Book

Australian Cinema afterMabo
Australian Cinema afterMabo is the first comprehensive study of Australian
national cinema in the 1990s. Drawing on concepts of shock, memory and
national maturity, it asks what part Australian cinema plays in reviewing
our colonial past. It looks at how the 1992 Mabo decision, which overruled
the nation’s founding myth of terra nullius, has changed the meaning of
landscape and identity in Australian films, including The Tracker, Rabbit-
Proof Fence, Moulin Rouge, The Castle, Cunnamulla, Looking for Alibrandi
and Japanese Story amongst many others. It is essential reading for anyone
studying Australian cinema and for those interested in how the history wars
of the 1990s have impactedonthewaywe imagine ourselves throughcinema.
FelicityCollins lectures in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University. She is the
author of The Films of Gillian Armstrong.
Therese Davis lectures in Film and Cultural Studies at the University of
Newcastle. She is the author of The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition
and Spectatorship.

Australian Cinema after Mabo
FELICITY COLLINS AND THERESE DAVIS
  
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Cambridge University Press
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© Felicity Jane Collins and Therese Verdun Davis 2004
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Contents
Acknowledgments page vii
Part 1 Australian Cinema and the HistoryWars
1 Backtracking after Mabo 3
2 Home and Abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 22
3 Elites and Battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 41
4 Mediating Memory in Mabo – Life of an Island Man 59
Part 2 Landscape and Belonging afterMabo
5 Aftershock and the Desert Landscape in Heaven’s Burning,
The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu
Boy, The Missing 75
6 Coming from the Country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and
Message from Moree 94
7 Coming from the City in The Castle, Vacant Possession,
Strange Planet and Radiance 112
Part 3 Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age
8 Lost, Stolen and Found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 133
9 Escaping History and Shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head
On and Beneath Clouds 152
10 Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion 172
Bibliography 188
Index 200
v

Acknowledgments
The joyful co-authorship of this book has been a tale of two cities and a
regional centre. Our friendship began in Sydney in the early 1980s when
we were both students in the Communication degree at the NSW Institute
of Technology. This book is grounded in those formative years when our
thinking about film, media, history and culture was shaped by the many
luminaries of the infamous Tower Building on Broadway. If the seeds for
thisbookwere sownin post-structuralist Sydney, the projectcametofruition
through the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University inMelbourne,
and the Film Studies program at the University of Newcastle. In December
1996 we participated in a seminar, Film andModernity, led byMiriam Bratu
Hansen, at the University of Newcastle. This seminar provided the impetus
for our desire to rethink Australian cinema in terms of shock, memory and
recognition. In Melbourne, the lively debate and recent flood of books and
essays by local academics and publishers engaged in the history wars has
created a stimulating context for our writing on the politics of memory in
post-Mabo films.We are indebted to theMelbourne-basedMetroMagazine
and Senses of Cinema for their regular forums on Australian cinema, and for
publishing early versions of ideas we have developed further in this book.
We thank Jodi Brooks for recommending texts on traumatic memory and
for encouraging this project. Con Verevis provided Felicity Collins with the
opportunity to present earlywork on landscape and aftershock at the Centre
for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in October 2001. The 2002
Conference of theAustralian andNewZealand Film andHistoryAssociation
at Flinders University gave us the opportunity to road-test the metaphor
of backtracking in recent Australian films. We are grateful for suggestions
and encouragement from Tracey Bunda, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, John
Hughes, Sylvia Lawson and Cassi Plate. We wish to thank Kim Armitage
from Cambridge University Press for her enthusiasm and diligence, Joyleen
Christensen for her efficiency with the bibliography and Venetia Somerset
for her instructive copy editing. We gratefully acknowledge the generous
support of friends, colleagues and family.
vii

Australian Cinema
and the HistoryWars

1
Backtracking after Mabo
Backtrack: (vb). 1. to return by the same route by which one has come. 2. to retract
or reverse one’s opinion, policy, etc.
The familiar yet estranged figure of the black tracker has enjoyed a certain
longevity in Australian cultural traditions for it easily corresponds with the
metaphor of exile and imprisonment in a purgatorial landscape, identified
by Graeme Turner as one of the key tropes of Australian fiction. However,
with shifts in the Australian social imaginary that accompanied the Land
Rights movement of the 1970s, the tracker receded into the background,
a result, perhaps, of a critique of racial stereotypes initiated by Aboriginal
activists and critics. In 2001–02 the black tracker made an unexpected return
to Australian screens in two feature films, Rabbit-Proof Fence (PhillipNoyce,
2002) and The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002), and a short musical film, One
Night theMoon (RachelPerkins, 2001). Inboth features, an iconic actor of the
1970s,DavidGulpilil, was cast in the role of the tracker.1His startling, intense
screen presence haunted Rabbit-Proof Fence and dominated The Tracker.
After a period of relative obscurity (save for smaller roles inCrocodileDundee,
Peter Faiman, 1986; Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders, 1992; and
Dead Heart, Nicholas Parsons, 1996), Gulpilil’s return to the screen in two
key films of the post-Mabo era, like the films themselves, can be understood
as a kind of backtracking, a going over of old ground in Australian national
cinema, a going over which reprises and at the same time retracts some of
the seemingly intractable figures of Australian national identity.
In this book, we use ‘backtracking’ as a key term to describe and interpret
Australian cinema (and to a lesser extent, television) in the twelve years
since the 1992 Mabo decision overturned the nation’s founding doctrine
of terra nullius (i.e., land belonging to no one). However, from the outset,
we want to be clear that this is not a book about the Mabo decision
itself or the representation of Aboriginality in Australian cinema. It is a
book about the cultural rather than political impact of a paradigm shift
in Australian historical consciousness. The Mabo decision is central to this
3
Australian Cinema after Mabo
shift because it forces Australians to rethink ‘race relations’ and the colonial
past as integral towhatTimRowse describes as amorally illegitimate national
identity.2
Australian colonial histories show that, from day one, European settlers/
invaders recognised the fiction of terra nullius.3 This is evident in their
encounters with Aboriginal clans in possession of land, initially in coastal
areas and later in the interior, which the British had presumed to be inhospitable
and therefore ‘empty’ of human life. Yet, as Henry Reynolds argues
in Aboriginal Sovereignty, ‘the advantages of assuming the absence of people
were so great . . . that legal doctrine continued to depict Australia as a
colony acquired by occupation of a terra nullius’.4 Racist assumptions about
Aboriginal culture provided the basis for the continued non-recognition
of Indigenous ownership of the land. As Reynolds puts it: settlers/invaders
saw Indigenous people as primitives ‘who ranged over the land rather than
inhabiting it’.5 Despite a history of Indigenous resistance to dispossession,
supported at different times in the nation’s past by a number of non-
Indigenous Australians, the story of the nation’s origin, in the occupation
of land belonging to no one, remained intact until the High Court’s Mabo
decision in 1992.
This landmark legal decision to recognise the pre-existing property rights
of Indigenous Australians created shock-waves across the nation as non-
Indigenous Australians were forced to confront the fiction of terra nullius.
As Justice Brennan wrote in his summation of the case: ‘Whatever the justification
advanced in earlier days for refusing to recognise the rights and
interests in land of the indigenous inhabitants of settled colonies, an unjust
and discriminatory doctrine of that kind can no longer be accepted.’6 Events
over the past decade have shown, however, that neither the Mabo decision
nor its subsequent enactmenthas settled issues of land rightsbetween Indigenous
and non-Indigenous Australians.7 On the contrary, non-Indigenous
Australians find themselves on unsettled ground as we come to terms with
the fact that our democratic society has a serious flaw. One public nationwide
poll done for the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in early 2000
showed that a large majority of people (80%) feel that the process of reconciliation
is important; but they are strongly divided about how the process
should proceed. For example: ‘In principle, 57% agreed and 37% disagreed
that a reconciliation document might help relations betweenAborigines and
the wider community. But only 28% favoured giving the document a legal
status.’8 In 2004, Australians remain divided on a range of post-Mabo issues,
including: the legal and financial implications of recognition of Indigenous
Australians’ prior ownership and sovereignty; the idea of collective blame
and the need for an official apology for past injustices; proposals for what
4
Backtracking after Mabo
the Howard government calls ‘practical reconciliation’ – that is, strategies
for overcoming the startling inequities in Indigenous health, employment,
education and rates of imprisonment.
Politicising History
The Mabo decision is at the centre of an unprecedented politicisation of
history in Australia. The ‘history wars’ are being played out in the public
arena, in which competing sides attempt to explain Australia’s past and
determine how best to remember it. These history wars are not unique to
Australia. In the wake of 20th-century genocide and other forms of atrocity,
many post-industrial societies are having a similar debate, struggling
for answers about how to explain unspeakable episodes from the recent
past, and how to remember them. Indeed, cultural theorists see this struggle
over the past as integral to the paradox of modernity whereby we valorise
progress while simultaneously lamenting the loss of a safer, more secure
past. In recent times, referred to as late modernity, obsession with the past
has intensified, resulting in what Andreas Huyssen calls ‘the globalization
of memory’.9 Huyssen’s description of this culture reminds us that in daily
life we are bombarded by invitations to remember the past through popular
global memory of the Holocaust in films like Schindler’s List (Steven
Spielberg, 1993), a new wave of museum architecture, the rise of autobiography
and memoir writing, retro fashion, the History Channel, and so
on.10 The past is, quite literally, closing in on us to produce what Huyssen
calls ‘an ever-shrinking present’.11 At the same time, Huyssen reminds us
that ‘while memory discourses appear to be global in one register, in their
core they remain tied to the histories of specific nations and states’.12 Since
the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre twin towers on 11 September
2001, it is tempting to focus primarily on global relations. Certainly,
this is something the Howard government did in the lead-up to the 2001
election. But as Huyssen argues, all nations are faced with ‘the task of securing
the legitimacy and future of their existing or emergent polities’, and
one of the main ways they do this ‘is to commemorate and adjudicate past
wrongs’.13
In Australia, the history wars have centred most intensely on past treatment
of Aboriginal peoples and the politics of land since theMabo decision.
One of the first major acts in the politicisation of history in the wake
of Mabo was Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech (1992).
Keating’s assertion that ‘we took the traditional lands’, ‘we brought the diseases’,
‘we committed murders’ radically altered the terms of the nation’s
5
Australian Cinema after Mabo
self-understanding.14 The Prime Minister’s acknowledgment that ‘we’, the
present generation, should take collective responsibility for colonial formsof
violence and subjugation was an initial step in the process of reconciliation
between settler and Indigenous Australians. But Keating’s speech also outraged
manyAustralians, especially neo-conservatives, including Opposition
Leader John Howard.
To understand why neo-conservatives oppose Keating’s assertions about
the past,we need togobeyondthe underlying concept ofmoral responsibility
and consider the speech in the broader context of Keating’s Republican
agenda and his politicisation of history. Keating’s aim, indeed his personal
passion, was to shift Australia’s identity away from a British-centred past
to a history grounded in Australian experience. Earlier in 1992, Keating
had accused Britain of deserting Australia in 1942 at the fall of Singapore.
Mark McKenna suggests that Keating’s anti-British agenda can be read as
a ‘useful means of transferring responsibility for the evils of colonialism
from Australia to Britain’.15 In this light we can better understand why neoconservatives
see Aboriginal reconciliation as such a threat to the nation.
Keating’s assertion of a moral flaw at the heart of national identity not
only demands a response from present-day Australians. It also brings into
disrepute the nation’s British heritage uponwhich national identity has been
so proudly based, thus revitalising the Republican call to cut all ties with
Britain.
