is revived not to trumpet victory but to celebrate defeat.  Australians may have been on the winning side, but the moments which provide core  film narratives reflect failure, and often incarceration, cruelty and death.  The key element is the self-sustaining quality of the Australian troops, and their defiance of their superiors, usually depiced as effete British upper-class officers who have no idea how to manage a campaign.  The fundamental value of male collectivity, the construction of authentic masculinity, and the ethics of mateship underpin the cinematic representation of these events. The  First World War has provided continued inspiration for Australian film for eighty years now, although with significant transformations (Reynaud 2007).

Popular observance of military history in Australia is centred on the annual celebration of ANZAC day.   ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and is held on 25 April each year to commemorate the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in 1915.  The motto of ANZAC Day is “Lest We Forget”. During World War One thousands of young Australians were called to defend the interests of the British Empire in the distant fields of battle in Europe and North Africa, where they usually joined the British working class as cannon fodder.  The Australians, however, according to the legend, were able to overcome this destiny and rather than dying passively in the slaughter found ways to defy the odds magnificently.

Among the critical moments in Australia’s military history no event has been more formative than the story of Gallipoli.  The popularisation of the Gallipoli story can in part be attributed to the sequence of movies taking this short episode as theme (cf Ward 2004). It is often thought that Charles Chauvel’s epic film Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) began the process, conveying a gripping sense of the wartime experience at a time when the world was preparing for yet another World War.  In fact, Forty Thousand Horsemen was not about Gallipoli, but depicted the amazing bravery of the Australian Light Horse in the attack on Beersheba in 1917, two years after the Anzac evacuation. Nevertheless, the film clearly refers to the context of Gallipoli, especially when the Turkish officers try to convince the Germans that the Australians are a dreaded foe who should not be underestimated.  The fighting qualities of the soldiers, the strong commitment to each other through the bond of mateship and egalitarianism, and the larrikin qualities which are seen as a lack of discipline by the officers are all evident in Chauvel’s reconstruction.

Although Forty Thousand Horsemen focussed on the special qualities of the Australian soldiers, it did not question the legitimacy of the links with Britain. Australians at that time still largely regarded themselves as “British”, not merely in origin but in race.  The violent racism of the Federation period remained well into the 1940s.  If Australians were able to prevail at Beersheba, it was in some part due to the fact that their enemies were Turks, who were by definition not “white men”, and equally to the fact that their pioneer prowess at surviving in the hostile Australian bush had elevated them above the normal run of the Britishers who were hampered by their hidebound ideas of class and traditional custom. In this depiction, Australians were superior both to “Turks” and to other “white men” including Germans, as well as the British.

During World War Two the Australian film industry was given over mainly to propaganda and documentaries.  Among the rare feature films was Charles Chauvel’s  The Rats of Tobruk (1944) starring famous Australian actors Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch.  Chips Rafferty also starred in The Overlanders (Harry Watt 1946), a British-Australian co-production showing a wartime cattle drive in the north of Australia under the imminent threat of Japanese invasion. This melded the Australians at War theme with the heroic bushman story, triumphing against the threat of an overwhelmingly superior enemy.  The link to Britain, with Australians as loyal subjects, remained evident.

Some twenty years later Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981) was considered a cultural event of enormous importance, renewing the meaning of ANZAC for another generation.  Mel Gibson played one of the two central roles, beginning his movie career as the epitome of virtuous but defiant Australian masculinity, to be reiterated in his roles in the Mad Max movies until the Hollywood system snatched him away from his Australian purity.

Gallipoli won every major film award and proved enormously successful at the box office.  It received Government support and remains a popular resource for teaching High School history.  To some extent it must be regarded as an “official” statement of public culture.  In Gallipoli new themes can be observed.  The enthusiastic militarism evident in Chauvel’s film is replaced by a focus on individual character and the random and meaningless elements of wartime events.  The film recounts the greatest failure of the entire campaign, where hundreds of soldiers perished in a few minutes.  In many respects it is an anti-war film. War is shown as stupid and pointless, but the moral purity and superior qualities of the Australian heroes are undiminished.  The film suggests that the real enemy was the despicable British, whose ineptitude resulted in the disaster that resulted from this phase of the campaign.  Although the exercise was futile, the Australians nevertheless undertook it because of their own indomitable courage even in the face of certain defeat. Astute critics noted immediately that the audience was being manipulated into a specific construction of the historical record (eg Lawson 1981 and see further discussion in Reynaud) .