For these reasons among others, neo-conservatives sought to defend the
old account of Australia’s past as a nation of well-intentioned, hardworking
British settlers. In his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture, Australian
historian Geoffrey Blainey introduced the phrase ‘the black armband view
of history’, claiming that there was a crisis in Australian history: ‘a swing
of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable to an opposite
extreme that is decidedly jaundiced and gloomy.’16 Howard seized this
view and pillaged Blainey’s speech, incorporating phrases such as ‘the black
armband view of history’ into his own rhetoric. By the mid-1990s, the history
wars were in full swing. Public debate over issues such as the Stolen
Generations, frontier conflict, school curricula and the National Museum
confirm that history is no longer a dying discipline in schools and universities
but an issue of national importance. Individual historians such as
Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey have become national figures, while
high-profile journalists such as Christopher Pearson and Piers Akerman,
and public intellectuals such as Robert Manne, Tim Flannery, Germaine
Greer, Ron Brunton and Peter Howson are strongly identified with either
the left-liberal or neo-conservative view on how best to explain the nation’s
past, how best to remember it.17
6
Backtracking after Mabo
Cinema after Mabo
How then do we begin to think about Australian cinema in the post-Mabo
era? What part does cinema play in the national process of reviewing our
colonial past and rethinking the ways in which settler and Indigenous cultures
can coexist? This book investigates the extent to which Australian
cinema, in the aftershock of the Mabo decision, has reprised its role as an
arbiter of national identity by going over some old ground. This backtracking
is literal in the case of the landscape tradition which anchored national
identity to British settlement of the land. It is also metaphorical in the case
of a miscellany of films which have a common interest in the problems faced
by settler and Indigenous peoples of being at home in Australia, whether
home is located in the bush, the suburbs or the outback, or is conceived
as local, national or international terrains of action. And whether ‘being
at home’ after Mabo is understood in terms of coexistence and recognition
of a sovereign First Nation within the Second Nation, on the Canadian
model, or post-colonial reconciliation based on a moral rather than legal
understanding of Indigenous–settler relations.
Influentialwriters have analysed the anxiety and ambivalencewhich seem
endemic to Australian nationhood and to Australian cinema.18 However,
the cultural impact of theMabo decision (and the peculiar forms of anxiety
about the nation’s past and future to which it has given rise) has not yet
been analysed in terms of cinema. In this book we are preoccupied with
the issue of how the Australian cinema has mediated historical memory
and national self-recognition in the wake of the Mabo decision, as well as
related events such as the 1997 Wik rulings on terra nullius and native title,
the Stolen Generations report, National Sorry Day, the opening ceremony
of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and the 2001 centenary of Federation. If the
false belief in terra nullius can no longer be maintained as the blind spot in
Australian national history, how has the cinema (as the cultural flagship of
national identity) begun to revise and retract its established (some would
say exhausted) tropes of national self-recognition?
At one end of the media spectrum, the televised opening ceremony of
the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games was a particularly self-conscious media
event, integrating an Indigenous dreamtime as the pre-history of the
nation. In turn, the nation’s history was allowed to unfold as a montage
of masculine archetypes, from the robust stockman-on-horseback to
the lawn-mowing man of suburbia.19 At the other end of the entertainment
spectrum, the national cinema of 2000–02 produced a cycle of films
concerned with Indigenous–settler relations.20 Rather than a celebratory
7
Australian Cinema after Mabo
montage of national archetypes, this cycle revised certain familiar figures
such as the black tracker, the lost child, the bush battler, and the Australian
landscape itself. If many of these films seemed strangely belated, already
out of date at the time of their release ten years after the Mabo decision,
it was partly because the subsidised national cinema lacked the immediacy
of television, radio and print media. This belated quality was partly an
effect of film-funding policy. Proposals dealing with the unpopular subject
of the nation’s colonial past needed to overcome commercial resistance
to Indigenous–settler stories in order to qualify for production funding.
Further, from the perspective of national cinema, films featuring Aboriginal
characters tended to revive an Anglocentric version of the social imaginary
at amomentwhen the economy and popular cultureweremoving decisively
into a post-national, cosmopolitan mode.However, if we look at these same
films from the international perspective of late modernity, it becomes clear
that Australian films dealing with traumatic events in national history have
been very timely. As a genre of international cinema, Australian films have
become part of a global, media-based politics of memory, where national
traumas like genocide are now being understood in terms of the failures
of Western modernity.21 For us, the term ‘after Mabo’ implies a national
cinema that, in various ways, tells us what it feels like to be living in the
‘afterwardness’ of colonialism during a moment of intense globalisation.
Key Concepts
In this book we propose that Australian cinema is one of the public spaces in
which Australians have been able to experience the impact of theMabo decision
as a national ‘shock of recognition’.We argue that cinema enables collective
and intimate forms of recognitionwhich have a different impact from
legal and political recognition. Our understanding of post-Mabo cinema is
informed by Walter Benjamin’s theories of history, modernity and shock.
Benjamin argues that there is a structural affinity between the montage principle
of film – the rapid juxtaposition of images – and the alienating effects
of modernity, making film an embodiment of the peculiar shock effects
associated with the rapid changes of modernity.22 Benjamin’s understanding
of film and modernity is closely related to his concept of the dialectical
image and historical consciousness. For Benjamin, the past makes itself evident
in dialectical moments where the past and present collide, where, in
his words, ‘the past flashes up in the instant it is recognized and never seen
again’.23 He cautions, however, that we should not confuse these moments
of ‘recognizability’ with the idea of seeing the present in terms of the past,
8
Backtracking after Mabo
of assuming a continuity between past and present. Rather, these flashes, in
which the past becomes visible, arise out of recognition of discontinuity. It is
precisely this recognition of theMabo decision as a rupture in the continuity
of Australian history that informs our understanding of Australian cinema
after Mabo. The shock of recognition of historical discontinuity entailed
in the Mabo decision provides the impetus for us to propose a new way
of thinking about the relationship between Australian cinema and a post-
Mabo politics of recognition. This approach to a contemporary national
cinema has the advantage of providing a way for us to backtrack over some
well-worn debates about Australian national identity.
In their ground-breaking study of Australian cinema of the 1970s and
1980s, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka deploy the concept of a ‘social
imaginary’ to account for historical modes of spectatorship in national
cinema. In this study, we use concepts of shock, recognition and trauma
to define a post-Mabo social imaginary grounded in memory. We refer
to memory in four different ways: historical memory as the chronological
ordering of events; involuntarymemory as a chain of associations incited by
shock; remembering the past as a work of mourning in the psychoanalytic
sense; and repetitive, belated memory associated with historical trauma. In
the following chapterswe drawon theories ofmemory and traumacinema in
order to answer the question posed by Radstone and others: ‘why these films
now?’24 More particularly, why these films, here, in this national cinema,
now? We are interested in questions of how ‘unintegrated traumatic memories
may impede recognition of present traumas’; of trauma’s ‘internal
conflict between the pre-traumatised and traumatised self’; of trauma as
‘the layering of several experiences rather than the impact of one’; and of
the role trauma films may play ‘in their spectators’ integration of trauma,
mitigating individualised isolation and creating empathy with the suffering
of others in the present’.25
Apart from the influence of current research into memory and trauma
films, our concept of recognition and memory in cinema is indebted to
Miriam Hansen’s reprise of critical theory’s approach to cinema as an intimate
public sphere of experience. Drawing on the writings of Benjamin and
Kracauer, Hansen’s work offers an alternative to film theory’s concept of
cinema as a place of voyeuristic and fetishistic identification. Her historically
grounded ideas are particularly useful for rethinking the ways in which
history, recognition and memory continue to be so central to our experience
of Australian national cinema as a ‘vernacular modernity’.26 The following
readings of Black and White, The Tracker and Black Chicks Talking (Leah
Purcell, 2002) will clarify our use of the interrelated concepts of Australian
cinema as a public sphere for reprising or going back over established themes
9
Australian Cinema after Mabo
of national history, as a site for the politics of recognition, and as a traumatised
space of public memory.
History and Storytelling in Black and White
At a forum to launch theMelbourne season of Black and White,27 the director,
Craig Lahiff, and actor David Ngoombujarra discussed two different
concepts of history informing their film about the landmark 1959 trial of
an Aboriginal man, RupertMax Stuart.Whereas Lahiff was concerned with
transforming complicated historical events into a feature film, Ngoombujarra
considered Stuart’s story to be just one of many ‘hidden stories’ waiting
to be told. This contrast between history and story indicates two different
possibilities for cinema as a public sphere. In his writing on storytelling,
Benjamin emphasises the difference between historical remembrance (Craig
Lahiff’s approach) and epic memory (David Ngoombujarra’s approach).28
For us, it’s not a choice between history as coherent remembrance and
storytelling as epic memory, but rather a sense of how they are both operating
in Black and White.
From the factual point of view of historical remembrance, Stuart’s death
sentence for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in Ceduna, South
Australia, was commuted into a fourteen-year prison sentence after seven
stays of execution. These stays were won chiefly (according to the film)
through the confused, altruistic but determined efforts of his defence
lawyers,Dave O’Sullivan andHelenDevaney,Christian ministerTomDixon,
and media scion RupertMurdoch.Workingwith screenwriter LouisNowra,
Lahiff drew on three books about the case and on other historical material
including an interview with O’Sullivan’s daughter and contact with
Rupert Max Stuart. This contact with Stuart led to the inclusion of a final
scene (taken from a documentary film, Broken English, Ned Lander, 1993)
which gives Stuart the last, inconclusive word in the film on the question
of his guilt or innocence.29 This scene ends the film, putting into doubt the
screenplay’s carefully constructed series of defence arguments, dramatised
by Lahiff in the courtroom scenes as a conflict over reliable evidence and
historical truth.
For Lahiff, the film represents an important legal case that changed the
judicial system in South Australia. It also represents a particular moment
in race relations in 1950s Australia, as race intersected with class in the
Anglocentric city of Adelaide, a moment which the film seeks to bring to
historical consciousness. This approach to the historical film as a corrective
to national history understands cinema as a public sphere which can
10
Backtracking after Mabo
re-educate its audience by reconstructing and reinterpreting a significant
traumatic event in the history of race relations.Acrucial aspect of our understanding
of backtracking in post-Mabo cinema is the way in which history,
reconstructed as a courtroom melodrama in Black and White, speaks to
the dilemmas of the present. In its depiction of flawed individuals committed
to obtaining white justice for a black man in the 1950s, the film is
firmly on the side of a 1990s politics of reconciliation. Yet its central courtroom
drama, from which Ngoombujarra’s character, Max Stuart, is largely
excluded, reminds us that legal justice in the present is more important than
historical empathy if reconciliation is to have any meaning. A sense of history
as unfinished business pervades the film’s ending, leaving the audience
with an overriding sense of anticlimax, of hollowvictory. This aura of pernicious,
endemic failure, which surrounds all the white characters in the film,
is relieved only by the documentary coda which allows Stuart to address us
directly, not as a victim-survivor, nor as a ‘real-life’ witness to the events we
have just seen dramatised, but as a kind of trickster or jester who, after all
the effort of the film to clarify the facts of the case, leaves us with a bit of a
riddle about evidence, truth and belief: Elvis really is dead. Isn’t he?
Although the factual courtroom drama, based on the historical record,
is the most prominent generic strand in Black and White, the film draws on
several other genres, including costume melodrama, crime investigation, the
modernist flashback, and even the road movie. This hybrid genre is more
akin to Ngoombujarra’s notion of history as epic storytelling. The mixing
of genres produces a series of shifts between different emotional registers or
affects. This incoherence of genre and affect has something to tell us about
the limits of the historical film in communicating traumatic experience
through a national cinema conceived as both a commercial-industrial and
a cultural-interventionist public sphere. The incoherence of affect, together
with the chronic sense of political, professional and personal failure in Black
and White, have something to tell us about history, memory and storytelling
in cinema after Mabo. The film’s mix of the modernist flashback together
with family melodrama and the crime thriller is a case in point.