Australian involvement in World War Two only came into focus decades later.  In Tim Burstall’s Attack Force Z (1982) a group of Australian commandos launch a secret mission against Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific.  In Blood Oath ( Stephen Wallace 1990) Australian Prisoners of War (POWs) are subjected to torture by their Japanese captors. Not until 2006 did a film appear about the war in New Guinea.  Kokoda (Alister Grierson 2006) depicted the extraordinary trials of the ill-trained and underequipped Australians during the nightmare latter phases of the war.

If few films were made about this major period of Australian military history, the almost complete lack of feature (i.e. non-documentary) films about any of the subsequent wars Australians were involved in is even more remarkable.  No feature film reflects the Korean War or the Malayan Emergency, although Australians were engaged in both. Unlike the ANZAC campaigns, these wars did not lend themselves to the customary Australian self-depiction. The same was true of the Vietnam war with one exception -  The Odd Angry Shot (Tom Jeffries 1979). It included a great deal of offensive language and nudity and was not well-received, largely being forgotten until the revival of interest in the films of the 1970s.

Several other war films carry the memorial burden more comfortably and allow the emergent sense of Australian distinctiveness to be celebrated even as the key characters fail.  Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) became an iconic film of the Australian renaissance, although it concerned a war which Australians had already forgotten (cf Hamilton 1990).   The Boer War (1899-1902) developed the familiar theme of  British perfidy in the reckless expenditure of the lives of “colonials” in its own self-interest. The British class system, the ethics of egalitarianism and the defiant courage and moral superiority of Australians were again themes underlying the construction of the film.  The central protagonist of the film, known as “The Breaker” for his horse-management skills, is executed by the British in the end.

Antiopodean Orphans?

By 1980 Australian popular culture was significantly distanced from its British identifications. Being British no longer provided an automatic identity for Australians and the idea that Britain was the Mother Country became less and less prevalent.  The 1971 British Immigration Act had removed automatic right of abode for Australian citizens.  As British links faded, the United States loomed ever larger as an external source of security and identity. American popular culture had been absorbed through film and then television for decades.  Most Australians felt the Americans had saved Australia in World War Two.  The Americans were largely admired, although with some ambivalence.  Then the flood of post-war refugees and immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s transformed the population mix.  Refugees from Central and Eastern Europe settled in the cities. Greeks and Italians arrived, many establishing farms in rural areas and working on national development projects.  They were in the 1970s joined by floods of refugees from Vietnam.

A protracted search was underway to create a viable sense of Australian identity.  It was no longer possible to be proud of being a “white man” or to consider oneself British.  At the same time, the extremes of masculinity, of mateship expressed in misogyny and drunkenness, was less and less tolerated.  Women had emerged into new roles.  They were increasingly employed in traditionally male roles.  Married women no longer stayed at home.  Organised feminism became stronger.  The invention of the contraceptive pill saw the emergence of sexual liberation, while homosexuality came “out” and began to be re-created as “gay identity”.  This was a very new, diverse and different Australia. The sense of unquestioned national identity was destabilised.  What kind of a country was Australia to be? Cultural production reflected a nation no longer proud and confident but increasingly uncertain, defiant and often resentful. 

Perhaps to compensate, the Australian Film Commission was established in the late 1960s to provide enhanced support for film production.  A national image was needed, both at home and abroad.  National identity as something to be consciously created became an increasingly accepted policy for arts and cultural production generally.  The Commission went on to fund numerous films throughout the 1970s. The favoured film-style was a strong drama which reflected a positive vision of Australian culture and history. This highly modulated and civilized mode of national representation was at the same time undercut by a much more lively and defiant identity expressed in a number of films which offered at once a celebration and a parodic critique of “the real Australia”, undermining the middle-class liberal respectability emerging in the cities.

A significant body of films made between 1969 and 1975  on very low budgets celebrated the Australian vernacular in speech and action.  Sometimes called “Ocker” films they were aggressively Australian and introduced slang and bad manners, and a concern with bodily functions (especially urinating and vomiting),  excessive alcohol use, compulsive interest in sexuality,  mindless violence and the revelation of all kinds of stupidity (see O’Regan 1989). The best known is probably The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford’s first film, made in 1972) where the humor comes from the use of vivid Australian idiom and a constant sardonic play on the way Australianness can overturn the respectability of Britain and its institutions.  Loutishness and vulgarity were celebrated. Although the Film Commission funded some of the Barry McKenzie films, they were highly controversial and were a major factor in stirring up demand for a more restrained and respectable film industry which would reflect an Australian image to overseas audiences of which the rising  middle-class could be proud.

Even more challenging were the independent low-budget films emerging from the lurid imaginations of fringe film-makers.  These films were hard to access and were seldom shown in public but had an enthusiastic fan-base.  If the Ocker films were disgusting, these were horrific in their revelation of an underside to the assumption of a picturesque national identity to be found in lovely landscapes and reconstructions of noble historical events.  Sometimes called  “Ozploitaiton” movies, they owed a debt to the underground movie culture of the US in the same era.  Great examples were Richard Franklin’s Road Games (1981), Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey Shoot (1982) and  Russell Mulcahy’s  Razorback (1984).  Although they had a cult following in Australia they have always been far more successful overseas especially in video and cable-TV markets.  Only recently have they been accepted as part of a legitimate Australian cinema history (Martin 2010). This restitution owes much to Mark Hartley’s film Not Quite Hollywood: the wild untold story of Ozploitation (2008) with its endorsement by cult director Quentin Tarantino.

The great film Wake in Fright (which had only a brief cinema run in 1971) can be considered a part of this group of films, although it was set apart by its origins and was, at the time of its release, considered “un-Australian”. Based on a novel by British writer Kevin Cook and directed by Ted Kotcheff  (a Canadian who initially knew nothing about Australia) the film was filmed in and around Broken Hill, a remote mining town located in the semi-desert.  It was entirely out of circulation for thirty years and had apparently disappeared.  In 2004 a negative was found in a warehouse in Pittsburg in a shipping container marked for destruction (Caterson 2006).  The film is now considered a triumph with its stark and terrifying representation of a kind of life beyond any urbanite’s imagination. It hinges on the anxiety of isolation in a harsh and foreign environment, as a respectable young school-teacher is forced to take up duties in a wild remote mining town. Events take him to the outer limits of Australian life, and into the gothic and gruesome darkness at the heart of what it really means to be an Australian (Rayner 2011).  The people in this small town scratch a living from mining, spending their time drinking, gambling, and trying to find some solace in loveless sex including homosexual rape.  The film takes apart the comforting myths of mateship, highlighting its coercive nature and cruelty.  This fine film showed a side of Australia which nobody at the time wanted to recognise.  The awful truth of a deep psychological malaise needed to be suppressed. The foreignness of director, screen-writer and British star also played a part in the rejection of the film. Urban audiences simply refused to believe that “that is really us”. 

By the 1980s the wish to sustain a respectable image of Australia came up against commercial considerations.  The Government became less willing to fund a steady stream of worthy but unsuccessful films. In 1981 a new form of tax scheme (the 10BA) was introduced, making it very attractive for any individual or business to “invest” in Australian cinema. In effect it functioned as a tax shelter, but it did lead to many successes.  If many critics found the AFC films insipid, the 10BA period led to a much more commercial and Hollywood inspired style, using elements of Hollywood paradigms to create an internationally viable form of film-making which remained to some extent true to its Australian mythic origins.

The Mad Max cycle is usually regarded as the greatest contributor to this new filmic landscape (Broderick 1993; Morris, 1998; Martin 2003).  The original Mad Max (George Miller 1979), starring the handsome and troubled Mel Gibson, brought together several American genre conventions in a uniquely Australian context.  An anti-bikie film, also a kind of Western due to its location in the bush, and a revenge film, the central figure of Mad Max presented an amalgam of Australian characters: the good and loving family man who goes mad with the need for revenge after bikies kill his family, the intrepid hero able to face up to all odds and triumph, the accomplished bushman unafraid of the uncivilized and untamed physical (and social) environment. The sequel, Mad Max Two: Road Warrior (George Miller 1981) extended the elements which made it highly palatable to the American audience.  The location is the desert, and the world is post-apocalyptic, although the narrative never explains what happened.  The characters become less Australian archetypes, and more recognisable to Americans. The landscape is used in ways much more familiar to viewers of traditional American westerns such as Stagecoach (1939) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967).