In her description of ‘trauma cinema’ Janet Walker has described the
problems that traumatic or catastrophic historical events present for memory
and for the stylistic conventions of narrative film form:
Like traumatic memories that feature vivid bodily and visual sensation over
‘verbal narrative and context’, these films are characterised by non-linearity, fragmentation,
nonsynchronous sound, repetition, rapid editing and strange angles.
And they approach the past through an unusual admixture of emotional affect,
metonymic symbolism and cinematic flashbacks.30
11
Australian Cinema after Mabo
Lahiff’s use of the modernist flashback in Black and White is a gesture in the
direction ofNgoombujarra’s concept of cinema as a place of epic storytelling.
The question of howtraumatic stories are told, by whom, to whom, becomes
evident in Lahiff’s use of two characters as narrators of the same story from
two opposing points of view. Lahiff’s two narrated flashbacks are modernist
in that they challenge the conventional use of the flashback to establish ‘the
truth’ in historical films.
The modernist flashbacks, unlike the courtroom scenes in Black and
White, belong (through the intensity of his performance) to Ngoombujarra,
even though the first is narrated by his defender, O’Sullivan (Robert
Carlyle), and the second by his prosecutor, Chamberlain (Charles Dance).
Each flashback presents a persuasive re-enactment of Stuart’s interrogation
by the police. Each insists it is a truthful account of how Stuart’s confession
was either ‘beaten out of him’ by habitually brutal police (defender
O’Sullivan’s view), or ‘laughed out of him’ by wily interrogators (prosecutor
Chamberlain’s view). The first flashback is tied to the crime genre’s ploy
of challenging the defence to prove that a confession is false. O’Sullivan’s
naturalistic flashback represents the police as a tightly bonded workingclass
fraternity with a shared set of prejudices: without compunction they
routinely manufacture the evidence they need to prove the guilt of the
person they ‘know’ committed the crime; if that person is an itinerant
worker and a ‘half-caste’, so much the better. The second flashback is less
conventional, entailing a startling shift between the generic affect of the
true crime story and the upper-class melodrama. While the crime thriller
version, narrated by O’Sullivan, is presented as part of making a legal case for
the defence of Stuart, the melodramatic version, narrated by Chamberlain,
is addressed to an elegant dinner party hosted by Chamberlain’s wife.
Chamberlain’s transgression of social etiquette brings to a head his failing
upper-class marriage and his contempt for public opinion engineered
by the bumptious Rupert Murdoch and his compliant newspaper editor.
As the sequence intercuts between Chamberlain’s flashback to the crime
and the melodramatic tensions of the dinner party, the audience is offered
a choice between genres. The contrast between the crime thriller and the
upper-class melodrama leaves it up to our genre preference to judge which
version of Stuart’s confession is true: the social realist flashback of police
brutality constructed from the point of view of the defence lawyer, or the
melodramatic representation of Stuart’s (alleged) rape and murder of a
nine-year-old girl, emphatically narrated by the prosecutor to shock his
high-society wife and her friends out of their media-manipulated sympathy
for Stuart.
12
Backtracking after Mabo
Black and White is modernist in that it leaves the viewer unsettled by this
clash of genres, a representational strategy that says the truth is a matter of
point of view and of storytelling conventions. In the end Stuart does not
hang but he does go to gaol for fourteen years, leaving the viewer unsettled
by the inconclusive outcome of the case. Ngoombujarra’s award-winning
performance (BestMaleActor at2003AFIawards) ensures that the enigmaof
Stuart and the pathos of his story dominate the film.However, the horror of
the crime against the little girl, her story and her family’s suffering, is buried
in the legal and class war of attrition between the inarticulate O’Sullivan
and the smoothly eloquent Chamberlain.
The intricacies of gender, class and race in Black and White do not resolve
themselves in a seamless narrative structure. Rather, the film takes the viewer
through jarring shifts in tone, mood and genre as it tries to condense the
important historical facts, political stakes, and current reinterpretation of
the Stuart case into the narrative conventions of commercial cinema. The
resonance between the Stuart case and the history wars of the 1990s is
clearly signalled in the way the film deals with two issues: language and
evidence. The prosecution case rests on Stuart’s signed confession and circumstantial
evidence. The defence case goes through a series of changes,
motivated by new evidence discovered in the course of trying to find any
admissible evidence that will save Stuart from the death penalty. The testimony
of an expert witness, T. G. H. Strehlow, is vital to demonstrating
the non-fit between Stuart’s first language, Aranda, his distinctive use of
English, and the Queen’s English used in the disputed confession. However,
despite Strehlow’s evidence, the Royal Commission remained unconvinced
that thewritten version of Stuart’s verbal confession had been unduly altered
by the police. The efforts of the defence team to discredit the evidence are
finally overshadowed by politics and the media’s role in making Stuart a
cause c´el`ebre. The film’s preoccupation with evidence resonates with current
debates, led by Keith Windschuttle, about the fabrication of historical
evidence and the whitewashing of frontier history, involving lawyers, academic
experts and the media.31 The film reverses Howard’s media spin on a
navel-gazing cultural elite imposing their unwelcome views on the battlers
of working-class Australia. Black and White’s reprise of the 1950s shows an
arrogant Adelaide political and social elite under pressure from the media
and from the underdogs (O’Sullivan and Devaney), who insist on defending
an Aboriginal man who has not been accorded a fair hearing by the
police, the judiciary or the government, all of whom are white Anglo males.
The history wars of the 1990s involve a similar cast of characters, disputing
the facts of the past, the reliability of the evidence and the nature of
13
Australian Cinema after Mabo
post-colonial truth and justice. The difference is that in the history wars of
the 1990s the roles have been reversed: those arguing for justice have been
cast as the cultural elite while those defending the status quo have been cast
as benign battlers.
Death and Recognition in The Tracker
Rolf deHeer’s The Tracker also uses the past to refer to the present. The film’s
distinctive style includes contemporary painted images of the land as well
as a haunting soundtrack of vivid lyrics by Aboriginal songwriter/singer
Archie Roach. By depicting the Australian landscape as a mythic space,
the film attempts to displace post-Mabo politics of recognition (with its
discourse of guilt and shame) onto a set of archetypal figures and a selfconsciously
mythic narrative form. We argue that de Heer’s attempt at a
mythic account of a massacre ofAborigines during a fictional police tracking
expedition set in 1922, ‘somewhere in Australia’, can be read as an allegory
of the master–slave dynamic central to Hegel’s concept of the struggle for
recognition.
ForHegel, recognition is a fight to the death. The master refuses to recognise
the slave in order to assert and maintain his own freedom. If the master
were to recognise the slave he would risk non-recognition by the slave and
therefore become the slave. This struggle is played out in The Tracker’s story
of the relationship between The Tracker (DavidGulpilil) and the police officer
leading the party, named allegorically (as are all the characters) as The
Leader (Gary Sweet). After becoming suspicious of The Tracker, The Leader
shackles and chains him, immediately setting off a struggle between the two.
In one scene, The Tracker attempts to free himself by plunging from a rocky
cliff into a waterhole. Dragging The Leader with him, The Tracker tries to
drown The Leader as the twomen struggle in themurky water. The Tracker
fails, but shortly after this incident the narrative reaches an unexpected
turning point. After witnessing The Leader’s summary killing of two tribal
Aborigines camped in a dry riverbed, the young police officer, named The
Follower, accuses The Leader of murder and arrests him at gunpoint. The
Follower then frees The Tracker from the shackle and chains, using them
to enchain the accused Leader. But the master–slave dynamic between The
Tracker and The Leader continues as a fight to the death.
The nature of this fight for recognition is made clear in the film. As the
party passes by the dead body of one of The Leader’s victims, The Tracker
drags the enchained Leader from his horse to the ground, forcing him to
face the dead man before him. Here, a sequence of extreme close-ups of
14
Backtracking after Mabo
the face of the dead man, as well as reaction shots of both The Tracker
and The Leader, invite the spectator to recognise the dead man’s humanity
as it is revealed in this face-to-face encounter with human mortality. The
Leader, however, refuses to see in this way, turning instead to confront The
Tracker. Biting down on his lip, he hisses that it is The Tracker who will die,
for he has committed the unthinkable crime of enslaving a white man. At
this point both The Tracker and the audience realise that in order for The
Tracker to survive he must take justice into his own hands. This moment
of realisation leads to the key question raised by the film’s play with the
master–slave dynamic of recognition, namely what is involved when the
audience passionately wants the white leader to be hanged at the hands of
the black tracker?
The film’s setting up of an intense desire in spectators to see The Leader
hanged marks a break in genre conventions. The conventional desire to see
a ‘baddie’ blown away is out of character with the art cinema’s commitment
to ambiguity and ambivalence. More troubling, perhaps, is the fact that, in
Hegelian terms, this desire for themurder of The Leader by non-Indigenous
members of the audience constitutes a deathwish, a willing of themselves
to be killed off. It is possible to read this desire as the dead end of white
self-castigating guilt. However, we want to suggest something more positive
by thinking about the audience’s willingness to side with The Tracker in
terms of an ethics of friendship and a principle of loyalty. This involves
shifting attention away from the primary relation between The Tracker and
The Leader to the relation between The Tracker and The Follower.
An essay on the ethics of friendship by Leela Ghandi is suggestive in this
regard. Ghandi poses a question similar to the one raised in The Tracker:
‘Does loyalty to “my own” liberate me of ethical obligations to all those
who are not of my own nation, family, community, republic, revolution?’32
This question, of ethical obligation to a stranger, is at the heart of The Follower’s
inner struggle leading up to his imprisonment of The Leader.Having
made the decision to take this course of action, The Follower finds himself
in a peculiar alignment with The Tracker. In the logic of spectatorship,
the viewer is also positioned in this curious space: aligned with a stranger
against ‘a countryman’ in a relation that is best described as a new friendship.
Returning to the philosophers of ancient Greece, Ghandi explains that there
are two classical models of the ethic of friendship. First, there is Aristotle’s
model of friendship based on the idea of philia and linked to citizenship.
As Ghandi explains, citing Aristotle, in the Greek polis, ‘ “a friend is another
self ”; “The basis of affection between citizens is equality and similarity”.’33
In this model, friendship is at the service of the state, ensuring loyalty to
the polis on the principle of sameness. We can see this dominant model at
15
Australian Cinema after Mabo
work, for example, in the Coalition of the Willing’s declaration of war on
Iraq in 2003. The second model of friendship, explains Ghandi, comes
from Epicurus and is based on philoxenia – ‘a love for guests, strangers,
foreigners’.34 This ethic of friendship ‘is predicated upon a principled distaste
for the racial exclusivity of the polis’.35 In this sense, it is an ethic that
could not abide the racial exclusivity of the Australian polity, which was
founded on theWhite Australia policy and continues to underpin policies,
such as the Pacific Solution, designed to deter and punish refugees. It is the
Epicurean model of the ethic of friendship that we find most suggestive for
our understanding of the spectator’s dilemma in The Tracker.
In his decision to imprison his leader, The Follower enacts a shift in
loyalty away from ‘a countryman’ towards ‘a stranger’. Further, this shift in
loyalty results in a tricky reversal of positions between The Follower and
The Tracker. By aligning himself with The Tracker, The Follower commits
a felony, as The Leader reminds him. Having taken the risk of becoming
friends with The Tracker, The Follower becomes a stranger in The Tracker’s
eyes. And this is where things become most interesting, enabling a form of
social recognition that takes us beyond the struggle to the death inherent
in Hegel’s struggle for recognition. The friendship between The Follower
and The Tracker is premised on a recognition of difference but one that
allows for an ethics of hospitality. The Tracker is now recognised as the one
who is ‘at home’, welcoming The Follower to another’s country where they
are both strangers, or guests. Indeed, The Tracker’s hospitality extends to a
willingness to share cultural knowledge, opening the eyes of The Follower
and the spectator to his cultural understanding of the land as ‘country’. This
is a relation to the land that eschews notions of ownership in favour of
custodial obligation and belonging. The end of the film makes the meaning
of country even clearer as The Tracker sets off on the long return journey to
his own country. This scenario of hospitable exchange in another’s country
stands in contrast to the discourse of exile generated by neo-conservatives
in the wake of Mabo. Responding to the Labor government’s introduction
of native title legislation in 1993, John Howard, then opposition leader,
appeared on national television holding up a map of Australia and warning
viewers that something like 90 per cent of the continent could be reclaimed
by Aborigines under Keating’s proposed legislation. The fear implanted
by Howard was that native title legislation would make non-Indigenous
Australians strangers in their own land.
On one level The Tracker’s mythic tale of massacre and other colonial
atrocities arrives too late in the history wars, in that it is behind the times in
its thinking about how best to remember traumatic colonial events. Upon
its release the film did not attract the sort of attention that might have led
16
Backtracking after Mabo
to widespread debate of the kind generated by Rabbit-Proof Fence. Instead,
interest in the film was limited to art-house audiences, leaving KeithWindschuttle’s
Fabrication ofAboriginalHistory at the centre of debates about how
to explain and remember frontier massacres. On another level – and this is
something we have discovered about many post-Mabo films – The Tracker
comes too soon. The ethic of friendship and new forms of recognition we
have read into the film is ahead of its time. Ongoing support for theHoward
government’s policies on national security indicates that an overwhelming
majority of Australians accept friendship as a basic principle of democracy
only if it is based on a notion of the friend ‘as another self, as what is most
similar’.
Recognition, Identity and Trauma
in Black Chicks Talking
Historical and storytelling forms of memory and recognition are not limited
to films that deal directly with the past. Cinema can invoke traumatic
memories of past events in films set in the present. Leah Purcell’s television
program Black Chicks Talking is a documentary comprised of interviews
between Purcell and five very different Aboriginal Australian women (identified
as DeborahMailman, Rosanna, Cilla, TammyWilliams and Kathryn).
The program provides an opportunity for Aboriginal women to make a
direct demand for settler Australians to recognise them as ‘strong, black,
beautiful women’. It does this by representing diverse experiences of being
anAboriginalwoman. This diversity is linked todifferent regions ofAustralia
from Bardi Jawi Country in the North Western Kimberleys, to Cherbourg
inMurri State or Queensland, and Launceston in Palawa State or Tasmania.
Further, Black Chicks Talking explores conflicts between the fivewomen over
the politics of claiming Aboriginality as an identity to be proud of. This is
particularly acute in the encounters between the filmmaker and Kathryn,
a former Miss Australia, who struggles to find the right words to describe
her recently discovered identity as an Aboriginal woman.36 ‘I could say I’m
Aboriginal or I could say I’m part Aboriginal’, she tells Purcell. The issue of
who is recognised as Aboriginal today is taken up by the other women as
they discuss the legacy of shame attached to Aboriginality for some of their
parents, and their own loss of language, culture and law.
The film intercuts on-location interviews with a gathering of Purcell
and the five women at a dinner party in Sydney. This structure allows for
two modes of storytelling: each woman speaks intimately, face to face, with
Purcell; this contrasts with the dinner party gathering which allows the
17
Australian Cinema after Mabo
womento speak communally about their different experiences ofAboriginal
identity. In addition, there is a sense in which the film is addressed to two
audiences. For most of the program the address is to a racially neutral
television viewer. However, there are occasions when some of the women
directly address the viewer as white. One such moment is when Purcell
and Mailman are in a conversation with each other about skin colour and
insulting white words which were used by policymakers to separate children
from their parents. Here, Mailman suddenly turns away from Purcell and,
looking directly into the camera, says: ‘Don’t call us fucking half-caste,
quarter-caste, one-eighth . . . because you’re denying . . . everyone who’s
gone before us.’ However, Kathryn, who is confronted with the absurdity of
being ‘one-sixteenth’ Aboriginal, is unsure of what it means for her future
identity to be recognised as the first Miss Australia of ‘Aboriginal descent’.
What she longs for is just one story from her mother that would tell her
where she comes from as an Aboriginal woman.
If we apply the idea of shock and recognition to Purcell’s documentary,
we can explain what is at stake when the program asserts a collective Aboriginal
identity, but also introduces conflict arising from radically different
experiences of being a black woman in contemporary Australia. This conflict
between the women themselves over how to represent their identity
allows viewers to recognise the trauma of colonialism.What we hear in the
interviews is a series of testimonies about being a black woman in Australia
today. But we also witness at the dinner party the inexpressible anxiety that
the experience of colonisation has produced about identity. This is most pronounced
in the juxtaposition between Kathryn, the former Miss Australia
(1999), and Cilla, young mother of six (four girls and two boys). Kathryn
struggleswith the question of howand, indeed, if she should take up ‘the gift
of Aboriginality’, as she calls it, hitherto hidden from her by her Aboriginal
mother, who remains silent on Kathryn’s matrilineal heritage. On the other
hand,Cilla claims she is ‘not in any way special because I’mAboriginal’, bearing
witness, surely, to the reality of her life as a member of one of Australia’s
poorest and most disenfranchised social groups. In terms of the difficulties
of recognition posed for individuals by Australia’s colonial history, the
documentary is compelling because it allows the viewer to recognise the
legacy of pain and suffering that arises from the violence of terra nullius. In
other words, Black Chicks Talking makes evident a form of political identity
that is grounded in the conflict between recognition (as a proud Aboriginal
woman) and non-recognition (as a half-caste, quarter-caste) as Tammy says,
‘reducing our culture to pigmentation’. Purcell’s documentary expresses the
full meaning of historical dispossession through the trauma of Aboriginal
identity played out in the present.
18
Backtracking after Mabo
RethinkingAustralian national cinema through the constellation of terms
discussed above offers new ways of understanding the relationship between
Australian films and audiences in local, national and global contexts. Just
as the Australian cinema of the past decade has backtracked across the
well-trodden ground of national identity in order to find new paths, this
book seeks to reconsider the role of national cinema in a global politics of
history, memory and identity. In the following chapters we consider three
key issues: the commercial and cultural strategies which shaped the response
of the Australian film industry to the post-Mabo history wars; the aftershock
of theMabo decision and its impact on the landscape tradition in Australian
cinema, from the iconic desert to the bush, the city, the suburbs and the
beach; and the role of trauma and grief in a cinema concerned with the
nation’s coming of age.
Notes
1 Gulpilil’s screen persona was established in Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971), Mad
Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976), Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976), and The Last
Wave (PeterWeir, 1977).
2 Tim Rowse, After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions, Melbourne University
Press, 1993, p. 2.
3 For a vivid account of colonial contact based on journals and letters of the First
Fleeters see Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne: Text Publishing,
2003.
4 HenryReynolds,Aboriginal Sovereignty:Reflections on Race, State andNation, Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. x.
5 ibid., p. x.
6 Mabo and others v. Queensland (no 2) 107, Australian Law Reports (ALR), 1992,
p. 42.
7 For a concise and informative critique of legal challenges to theMabo (1992) decision,
includingWestern Australia’s unsuccessful 1995 challenge, aswell as challenges to the
Wik (1995) decision, which led to the Native Title Amendment Bill (1997) (Cth) or
‘NTAB’, see Garth Nettheim, ‘Native Title, fictions and “convenient falsehoods”’, in
In theWake of Terra Nullius, a special issue of Law.Text.Culture, 4(1) 1998, pp. 70–80.
8 Newspoll, Saulwick & Muller and Hugh Mackay, ‘Public Opinion on Reconciliation’.
In Michelle Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation,
Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000, p. 35.
9 AndreasHuyssen, ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’. In Arjun Appadurai (ed.),
Globalization, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 60.
10 ibid., p. 61.
11 ibid., p. 68.
12 ibid., p. 63.
13 ibid., p. 63.
14 Paul Keating, ‘The Redfern Park Speech’. In Grattan, Reconciliation, pp. 60–4.
15 Mark McKenna, ‘Different perspectives on black armband history’, Australian
Parliamentary Library Research Paper 5, 1997–98.
19
Australian Cinema after Mabo
16 Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Drawing up a balance sheet on our history’, Quadrant, 37(7–8)
1993, pp. 10–15.
17 On the history wars in Australia, see Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History
Wars,Melbourne University Press, 2003. On debates on frontier conflict, see Robert
Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History,
Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003 and Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience,
Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003. For an account of neo-conservative
responses to Bringing Them Home (1997), the report of the national inquiry into
the Stolen Generations, see RobertManne, ‘In denial: the stolen generations and the
right’, Quarterly Essay, no. 1, 2001. Also see Tim Flannery, ‘Beautiful lies: population
and environment in Australia’, Quarterly Essay, no. 9, 2003; DavidMalouf, ‘Made in
England: Australia’s British inheritance’, Quarterly Essay, no. 12, 2003; and Germaine
Greer, ‘Whitefella jump up: the shortest way to nationhood’, Quarterly Essay, no. 11,
2003.
18 See Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol. 2: Anatomy
of National Cinema, Sydney: Currency Press, 1988; Ross Gibson, South of the West,
Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1992; Tom O’Regan,
Australian National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1996; William
Routt, ‘On the expression of colonialism in early Australian films’. In A. Moran
and T. O’Regan (eds), An Australian Film Reader, Sydney: Currency Press, 1985;
Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian
Narrative, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986 and 1993.
19 See Linnell Secomb, ‘Interrupting mythic community’, Cultural Studies Review, 9(1)
2003, pp. 85–100.
20 The Tracker (Rolf deHeer, 2002); Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen, 2002); Rabbit-Proof Fence
(Phillip Noyce, 2002); One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001); Black and White
(Craig Lahiff, 2002), Yolngu Boy (Stephen Johnson, 2001).
21 Huyssen, ‘Present pasts’.
22 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. In
Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1992,
pp. 211–44.
23 Walter Benjamin, ‘“N” (re: the theory of knowledge, theory of progress)’, transl. Leigh
Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics,
History, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 43–82.
24 ‘Special Debate: Trauma and Screen Studies’, ed. Susannah Radstone, Screen, 42(2)
2001, pp. 188–215.
25 ibid., pp. 191–2.
26 See for instance Miriam Hansen, ‘America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer and Benjamin
on cinema and modernity’. In Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Cinema and
the Invention ofModern Life, Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press,
1995.
27 Nova Cinema, Carlton, 23 October 2002.
28 Walter Benjamin, ‘The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov’. In
Arendt, Illuminations.
29 Broken English is part of Blood Brothers, a Film Australia series of documentaries
produced and directed by Ned Lander, Rachel Perkins and Trevor Graham.
30 Janet Walker, ‘Trauma cinema: false memories and true experience’, Screen, 42(2)
2001, p. 214.
20
Backtracking after Mabo
31 KeithWindschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: vol. 1, Van Diemen’s Land
1803–1947, Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002.
32 Leela Ghandi, ‘Friendship and postmodern utopianism’,Cultural StudiesReview, 9(1)
2003, p. 15.
33 Ghandi, ‘Friendship and postmodern utopianism’, p. 17.
34 ibid., p. 18.
35 ibid.
36 This issue opens the published interview between Purcell and Kathryn Hay in Leah
Purcell, Black Chicks Talking, Sydney: Hodder, 2002, pp. 213–48.