The director of the series, George Miller, articulated an emerging view that “national cinema” no longer made sense.  In his view, “the film industry is indigenous to the globe” (cited White 1984, p. 96). For him, a great film should not be considered first of all a means of promoting its country of origin.  Nevertheless the Australianness of many elements of the Mad Max films remained even if it was mainly Australians who could identify it.

The Outback.

Essential to the success of the Mad Max films and many others is the starring role of the Australian landscape (Metro Magazine 2010 Special Edition). As Australia has become increasingly urbanised the mythic power of the vast desert interior has become increasingly reflected on film.  For the nineteenth century white settlers, “the bush” was a space to be conquered through the removal of the dense forests and the creation of small “runs” on which cattle and crops could be raised.  Behind the “bush”, however, was the vast, unconquered interior landscape, still occupied by indigenous people, unknowable, dangerous, a world where the hand of civilization had barely touched the dry red sandy surface. 

The more civilized Australia became, the more the Outback loomed in the imaginary construction of Australia, experienced as a force, often almost supernatural in power, which shapes human characters and their destinies.  What seems a featureless expanse is shown to possess an awesome grandeur in which an Australian identity can be fully grasped, in both positive and negative terms.  The emptiness can inspire fear and terror.  This quality can even be experienced in what seem at first quite benign landscapes. In one of the iconic films of the 1970s Australian revival, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) beautiful adolescent schoolgirls disappear into a weird rock formation in an otherwise pleasant picnic ground from which they never return.  Sometimes this haunting quality arises from the awareness of an indigenous presence which does not actively reveal itself, but leaves its traces in visual and aural moments which destabilise or terrify the white intruder.  Or the indigenous presence is revealed as having deep and secret knowledge which cannot be fully understood by the white man, as in Peter Weir’s later film The Last Wave (1977).

To penetrate this landscape can also be deadly, not from the unseen spirits  which permeate it, but from the violent impulses of human beings who are able to make it part of their own vicious and perverted desires.  The iconic bushman, traditionally a fine and upstanding figure in Australian films, has emerged into the present-day as a perverted serial killer.  Young innocent travellers, in search of adventure in the great outback, find themselves in a deadly trap of a cunning bushman’s devising in Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean, 2005). McLean retained the outback setting but changed the perpetrator from man to killer crocodile in Rogue (2007) while Carlo Ledesma’s new low-budget release The Tunnel (2011) uses the empty underground of the city to similar effect.

Small country and “bush” towns, far from being the reassuringly comfortable sites for traditionalist nostalgia (as in the US cinema) are usually places where racism, sexism, violence and homophobia can be seen in the most lurid and uncompromising expression. The 2011 film Snowtown (Justin Kurzal) is based on real events which occurred in a typical Australian small town.  Telling the story of “the bodies in the barrel” case, it is a harrowing film about paedophilia, torture and serial killing.

Let’s laugh at ourselves instead!

If one strand of Australian filmmaking was engaging in a harsh self-critique, another strand was picking up aspects of the earlier comedic interest in “ordinary people” and their Australian lives and having a good laugh at them.  These “ordinary people” encompassed a wide variety of “characters” but all are recognisably and exaggeratedly Australian.  It is impossible to survey the many films which were made in this spirit, but a few are outstanding for their popularity with the Australian audience.  Some have gone on to be  “hits” internationally, as did Crocodile Dundee, by providing something bizarre and entertaining through an unfamiliar background and peculiarly unlikely narrative. 