21
2
Home and Abroad in Moulin
Rouge, The Dish and Lantana
When Russell Crowe became the inaugural winner of the Global Achievement
Award at the nationally televised 2001 Australian Film Institute (AFI)
Awards, he ended his acceptance speech with the provocative words, ‘God
bless America’. It was not hard to imagine the assembled film and television
industry catching its collective breath. Only two years before, in 1999, the
AFI Awards had provided a public platform for the industry’s attack on the
HighCourt’s decision thatNewZealand programswould henceforth qualify
as Australian content when broadcast on free-to-air commercial television.1
In 2003 the AFI Awards ceremony once again became a public forum for the
industry’s vociferous attack on the bilateral trade agreement being negotiated
with the United States. For a national feature film industry struggling
to extract more than 5–7 per cent of the nation’s annual box office revenue
from Australian cinema-goers, Crowe’s words must have felt like a rude
betrayal of the home-grown industry that had nurtured his talent.2 So it
is not hard to imagine a collective sigh of relief going through the auditorium
when Crowe added, after a perfectly timed pause, ‘And thank God for
Australia’. In 2002, accepting the award for his leading role in The Tracker,
DavidGulpilil, againwith impeccable timing, responded to the ovationwith
a laid-back one-liner, ‘Thanks. I deserve this.’ Unlike Crowe, Gulpilil did
not get to deliver a preamble or elaborate on his punchline, at least to the
television viewers, who were immediately diverted to a commercial break.
It is unlikely that the startled moment of incomprehension, followed by
the laughter of recognition in response to both Crowe and Gulpilil, would
make much sense outside the context of the Australian film and television
industry and its relatively small national and international audience.Within
the genre of a televised industry awards night, Crowe’s and Gulpilil’s words
stand out as a kind of shorthand for issues and debates that have defined the
Australian film industry throughout its history. As a medium-sized industry
which attracts some level of subsidy and protection, Australian cinema has
to compete, at home and abroad,withHollywood popular cinema, aswell as
22
Home and Abroad
British and European national cinemas. At the same time, with deregulation
of the Australian economy, the local production industry has become more
engaged with the global market.
As a result of national recognition and international exposure, both
Crowe and Gulpilil have entered the annals of great cinema talents, with
L.A Confidential (1997) as Crowe’s international breakthrough and Rabbit-
Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) and The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) as
Gulpilil’s return to form on national and international screens. However,
the difference in the terms of Crowe’s and Gulpilil’s visibility raises the
perennial question of how to characterise Australian cinema. TomO’Regan
makes a convincing argument that it is best regarded as a medium-sized
national cinema, lacking coherence as a subsidised local industry, and as
an English-language team player in international cinema.3 Crowe is now a
blockbuster star in transnational Hollywood, his career bookended by two
films which represent a trajectory fromthe intensely local, independentAustralian
film Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992) to the spectacularly
transnational blockbuster Master and Commander (Peter Weir, 2003). By
contrast, Gulpilil is the canny stayer whose local career has been bookended
by the European vision of directors Nicholas Roeg (Walkabout, 1971) and
Rolf de Heer (The Tracker, 2002). Crowe has transcended his New Zealand
birth and his Australian coming of age to become a Hollywood Oscar winner.
As a star with deal-making power, his access to a range of leading
roles is now unconstrained by issues of national identity. Gulpilil’s international
exposure has been contained within the art-house niche reserved for
Indigenous Australians in world cinema. Gulpilil’s screen persona has been
defined by the way he has played to and undercut the Eurocentric fantasy
of an exotic or mystical figure, somewhere between the canny black tracker
and the noble savage.Gulpilil achieved international visibilitywith his comic
undercutting of audience expectations of authentic tribal Aboriginality in
Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986). However, the reception in January
2004 of The Tracker by critics in the United States as ‘a decent little exercise
in nativist outrage’, marked by Gulpilil’s ‘startling authority’, ‘furious
moral certainty’ and ‘mystical aura of a man . . . in touch with the earth’,
indicates thatGulpilil’s current screen persona revives the exoticism ofWalkabout
and combines it with the post-colonial moral authority invested in an
Aboriginal elder.4 This persona has been complicated by Darlene Johnson’s
portrayal of Gulpilil in his everyday life in the television documentary One
Red Blood (2002).5 In 2004, Crowe’s ever-expanding career options contrast
with Gulpilil’s stop-start career pattern (typical of the local industry). Given
the successful export of Australian talent to Hollywood over many decades,
23
Australian Cinema after Mabo
the jury might still be out on whether Russell Crowe was the most deserving
recipient of the AFI’s first Global Achievement Award. However, within the
genre of national cinema, Gulpilil’s ‘I deserve this’ speaks volumes (about
surviving as a local actor for more than three decades) to an industry conversant
with its own transient history and tenuous status within international
cinema. For Crowe, national identity is no hindrance to a wide range of onscreen
roles, whether neo-Nazi skinhead inMelbourne, gay son of cool dad
in Sydney, cop in Los Angeles, gladiator in ancient Rome, whistleblower or
mathematician in America, or ship’s captain on the high seas. For Gulpilil,
every screen role is contained within the boundaries of a national cinema
which returns at unpredictable intervals to questions about the authoritative
place (mythic, historical, spiritual, cultural) of Aboriginality in Australian
identity. Crowe carries no such burden in his on-screen roles, although he
may be called upon to speak for the national industry off screen.
This chapter will venture into the thicket of questions to do with globalisation,
local industry strategies, and national cinema by looking at three
films, Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann), The Dish (Rob Sitch) and Lantana
(Ray Lawrence)which competed at the 2001 AFI awards (the year ofCrowe’s
speech). These three films adopt commercial-industrial strategies for negotiating
the local, the national and the global. The next chapter will look at a
cultural-interventionist strategy developed by Bridget Ikin of SBS Independent
Television (SBSi) to fund a package of films released in 2002 (the year of
Gulpilil’s speech). The thorniness of these issues can be felt in the nexus and
dissonance between the forces that have shapedCrowe’s international career
(‘God bless America’) and fostered Gulpilil’s longevity (‘I deserve this’), in a
financially protected but creatively independent (‘Thank God for Australia’)
film industry. Keeping in mind that the blessings of global Hollywood have
been visited unevenly upon the three different sectors (production, distribution,
exhibition) of the Australian film industry, this chapter will backtrack
over the idea that Australian cinema might be re-imagined as a genre (or
type) of international cinema.6 As a genre, Australian cinema is characterised
by two main strategies, the commercial-industrial (mainly initiated
by the private sector) and the cultural-interventionist (mainly initiated by
the public sector). These strategies are broadly shaped by the way economic
and cultural policies have regularly fallen out of step with each other since
deregulation of theAustralian economy became gospel for both major political
parties in the 1980s. More particularly, this chapter looks at three films
in terms of their industrial-commercial strategies within a national economic
and cultural policy framework which positions Australian cinema as
an international genre.
24
Home and Abroad
Australian Cinema as a Genre of International
Cinema
If we think of Australian cinema as a genre, and of the 2001 and 2002 AFI
awards as post-Mabo moments within the genre, it is possible to explain
how the audience recognised precisely where Crowe and Gulpilil were coming
from, locally and internationally. Genre allows us to think about the
expectations and knowledge the ‘generic’ audience brings to an occasion
like the AFI awards. This notion of a generic audience assumes there is a
constellation of people with varying degrees of arcane knowledge derived
from a shared history of viewing Australian film and television since the
cultural renaissance of the 1970s. This concept saves us from reverting to
the dubious idea that the audience for Australian cinema shares an innate
sense of national identity expressed through both Crowe and Gulpilil as
icons of national cinema. This view might argue that Crowe is the Australian
actor who has most successfully taken the iconic Anglo-Celtic male,
the larrikin-ocker of 1970s Australian film and television, and transformed
it through a series of character roles into a transnational figure.7 And that
Gulpilil’s performances since Walkabout have rung the changes in cinema’s
stock figure of the Australian Aboriginal, to the extent that Gulpilil stands
for a type of national character, story or landscape that is specific, local, and
non-transferablyAustralian.However, ifwe put national identity to one side
for a moment and take up the idea of Australian cinema as an international
genre, then the gap between the transnational (Russell Crowe) and the local
(David Gulpilil) starts to become comprehensible as a field of play that is
more flexible and more varied than the circumscribed idea of national cinema.
In this playing field, economic and cultural politics are more important
than the slippery slide of national identity for understanding the Australian
‘accent’ in international cinema.
Several things are implied in the idea of genre as a field of play. The first
is that a national cinema is recognisable to audiences as a set of conventions
or norms. From this perspective, Australian cinema is marked by particular
types of characters (laconic males of the recessive, ocker or larrikin category);
iconic landscapes (the outback, the bush, the suburbs, the beach); narrative
patterns (melancholy defeat or wry acceptance of things-as-they-are); and
aesthetic choices (low budget, independent, naturalistic). The second idea
implied by genre is that there is a generic audience of critics and viewers
who have a range of expectations of the genre based on cumulative knowledge
and debate about the films and about the industry (for instance, the
Australian road movie of the 1990s borrows elements fromNewHollywood
25
Australian Cinema after Mabo
road movies, but it also adds local elements: the characters tend to depart
from Sydney or Melbourne in a hurry, encountering an assortment of ugly
Australians along the road; they reach a crisis point involving criminal misdeeds
and sexual misunderstandings in the outback, often north of Adelaide
or back of Bourke, and return to the coastal fringe for an ambivalent, ironic
ending). The third idea entailed in genre is that genre films function for
their generic audience as either mythic or ideological solutions to ongoing,
unreconciled social conflicts.8 In this sense, Australian films might appeal
to particular local and international audiences for the way they backtrack
over the dilemmas of a minor English-speaking nation negotiating a place
for itself in global politics on the basis of its former status as a far-flung
dominion of the British Empire, and, since the Second World War, as a
South Pacific deputy to the current world superpower, the United States
of America.9 Shifting perceptions of nationhood entailed in the nation’s
social imaginary, from Anglophile White Australia, to multicultural settler
nation, to cosmopolitan labour force in the Asia-Pacific region, are also
part of what defines the experience of Australian cinema for its generic
audience.10
Further, the post-Mabo period might be understood as a particularly open
moment in the history of the genre of Australian cinema.11 As well as trying
to assert itself in a global economy dominated by a handful of transnational
media conglomerates, the post-Mabo film (together with its generic audience
of viewers and critics) signifies the return of unreconciled national
issues, at the very moment when a cinema of national identity seems most
redundant.12 This vigorous return of a national agenda for Australian cinema
is remarkable for two reasons. The first is the long history of bipartisan
support for economic policies which regulate and subsidise the local film
and television industry as part of a transnational media market.13 These
economic policies demand that the industry be commercial, efficient and
competitive in the international market. Yet, for three decades, the film production
industry (focusing on drama and documentary forms) has successfully
agitated for the cultural protection of Australian stories against a flood
of cheap imports which, it is argued, pose a threat to national identity,much
as the imported cane toad threatens the local environment. The second is
the Howard government’s apparent resolve to replace left-liberals with neoconservatives
on the boards of key cultural organisations (including ABC
and SBS Television and the NationalMuseum).14 The neo-conservative aim
is to restore a strong sense of unity and pride to the nation based on an
Anglocentric model of national identity, borrowed from One Nation.15 The
outcome is a post-Mabo cinema which is subject to a major contradiction.
On the one hand, Australian cinema’s international strategies display clear
26
Home and Abroad
evidence of the bipartisan economic policies which promote a commercialindustrial
ethos, despite a necessary level of government subsidy and protection.