Two of the best known internationally are The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (1994).  These films are reminiscent of the earliest era of Australian films, discussed above.  They are exaggerated and parodic.  Priscilla tells the story of three “drag queens”,  men who offer elaborate entertainment dressed as women. One is a transsexual and the other two homosexual.  For complicated reasons they take themselves in a bus to Alice Springs in the heart of Outback Australia. On their journey they have to come to terms with the homophobic intolerant bush and small-town Australians who inhabit these zones.  They are subject to abuse and violence in some places, but no real harm comes to them.  In Alice Springs the complexities of their own relationships are revealed, and after four weeks wowing the crowds at the local Casino they are able to move their personal lives on in new directions.  The Outback experience has allowed them to find new ways of being comfortable with themselves and their own form of difference.  This “happy ending” is interpreted by many critics as a sign that Australia is at last able to incorporate diversity (cf  Thomas 1996, Brooks 1999). However an argument can be made that while it is supportive of gays it is relentless in its “whiteness” (cf LaForteza 2006). The film did well overseas earning over $11 million in the US and almost one million pounds in the UK.  It took over $16 million in Australia.

Muriel’s Wedding does something similar for women.  Muriel, played by Toni Collette, is unattractive, overweight and badly dressed, a source of ridicule for her friends.  She yearns for a glamorous wedding and wants to be free of her own family, dominated by her psychologically abusive father.  She steals money to go on vacation at a tropical resort, then moves to Sydney to follow her dream.  She is constantly disappointed and her self-esteem is shaken, but ultimately goes through different kinds of liberating experiences until she is able to be comfortable in her own life and identity.  As in Priscilla, Muriel’s wedding depicts an outsider, someone who does not fit in with the norms, and proposes that conventional limits can be overcome through personal experiences, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem.  It is also significant that Muriel must leave the small town behind, leave her family and move to the big city to find redemption. Muriel’s Wedding was released around the world and was very successful making at least $57 million worldwide including over $15 million in Australia.

Another notable film of the 1990s was The Castle (Rob Sitch 1997). It portrays a working-class family’s devotion to their run-down and unattractive home located under a flight path adjacent to an airport, built on a toxic landfill beneath power lines.   The family thinks the world of their home, and are happy and loving, including one son who is a criminal in jail.  Developers want to acquire their house for expansion of the airport, but due to the condition and location of the house offer only a token sum.  The family refuses to sell and joins with the neighbours to challenge the compulsory acquisition.  The neighbours include Muslims and members of other ethnic groups. They finish up in a crazy court case with an incompetent but lovable lawyer. By chance a retired barrister offers to represent their case in the High Court. They win the case, receive just compensation and continue to be happy together.

The Castle presents a lovable vision of working-class Australia where the values of indigenous land-ownership and everyday multiculturalism are projected as worthy and positive. The filmmakers are media professionals who are well-known as comedians and television performers.  They have little in common with the “battlers” but depict them so sympathetically that the film took over $10 million at the Australian box-office. Australians certainly subscribe to the view that “a man’s home is his castle”, and that “the authorities” should not get away with interfering in a person’s enjoyment of their own property.  The film appealed across the spectrum of Australian society notwithstanding its elements of political correctness.

 Unlike Priscilla and Muriel, though, it did not do well internationally, taking less than one million dollars in the US. Its “Australianness” was a step too far: Americans could not identify with losers who defy the law in order to live in a horrible place just because they have always lived there.  The oblique references to indigenous land rights and positive multiculturalism likewise would have made little sense.

Australian film-making in the 1990s increasingly reflected an international perspective and cosmopolitan background.  Many of the talented directors (such as Phil Noyce and Bruce Beresford) made the transition to Hollywood. International co-productions emerged.  Australia became an increasingly profitable place to make “universal” films including animations and musicals which had no Australian references at all. O’Regan has offered a useful and detailed discussion of the rapid internationalisation and its effects which cannot be further discussed here. 