On the other, the post-Mabo culture war between left-liberals and
neo-conservatives battling for control of the social imaginary is evident in
the startling difference between the feature films that contended for AFI
Awards in 2001 and 2002. The prominent films from each year represent
a divide between a commercial-industrial ethos and an ethos of cultural
intervention.However, as will become apparent in the next chapter, the two
sides of the culture wars do not divide neatly into commercial entrepreneurs
and cultural apparatchiks.
The idea of a national cinema as a field of international play has been
given leverage by the clash between economic and cultural objectives since
the election of Hawke’s ALP government in 1983 and the defeat of Paul
Keating’s ALP government by John Howard’s Liberal Coalition in 1996. To
explore the kinds of moves that have been made in this playing field, our
focus for the remainder of this chapter will shift from Crowe and Gulpilil to
three films that competed at the 2001 AFI Awards, each adopting different
commercial-industrial strategieswithin the genre of Australian cinema. The
next chapter will look at two films that emerged as part of a package deal
between cultural and film funding bodies in 2002 through the intervention
of SBSi in the culture wars.
Commercial–Industrial Ethos and Local–Global
Strategies in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana
One way of mapping the local-global as a national policy issue with textual/
aesthetic outcomes is to take Baz Luhrmann’sMoulin Rouge andWorking
Dog’s The Dish as benchmark films for local engagement with New
Hollywood’s global blockbuster economy. If Moulin Rouge takes up the
challenge of New Hollywood’s ultra high-budget spectacle of digital effects,
funded by Twentieth Century Fox, The Dish resorts to a low-budget, televisual
deployment of a resilient populist nationalism, one that resonateswryly
with Howard’s oft-cited vision for a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia
and his more recent profile as junior partner to Bush and Blair in the
Coalition of the Willing’s war on Iraq in 2003. The film standing between
the blockbuster spectacle and the populist comedy-drama at the 2001 AFI
awards was Lantana, which stole the show frombothMoulin Rouge and The
Dish, reaffirming a middle-brow film industry’s sceptical relation to both
global Hollywood and local television as models for aspiring commercial
auteurs.
27
Australian Cinema after Mabo
The Dish and Moulin Rouge appear to exemplify the tension between
inward-looking Australian films, preoccupied with familiar types of characters
in familiar landscapes, and outward-oriented, international films that
pitch themselves to an international marketplace by drawing on local talent
and facilities to become a branch of the global infotainment industry.
The inward-looking films tend to be low-key comedy-dramas exploring
downwardly mobile or marginalised milieux in old (Anglo-Celtic) or new
(multicultural) vernaculars. The global films made in Australia, such as
the Matrix trilogy, tend to use digital effects to create imaginary cities or
worlds that are ubiquitous rather than geographically located.16 Between
these two extremes, Lantana is more typical of run-of-the mill, outwardlooking
films whose budgets are eclipsed ten times over by that of Sydney
Fox Studio’s local blockbuster, Moulin Rouge. Although its locations make
it a Sydney film, Lantana draws on the international genre of the crime
thriller to explore middle-class life in a cosmopolitan rather than national
context.
Although there appears to be a clear divide between the global and the
local film, even the most resolutely parochial Australian films are attuned
to trends in international cinema. Exemplifying the dialectic between the
global and the local, bothMoulin Rouge and TheDish might be considered as
event films in the same way that the International Sydney Olympics of 2000
was simultaneously a global and national media event. Both films exhibit
the Olympian ambition to stage the greatest show on earth, Moulin Rouge
as spectacle and The Dish as allegory. However, despite a shared interest
in enhancing Australia’s place on the global map (through a combination
of technology and concept), Moulin Rouge and The Dish adopt opposing
strategies for getting into the international marketplace.
With a reported budget of US$52.5 million,Moulin Rouge is clearly competing
offshore with the Hollywood blockbuster (it opened in Australia
against Steven Spielberg’s historical blockbuster Pearl Harbor). With an
estimated (Australian average) budget of AUS$5–6 million, The Dish,
through its distribution deal with media conglomerate Time-Warner, was
clearly aiming for an independent breakthrough hit in national and international
markets. Taking into account the vast difference in production
and marketing budgets, Moulin Rouge and The Dish share some common
ground. Both engage with the dominant New Hollywood form, the blockbuster,
and both keep the European market (which now includes Britain)
and cultural heritage within their sights. In the case of The Dish, Australia’s
national status is an explicit issue and informs the film’s sly address
to the Australian, British and American markets. In the case of Moulin
Rouge, Australianness is effaced only to return as a hybrid, postmodern
28
Home and Abroad
(distinctively Sydney) sensibility, one that seems entirely at odds with The
Dish’s tongue-in-cheek style of populist nostalgia for a benignly bucolic
Australia. However, both films have been produced as antipodal engagements
with New Hollywood in both economic and textual senses.17
Spectacular Party People in Moulin Rouge
In an article on specularity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola,
1992), Thomas Elsaesser describes the emblematic New Hollywood film as
the high concept blockbuster, directed by a ‘power baby’ or Movie Brat,
financed and marketed by a US media conglomerate, and distributed via
satellite-cable-video technologies.18 The New Hollywood style is characterised
by digital sound and image technologies, new temporal structures
and ‘the mania for citation’.19 Moreover, the hybridity and intertextuality
of the New Hollywood film since the mid-1970s exhibits the movie brats’
‘self-conscious use of old mythologies, genre stereotypes, and the history
of cinema itself’.20 This knowledge of cinema history, expressed as an element
of style, produces a double address to the spectator as both naive and
ironic, innocent and knowing.21 Elsaesser argues that in the high concept
blockbuster film ‘the vigorous refiguring of the text and its limits . . . joins
economicwith textual excess’.22 The priority given to audiovisual impact and
citation produces new temporal forms(time-travel,multi-strand narratives,
open endings enabling sequels), and ‘shape-shifting’ rather than consistent
character identity.23 In terms of spectatorship, theNewHollywood film displaces
voyeuristic and fetishistic identification in favour of aural and visual
engulfment, which Elsaesser describes as ‘producing a more corporeal set of
perceptions’ typical of ‘the multimedia viewing experience’.24 Viewers and
critics are thereby deemed capable of responding in a variety of classical or
post-classical ways to the New Hollywood mode, resulting in incompatible
understandings and judgements of the films, clearly evident in the critical
reception of Moulin Rouge.
Reviews of Moulin Rouge tend to agree on one point – the visual and
aural excesses of Baz Luhrmann’s follow-up to Strictly BallroomandWilliam
Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996) produce a delirious, disorienting, sensory
assault on the viewer. The effect of Baz Luhrmann’s ‘red curtain’ style
and New Hollywood’s high concept blockbuster is much like the combination
of ecstasy and rave parties. For some of the film’s generic audience,
Moulin Rouge is a party film, a postmodern homage to popular music and
the craze for dance parties: very camp, very Mardi Gras, very Sydney. To
other members of the generic audience, Moulin Rouge is a step forward for
29
Australian Cinema after Mabo
the local special effects industry, but it also represents a downgrading of
national cinema into an offshore service industry for global Hollywood.
This is reflected in the AFI awards, where Moulin Rouge was snubbed by
the voters (key members of the generic audience for Australian cinema). A
series of craft awards for special effects damned the film with faint praise.
This snub by the industry followed a rejection of the investors’ bid for tax
concessions under 10B, with the Australian Taxation Office refusing to collude
in tax avoidance schemes involving large corporations and financial
institutions.25
Reviewers are also sharply divided in their evaluation of the film’s engulfing
spectacle: on the one hand the film is rejected for its banal plot, its lack
of depth, its superficial characters and its music video style; on the other,
it is praised for its spectacular, postmodern pastiche of images and music.
Sustained interest in the film lies in the excess of both its digital effects
and its layers of audiovisual sampling and citation. For some reviewers the
issue of the film’s Australian identity is at stake. The film has been vigorously
defended as a non-American blockbuster by Sydney Morning Herald
reviewer Paul Sheehan, who revels in the distance betweenMoulinRouge and
Australia’s last international blockbuster, Crocodile Dundee.26 Local defenders
of the film are quick to point to the Australian creative team, Rupert
Murdoch’s money, Nicole Kidman’s starring role, a supporting cast of Australian
talent, the two British imports, EwanMcGregor and Jim Broadbent,
and the one American import, John Leguizano. Further, as Sheehan argues,
‘Moulin Rouge is a brilliant extension of Australia’s trademark niche in the
global film industry – hypertheatre’. Luhrmann’s artistic sensibility, too, has
been defended as Australian in so far as he has invented, in his red curtain
trilogy, a ‘cinematic language’ which is ‘particularly Australian’.27
An alternative critical strategy treats Moulin Rouge as either an attempt
to revive the musical or as a failed epic experiment on a par with the
auteurist hubris of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart (1982)
and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). In this context Adrian Martin
describes Moulin Rouge as ‘the campest film folly since the days of Erich
von Stroheim’.28 Much of the criticism of Moulin Rouge is divided over the
value of the film’s rapidly edited snatches of song and dance (rather than
full-length show-stoppers in the classical tradition). The film has been scrutinised
for its soulless appeal to the DVD generation of ‘internet squatters’
and ‘culture vultures in a fast-forward media environment’.29 At the same
time it has been lauded for its hybridity: ‘MGM vs MTV, Busby Berkeley on
ecstasy, Fred and Ginger . . . with equal measures of love and irony – on top
of a mardi gras float . . . a time-travelling, medium-hopping musical’.30
30
Home and Abroad
The delirious ‘time-travelling, medium-hopping’ hypertheatre ofMoulin
Rouge speaks directly to Elsaesser’s analysis of the specular engulfment
which characterisesNewHollywood. The film’s temporal conceit (late 20thcentury
pop songs reprised in a 21st-century transnational film set in a 19thcentury
Paris nightclub made famous by aToulouse-Lautrec poster) exploits
cinema’s ahistorical capacity, speaking to a late modern, post-national, melting
pot sense of identity which takes the ubiquity of popular culture (from
postcards and posters, operas andmyths toMonroe andMadonna) as its reference
point. Just as the cinema of specularity can be experienced as classical
or post-classical, as naive or sophisticated,Moulin Rouge can evoke national
and post-national takes on identity. In terms of economic and textual excess
it is an international film, with signs of Australianness effaced in favour of
signs of Sydney not as a place but as a sense of style. AlthoughMoulin Rouge
revels in fin-de-si`ecle Paris as the digitally re-imaged capital of 19th-century
modernity, the film’s own fin-de-si`ecle sensibility is grounded in Sydney as
a style capital of late 20th-century modernity. The film’s high concept Sydney
style has been honed by the annual spectacle of the Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras, brought into international recognition by the staging of the
Sydney 2000 Olympics, underwritten financially by Sydney’s Fox Studios,
and enhanced digitally by special effects company Animal Logic. However,
although high concept spectacle is not the only option in the international
marketplace, its global influence is a determining factor for Australian film
as a genre of international cinema.
Benign Battlers in The Dish
Although they share the same editor, Jill Bilcock, Moulin Rouge and The
Dish appear to occupy opposite sides of the post-classical/classical divide
which characterises contemporary cinema. However, no film which pitches
itself at the American market is uncontaminated by the blockbuster. As
an independent, low-budget film with a potential blockbuster theme (the
American moon landing of 1969), TheDish deploys the blockbuster’s infantilised
affect of awe and wonder to emulate the boy’s-own adventure films of
Hollywood’s original high concept brats of the 1970s, Lucas and Spielberg.31
Although its production budget does not stretch to blockbuster effects, The
Dish uses archival footage and popmusic aswell asAmerican characters (the
Ambassador, the man from NASA) to project itself into the American market
(through a distribution deal with media conglomerate Time-Warner)
as an antipodal or reverse image of the blockbuster film. The film expresses
31
Australian Cinema after Mabo
admiration for the blockbuster’s universalising theme (world peace imagined
as an international audience of television viewers united in awe, tears
and wonder as an American flag is planted on the moon). At the same time,
The Dish takes the mickey out of politics and history, producing an ironic
distance fromthe world stage by foregrounding small-town characters who,
even as they rise to the occasion, seem to have the exact measure of their
place in world events. Just as the modest team of dish workers (embodied by
SamNeill’s pipe-smoking, cardigan-clad, self-effacing man of science, Cliff)
honours the higher purpose behind the overreaching ambition of NASA,
The Dish honours the blockbuster, asking only to occupy the space in the
American market reserved for the independent, breakthrough hit.However,
just as Parkes andHoneysuckleCreek remained invisible to the international
audience of 600 million television viewers as the source of the images of the
1967 moon landing, The Dish remained an event only in the Australian film
industry. The Dish, like the Australian contribution to the moonwalk, is
a routine event in international cinema, just one in a series of small-scale
marketing events eclipsed by the saturation coverage given to the release of
the year’s Hollywood blockbusters.
But what kind of event is The Dish in Australian cinema? The geopolitical
space of Australian cinema is anticipated by the film’s tongue-in-cheek
account of ‘the greatest story never told’. The film’s art-directed nostalgia for
the 1960s works against any serious attempt to pinpoint Australia’s coming
of age as a team player in the infotainment industry. The makeshift moment
of making it to the international team is cut down to size when the Prime
Minister’s advisor announces with succinct humour, ‘We’ve got the moonwalk.’
The television comedy groupWorkingDog,with hits like theABC-TV
series Frontline (1994–97) and its first feature film, The Castle (1997), has
the proven ability to tap into a vein of populist national sentiment. This
is achieved through its trademark self-deprecating humour combined with
an affection for the battler – tapping into familiar Australian strategies for
responding to an economic, cultural and political position of relative weakness,
leavened by close ties to superpowers. Yet for all the newfound national
pride exhibited by the film’s characters at the end of The Dish, there is a
defensive, almost apologetic tone in the film’s nostalgic rendition of Australia’s
chance to play in the big league. This sense of being second-rate has
something to do with the American market’s indifference to the Australianmade
product, a repetition of The Castle’s limited exportability, despite its
home-grown success. This limited success is repeated in the local interest
and international indifference which greeted Working Dog’s sly attempt to
go beyond the parochial in The Dish by borrowing an American event and
marketing it to the world from a down-under perspective.
32
Home and Abroad
Like Australian television drama, The Dish did well with the national
audience in 2001 (earning around $18 million compared toMoulin Rouge’s
$25.5 million, with the Hollywood animation, Shrek, in number one position,
earning $29 million at the Australian box office in 2001).32 Yet beyond
raw box office figures (which fail to reflect key marketing factors like saturation
television advertising, multi-screen release patterns, star power,
distribution deals with cinema chains, and a limited release pattern for
independent and foreign films in the North American market) the impact
of The Dish on international markets is much harder to measure. However,
the film itself anticipates the disparity between national aspiration
and international reception. The widescreen version of the film provides a
large canvas for small-town, parish-pump themes of purported universal
significance. However, the film’s chronic deflation of its own widescreen
perspective on Australian history is evident in its repeated, awestruck shots
of the Parkes radio telescope, shots which are doubly deflated by the film’s
ironic title, The Dish, and by the telescope’s rural location, referred to as ‘a
sheep paddock’. This strategy of awestruck deflation provides an Australian
perspective on Hollywood’s blockbuster film industry, undercutting excess
and over-achievement, valuing an optimal contribution rather than an ethic
of maximum exploitation epitomised by both theNASA space program and
the blockbuster.Throughrepeated contrasts of scaleandtone betweenNASA
and Parkes, The Dish makes a virtue of the necessity of being a minor player
in an international league. It is in this sense that The Dish owes its better
moments to the bumbling spirit of Britain’s Ealing comedies rather than to
the Hollywood high concept industry.
Anxious Flesh in Lantana
A curious feature of the 2001 AFI awards was the sureness with which
Lantana stole the show from its major competitors, edging Moulin Rouge
into the craft awards and eclipsing The Dish (a disappearing act in terms
of film awards, despite success at home and its enviable distribution deal
with Time-Warner). Lantana, like TheDish, belongs to a cluster of mundane
Australian films which routinely negotiate tensions between cinematic spectacle
and televisual naturalism, between a sophisticated, outward-looking
spectacle and a naive, inward-looking (though canny) populism. For the
purposes of this chapter, Lantana represents a third way, between Moulin
Rouge and The Dish.
One of four crime thrillers entered in the 2001 AFI awards, Lantana
appeals to the international market as a genre film featuring international,
33
Australian Cinema after Mabo
billablenames–BarbaraHersheyandGeoffreyRush.33 TheAustralian trailer
is pitched at the crime thriller audience, juxtaposing the image of a woman’s
body (entangled in the exotic tropical weed lantana) with a montage of the
key suspects in a murder investigation. In contrast, the film’s press kit and
reviews emphasise Lantana’s enquiry into themysteries, not somuch of guilt
andmurder, but of marriage and middle age. Adopting this dual strategy of
the psychological thriller grafted onto the personal relations film, Lantana
has tapped into a broader audience than the obvious middle-aged demographic
targeted by the BBC quality mini-series, screened regularly on Sunday
nights by ABC-TV. Lantana’s successful crossover from limited release
on the art-house circuit to wide release through the suburbanmultiplex can
be attributed to this double pitch, as well as to the collaboration between an
experienced local distributor (Tait Brady at Palace) and a tenacious creative
teamheadedby respectedfilmproducer JanChapman, second-feature director
Ray Lawrence and theatre writer Andrew Bovell. The casting of familiar
television actors in the ensemble film (particularly Kerry Armstrong from
SeaChange, the remarkable Rachael Blake from Wildside, Glenn Robbins
from The Panel and Peter Phelps from Stingers) and the screen adaptation of
Bovell’s play Speaking in Tongues add two further ‘presold’ elements to the
package. However, the question remains whether these factors are sufficient
to explain Lantana’s sweep of AFI awards, together with the coolness of the
AFI voters towards the year’s expected crowd pleasers, Moulin Rouge and
The Dish.
Ostensibly a psychological thriller investigating what looks like amurder,
Lantana connects internationally to the contemporary multi-strand narrative
in the vein of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993). The pleasures of
Lantana lie in its confident orchestration of the moody desires and bodily
discontents of the film’s ensemble of middle-aged characters as four
marriages unravel amid a thicket of interlocking professional and domestic
lives. Early in the film, the overweight and unfit Leon Zat (Anthony
LaPaglia) struggles for breath after a morning ‘I don’t want to die’ jog, only
to be told by his wife, Sonia (Kerry Armstrong), ‘You are going to die. Stop
jogging.’ Mortality, and the shadow it begins to cast over middle age, is an
unpromising marketing hook for a feature film straddling the blockbuster,
high concept terrain of commercial cinema. Yet Lantana uses the decentred,
multi-strand narrative and the alibi of the thriller to pursue its low-concept
themes by linking and then isolating its characters inwidescreen shots which
reveal the contingency of (certain kinds of) human bodies as they age. In this
sense Lantana activates whatWalter Benjamin calls the ‘optical unconscious’
of cinema. Through such devices as the widescreen close-up, Lantana, ‘by
focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace
34
Home and Abroad
milieus . . . extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our
lives’ and also ‘manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field
of action’.34 In Lantana, cinematographer Mandy Walker’s medium closeups
reveal the hidden details of the mid-life body and its field of action in
sensual wide shots which seem to offer a different kind of visual pleasure by
touching the eye and brushing up against the ear.35
Along with the discontented flesh trying to break through the anaesthetisation
of mid-life and its routines, Lantana makes visible the range
of locales of middle-class life. These distinctive locales indicate the socioeconomic
strata of middle-class experience, as characters begin to connect
with each other, as strands of space within the film begin to tangle like
lantana, extending the thriller’s conventional field of action into the multistrand
narrative of the art cinema. These milieux are recognisable Sydney
habitats, from the inner-city renovation, to the suburban double-brick or
weatherboard bungalow, to the architect-designed bushland retreat.As local
habitats, Lantana’s distinctive houses and its ubiquitous workplaces, bars,
bookshops, dance studios and nightclubs are readily exportable to an international
audience sharing a similar field of action. Whereas Moulin Rouge
imports its field of action frompictorial representations of late 19th-century
Paris, and The Dish exports a vision of small-town Australiana unchanged
by the 1960s, Lantana captures its generic middle-class audience where it
lives in the 21st century. In this sense it is an export-oriented film, but its
international cinematic reference is the quality drama we expect from independent
auteurs rather than the Hollywood blockbuster of the commercial
power babies.
Lantana is a deceptive film that invites its audience into the cinema by
promising the tension and release of the thriller. The twist in this thriller is
that there has been no murder, only a failure of trust which produces the
film’s opening exploitation image of a woman’s corpse entangled in lantana.
For AFI voters the film delivers something familiar that was crafted by the
first wave of Australian auteurs (notably Beresford, Noyce, Schepisi, Weir)
before they left for Hollywood at the end of the 1970s. One of the staples
of Australian ‘quality’ cinema is the intimate ensemble film from a creative
team capable of examining the necessities which shape the lifestyle of the
local middle class. (Jan Chapman, Gillian Armstrong and Helen Garner
might be the perfect realisation of such a team in the 1992 production The
Last Days of Chez Nous; Andrew Knight and Deb Cox might be considered
the equivalent in Australian television drama, their critical success with
the mini-series After the Deluge in 2003 demonstrating the importance of
television for the longevity of certain genres that were once the province of
cinema.)
35
Australian Cinema after Mabo
By engaging the thriller as an international calling card, Lantana participates
in one of the commercial-industrial protocols of what O’Regan calls a
mundane national cinema. O’Regan insists that both meanings ofmundane
are pertinent to understanding the place of low-budget independent films:
as ‘everyday’ local products of a minor national cinema and as ‘worldly’
products of international (albeit unequal) cultural exchange.36 As O’Regan
puts it, this is a matter of ‘international form’ with an Australian ‘flavour’.37
An Australian Flavour in Commercial-Industrial
Films
In their ground-breaking studies of Australian cinema of the 1970s and
early 1980s, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka adopted the concept of a
social imaginary rather than national identity to explain the characteristics
of a second world cinema.38 The idea of a social imaginary as a tangled
undergrowth of historically shaped, cultural modes of perception and social
experience is a useful one for considering the Australian ‘flavour’ which so
many critics perceive in films as unlike each other asMoulin Rouge, TheDish
and Lantana.Bydefinition, these commercial-industrial films need to attract
market interest in the form of private investment, a pre-sale or distribution
deal. To increase the odds in favour of a profitable return on investment
(in an international market where eight out of ten American films fail to go
into profit at the box office) Australian films need to think global as well as
local.What then arewe to make of a persistent expectation, from the generic
audience, of an Australian flavour in commercial-industrial films conceived
with one eye on the international market?
In the recent history wars (see Chapter 1),Miriam Dixson has discerned
‘some of the enduring patterns’ of Anglo culture which linger in the nation’s
social imaginary even as Australians experience the intense aftershock of
global corporatism.39 For the generic audience, it may be that the three
films discussed in this chapter are indicative of enduring patterns as well as
shock-waves of change in the social imaginary over the last decade. Moulin
Rouge might register the pleasures and rewards of singing and dancing for
our supper in the open market, envisaged as expansively cosmopolitan in
Keating’s big picture, and as creatively entrepreneurial in the new digital era
of infotainment corporations. The Sydney ethos of ‘party harder’, marketed
under the banner of Mardi Gras since the 1980s, coincided with Treasurer
Keating’s rise to prominence as passionate advocate of the free-market economy.