Baz Lurhmann pioneered a style of lavish production and familiar story arc which would appeal to a global audience. His first film Strictly Ballroom (1992) reflected Australian identity with a degree of cosmopolitanism but his following films Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2001) had no Australian reference other than the presence of Nicole Kidman in the latter film.  Luhrmann then turned back to make the epic Australia (2008). Lavish and glossy, with two top internationally recognised Australian stars (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman) the film is set in Northern Australia before World War 11, and has a common story element with the earlier British co-production The Overlanders (1946).  Featuring spectacular scenery and elaborate dramatic production values, the budget was around A$130 million. It was considered a high-risk venture, but it took over $49 million in Australia and $221 million worldwide.  Opinion about the film was divided.  Audiences thrilled to the scenery and technical triumphs. The New York Times review acknowledged this but expressed ambivalence, especially regarding the kitsch aesthetic.   The Guardian critic had no doubts, calling it  “an antipodean Gone with the Wind and a shallow, overblown and embarrassing failure”.   Most Australian critics also considered it a bloated flop, based on a cynical recycling of stereotypical images for international consumption (eg Conrad 2009).  One redeeming feature was the starring role of a beautiful young indigenous child, played by unknown thirteen year old Brandon Walters.  He added an extraordinary charm to the film, but since has disappeared back into his own community, amid charges that he was to some degree exploited in its making. The issue of indigenous history in the film turned into a major debate between two prominent Australian feminists, indigenous anthropologist Marcia Langton (who praised the film) and Germaine Greer (who loathed it). 

Brandon Walters’ position in this film provides just one more example of the way indigenous people have been drawn into Australian film for the purpose of constructing a national imaginary.  Until the 1970s their main role in film was to illustrate the necessity of their disappearance.  Subsequently, filmmakers have sought to incorporate the indigenous presence without upsetting mainstream conventions of Australian self-representation as still a country of “whiteness”, albeit a tolerant one.

The Indigenous Other.

Although the very first films made in Australia were images of Aboriginal Australians (see discussion above) there was almost no depiction of Aboriginal characters in feature films until the 1950s.  The presence of Aborigines was acknowledged in some early films set in rural or outback regions.  Charles Chauvel’s early film, Heritage (1935), was unashamedly racist, one of its key scenes showing “black devils” attacking a settler’s peaceful homestead.  His next film, Uncivilized (1936) continued to represent Aborigines as a force of nature, rather than as a fully human society.  The same can be said for Bitter Springs (Smart 1950) a British co-production which brought in by truck a large group of Aboriginal people from a distant community to play the role of an untouched tribe living on land obtained by a white settler and his family, who want to introduce sheep to the part-desert environment.  The tribe, of course, is unable to defend itself and is destroyed in the process. The film suggests a sympathy for the plight of the indigenous people and portrays the racist indifference of the settlers.  Although the Prime Minister of the day praised the excellent acting by the Aboriginal cast, the film was not popular and today is virtually unobtainable.

The forced displacement of Aboriginal society and culture took place historically under a tacit agreement of silence.  The massacres and violent episodes which removed Aboriginal people from the spreading frontiers fell into a void of historical amnesia. Australian children learnt nothing about this in their history lessons.  Rather, it was thought that Aborigines just “melted away”, moved to the interior regions, or were unable to compete in the “survival of the fittest” which was the social theory of early twentieth century Australia.  Silence remained the prevailing response in cinema until the remarkable breakthrough of Charles Chauvel’s film, Jedda (1955).

This was the first film to give Aboriginal people starring roles.  Filmed in stunning colour in the spectacular Central Australian desert region, Jedda tells the story of an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family on a remote cattle station.  Her white mother is determined to suppress her Aboriginality.  But Jedda, as she grows up, is attracted to a “wild” Aboriginal man, Marbuk (played by first-time actor Robert Tudawali).  In spite of everything her white parents have tried to do for her, her “blood” calls her to Marbuk’s side.  In the inevitable, tragic ending, they both die by falling from a mountaintop.

Although Jedda was comparatively successful at the box-office,  the subject of Aboriginal-white relations remained rare until, in the late 1960s, a massive upsurge of social change began to be felt in Australia as elsewhere in the world.  A younger generation had emerged from the traumas of war, better educated and more affluent than their parents.  Issues of justice and equality replaced the problems of earning a living.  Television had arrived and movements in the world outside Australia were now in everybody’s lounge-rooms.  The rising civil rights movement in America was quickly reflected in Australia and for the first time the general public learnt of the impact and consequences of generations of neglect and shameful treatment of the indigenous people.

Between 1955 and 1967 only one film touched on Aboriginal themes.  Then, in the following decade, seven films were made, including the appealing Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg,1971) and Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976) as well as Peter Weir’s riveting masterpiece The Last Wave (1977).  Documentaries began to focus on specific issues such as the struggle for the recognition of Land Rights ( eg Ningla A-Na  Alessandro Cavadini, 1972) and memoir-style films gave an indigenous perspective, for example  My Survival as an Aboriginal (Essie Coffee with Martha Ansara,1978).  The cruelty and violence between “black and white” was reflected in Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), deeply disturbing to much of the audience and a failure at the box office.  So was Phil Noyce’s Backroads (1977) which was only released briefly in one theatre.  It was a version of the hybrid Australian genre, the criminal/road movie, starring famous local character actor Bill Hunter and two well-known indigenous activists, Gary Foley and Essie Coffee.  It told a story of two criminals, one black and one white, who steal a car in the Outback and drive around the coast.

Other remarkable developments were in train through that decade.  Tracey Moffatt, a young woman of indigenous origin who had been raised in a non-indigenous home, burst onto the scene as an astonishingly talented artist.  She worked in photography but then directed Night Cries: a Rural Tragedy (1989), starring famous indigenous anthropologist and writer, Marcia Langton. Night Cries took its inspiration from Chauvel’s Jedda.  Moffatt imagined an alternative scenario in which Jedda had not died, but lived on to care for her white “mother” who is now aged and frail.   The film develops aesthetic values in the politics of memory.  It is beautiful and almost surreal in places and was considered by some as too much so:  the subject of indigenous/white relations, for these critics, should be serious, grim and factual.

Other indigenous filmmakers emerging at that time included Rachel Perkins, whose film Radiance (1998) won numerous awards and high praise for its portrayal of an indigenous family of three sisters trying to come to terms with the implications of their mother’s death. Ivan Sen’s film Beneath Clouds (2002) was followed by Toomelah (2011).  Hailed for veracity and talented acting, the vision presented of the life of young Aboriginal people living in Australian country towns was bleak and pessimistic.

Also harrowing was Samson and Delilah (2009), directed by Warwick Thornton.  The extraordinary performance by two first-time actors could not disguise the terrible reality of life in town camps around Alice Springs and the difficulties of bare survival. Financed largely through Government sources (including the Film Finance Corporation) the film did well at the box-office and has been showered with awards, as well as having releases in Europe including in Holland and Croatia.  That a depiction of absolute hopelessness should be praised as the best ever film by an indigenous person has some very strange and disturbing ethical implications, both from the national perspective, and internationally.  This is a vision of Australia at the opposite end of the spectrum found in the sedate self-congratulatory dramas made with Government resources in the 1970s.

 In summary, with regard to the images of indigenous people and their relationship with white Australia, in the seventies optimism and enthusiasm was expresssed mostly by white Australian film-makers who wanted to find ways of including indigenous Australia and its history.  In the 1980s indigenous people themselves began making politically oriented mostly non-feature films, with a few remarkable exceptions.  In the 2000s indigenous people began making  their own feature films, which became progressively more terrifying and depressing in their implications for an indigenous future. Yet a film like Baz Luhrmann’s Australia could ignore these perspectives and celebrate a harmonious and constructive engagement between glamorous and wealthy white Australians and the indigenous people whose self-representations bear no relationship with the positive thematics of mainstream cinema.

Conclusion

This brief historical overview of Australian film has traced the abiding presence of several key themes which relate to the construction of Australian identity through an imaginary process of self-reflection with regard to the external world (largely the United Kingdom and the United States) and the internal presence of an indigenous population.  A continuing struggle to clarify a positive self-image focussed on courage, humour, egalitarianism, mateship and defiance of unreasonably authority has been in constant dialogue with a darker, more Gothic sensibility.  Homophobia, mysogyny and violence constitutes a barely suppressed element which appears unpredictably throughout Australia’s film history.  It is proposed here that ambivalence and doubt, as well as the qualities of positive assertiveness and ability to take action are based on an unspoken ressentiment around the unresolved question of superiority and inferiority.  The early ties to the British Empire, still existent through the link to the monarchy, and the evident power and influence both culturally and politically of the United States are significant elements in Australian cultural history, while the inability to recognise fully or resolve the genocidal origins of white settlement  continues to haunt the cinematic imagination.

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