However, in theHawke-Keating era of economic rationalism from1983
to 1996, the commercial ethos of the cosmopolitan entrepreneur (embodied
36
Home and Abroad
by veteran British actor Jim Broadbent in Moulin Rouge) was tempered by
a revived sense of Australia as ‘a first rate social democracy . . . truly the
land of the fair go and the better chance’.40 In his history-making Redfern
Park speech of 1992, Keating asked non-Aboriginal Australians to imagine
the past from the perspective of Aboriginal people. He argued that reconciliation
based on recognition and justice for Aboriginal Australians would
take an act of imagination similar to the one that transformed the ‘narrow
and insular’ Australia of the 1960s into ‘a culturally diverse, worldly
and open Australia’ in a single generation.41 For the attentive, generic audience
of Australian cinema afterMabo, the Australian flavour in commercialindustrial
films mightwell be those figures of landscape and character, milieu
and habitat that resonate with the complex shifts in the social imaginary
accompanying the shifts in economic policy and cultural rhetoric deployed
under the banner of theHawke-Keating governments. If Gulpilil and Crowe
both stand tall in this social imaginary, straddling old and new ground a
decade after the Redfern Park speech, then it may well be that the moral
authority of Gulpilil and the commercial clout of Crowe, together with Lantana
andMoulin Rouge, are outcomes of the Keating cultural and economic
moment.
In this view, The Dish reprises the 1960s not as a decade of change but
as the tail-end of the Menzies era, as the last time when Australia could
happily enjoy its place in the world, secure in its identity as a benign backwater,
before Britain’s entry into the Common Market broke the bonds of
Empire and forced Australia into a new role as a minor team player in global
events orchestrated from elsewhere. The 1960s, affectionately re-imagined
by The Dish, are uncannily similar to the prosperous, protected Australia
of the 1950s, fondly remembered by neo-conservatives as a prototype for
Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia in the 21st century. The fact
that The Dish was successful at the box office but a non-event in popular
culture, and that it was ignored at the AFI awards, indicates that its tonguein-
cheek homage to the more benign aspects of Howard’s nostalgic vision
of the 1950s failed to resonate with the changes taking place in the social
imaginary. The unexpected critical success of Lantana suggests that the film
stole the AFI awards frombothMoulinRouge and TheDish because it offered
its generic audience a more complex response to the anxieties of the urban
middle class, broadly represented as inclusive of suburban battlers, at one
end, and the cosmopolitan literati at the other. It is this middle ground that
is reshaping the social imaginary in Australia as it is courted by both sides
of politics. Pundits have named it the ‘aspirational class’ and pollsters are
reminding political leaders that voting patterns can no longer be depended
on in electorates once considered rock-solid for one or other side of politics.
37
Australian Cinema after Mabo
As an exploration of the field of action of the middle class, Lantana brings
new tensions of home, family,work and unsatisfied longings intowidescreen
focus in subtle ways that do not rely on quirky comedy, grotesque suburbia
or rituals of mateship for Australian ‘flavour’. Rather, Lantana manages to
integrate its cast of local media personalities (Armstrong, Blake, Colosimo,
Robbins, Purcell) and its internationally recognised film actors (LaPaglia,
Hershey and Rush) into a Sydney middle class indebted to Keating’s economic
reforms, tempted byHoward’s promise of security, less enamoured of
nostalgia for community than The Dish, and more likely to watch theMardi
Gras parade on television than to be found dancing atMoulin Rouge’s party.
Notes
1 New Zealand programs comprise around 20 per cent of the content on New Zealand
free-to-air television. Australian programs comprise at least 55 per cent of content on
Australian free-to-air television. See Roger Horrocks, ‘New Zealand cinema: cultures,
policies, films’. In Deb Verhoeven (ed.), Twin Peeks: Australian&New Zealand Feature
Films,Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 1999, pp. 129–37. Horrocks outlines cultural
costs and benefits of a deregulated film and television industry in New Zealand. One
of the benefits is a kind of localism producing an ‘Antipodean camp’ aesthetic rather
than nationalism’s straight white macho figures.
2 For a persuasive analysis of Australia’s globally integrated distribution/exhibition sector
as a starting point for understanding why this situation is likely to get worse,
not better, see Mary Anne Reid, More Long Shots: Australian Cinema Successes in the
90s, Sydney: Australian Film Commission, and Brisbane: Australian Key Centre for
Cultural and Media Policy, 1999, pp. 110–29.
3 Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, London & New York: Routledge, 1996,
pp. 44–71 and 96–106.
4 Quoted in Lawrie Zion, ‘Short Cuts’, Age, A3, 30 January 2003, p. 8.
5 One Red Blood (Darlene Johnson, 2002) was broadcast on ABC-TV on 11 December
2002 as part of the national broadcaster’s Australian documentary series The Big
Picture.
6 See O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, pp. 194–6 . This concept of Australian film
as a genre of international cinema has been discussed inWilliamD. Routt, ‘MeCobber,
Ginger Mick: Stephano’s story and resistance to empire in early Australian film’. In
Verhoeven, Twin Peeks, p. 37. It supports Routt’s attempt to interpret an Australian
silent film as an international classic rather than as a representation of national identity.
7 For a precedent in Paul Hogan, see AlanMcKee, Australian Television: A Genealogy of
Great Moments, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 117–35.
8 Onnation itself as a type of genre, open to being remade in the same way that genres are
transformed, see Rick Altman, ‘What can genres teach us about nations?’ Film/Genre,
BFI, London, 1999, pp. 195–206.
9 For two recent literary accounts of Australia’s ambivalent ties to the UK and the USA
see David Malouf, ‘Made in England: Australia’s British inheritance’, Quarterly Essay,
no. 12, 2003; and Don Watson, ‘Rabbit syndrome: Australia and America’, Quarterly
Essay, no. 4, 2001.
38
Home and Abroad
10 On the concept of a ‘second world’ social imaginary in Australian cinema, see Susan
Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening Of Australia: Anatomy of a National
Cinema, vol. 2, Sydney: Currency Press, 1988, pp. 17–23.
11 There is something of this idea at work in the notion of ‘the nation as an open
framework for action’ in Meaghan Morris, ‘Lunching for the republic’. In Too Soon
Too Late:History in PopularCulture, Bloomington IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1998,
p. 298.
12 See Graeme Turner, ‘Whatever happened to national identity? Film and the nation
in the 1990s’, Metro, 100, 1994, pp. 32–5.
13 For a succinct account of government measures to support film financing in Australia
since 1970 see Ina Bertrand, ‘Finance’. In Brian McFarlane, Geoff Mayer &
Ina Bertrand (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1999, pp. 156–9.
14 For an account of such appointments to theNationalMuseum of Australia see Stuart
Macintyre, ‘Working through the museum’s labels’. In The HistoryWars,Melbourne
University Press, 2003, pp. 191–215.
15 For an overview of the way the Howard Government has exploited One Nation
supporters and the politics of race since 1996, see RobertManne, ‘TheHoward years:
a political interpretation’. In Robert Manne (ed.), The Howard Years, Melbourne:
Black Inc. Agenda, 2004, pp. 3–53.
16 See Tom O’Regan and Rama Venkatasawmy, ‘A tale of two cities: Dark City and Pig
in the City’. In Verhoeven, Twin Peeks, pp. 187–203.
17 O’Regan describes the Australian ‘antipodal condition’ as a permanent structure of
unequal cultural exchange with the dominant film cultures of USA, UK and Europe:
Australian National Cinema, pp. 106–10.
18 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Specularity and engulfment: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula’. In Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 191–208.
19 ibid., pp. 191–2.
20 ibid., p. 195.
21 ibid., p. 193.
22 ibid., p. 197.
23 ibid., pp. 200–1.
24 ibid., p. 204.
25 Encore, 19(8) 2001, p. 6.
26 Paul Sheehan, ‘Moulin Rouge is all it was hyped up to be – and more’, SydneyMorning
Herald, General News Section, 6 June 2001, p. 26.
27 Stephanie Bunbury, ‘Luhrmann says his film’s strictly Australian-made’, Age,General
News Section, 11 May 2001, p. 3.
28 Adrian Martin, Review of Moulin Rouge in The Age, Today Section, 24 May 2001,
p. 5.
29 Deirdre Macken, ‘So superlatively superficial’, Australian Financial Review, General
News Section, 26 May 2001, p. 2.
30 Vicky Roach, ‘Dancing feet a sight to see’, Daily Telegraph, Supplement, 24May 2001,
p. 8.
31 See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, Austin TX:
University of Texas Press, 1994.
32 Encore 19(8) 2001, p. 14. Figures based on totals to 1 August 2001.
39
Australian Cinema after Mabo
33 The other three crime thrillers released in 2001 were The Bank (Robert Connolly),
The Monkey’s Mask (Samantha Lang) and Risk (AlanWhite).
34 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, inHannah
Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1992, p. 229.
35 This sensual experience of viewing particular kinds of film images is explored in
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 138–53.
36 Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, pp. 136–7.
37 ibid., p. 218.
38 Dermody and Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol. 2, pp. 17–23.
39 Miriam Dixson, ‘Identity: history, the nation and the self’. In Joy Damousi and Robert
Reynolds (eds),History on theCouch: Essays inHistory and Psychoanalysis,Melbourne
University Press, 2003, pp. 123–5.
40 Paul Keating, ‘The Redfern Park Speech’. In Michelle Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation:
Essays on Australian Reconciliation, Melbourne: Black Inc., pp. 60–4.
41 ibid., p. 63.
40
3
Elites and Battlers in Australian
Rules and Walking on Water
Australian cinema, perceived as an international genre, brings tomindiconic
landscapes, characters and stories which take hold in the memory as visual
images. However, in Australian Rules (Paul Goldman, 2002) and Walking
on Water (Tony Ayres, 2002), it is the voice and the breath that linger in
the memory as aural images. In Australian Rules there is a transformation
from a polyglot of vernaculars in the opening sound sequence to one clear
voice-over at the end. InWalking onWater, everything important hinges on
the breath, from Gavin’s last strangled gasp to the breakdown and recovery
of each of the characters involved in Gavin’s final expiration. This chapter
will explore the loss of identity and recovery of the voice, and the breath, in
AustralianRulesandWalking onWater.Between them, thetwofilmsdrawour
attention to the reshaping of a transplanted Anglo-Celtic social imaginary
in Australian cinema. Miriam Dixson argues that ‘Australian identity still
carries the marks of yesterday’s British connection’.1 DavidMalouf qualifies
that assertion by arguing that an experimental and open sense of identity
characterises the Australian social imaginary because ‘we are a bit of the
motherland set down in a new place and left to develop as the new conditions
demanded, as climate, a different mixture of people, changes in the world
around us, and our reaction to them, determined’.2
This reshaping of the social imaginary by new conditions involves a politics
of identity in a national context informed by tensions between the claims
of history (the past) and social mobility in the new economy (the future). In
both films, change in the social imaginary (and recovery fromits most brutal
exclusions) is evident in the merging vernaculars of ‘bush battlers’ and ‘cultural
elites’. It is also implied in the context of an international, media-based
politics of memory which speaks to contemporary experiences of dislocated
identities based on nation, class, race, ethnicity or gender. Both films make it
difficult to imagine a future built on a resurgent, populist desire for a unified
national identity based on a whitewashed version of the British heritage.
Before addressing these issues, however, we need to recover some old
ground in film politics in terms of the stand-off between culture and
41
Australian Cinema after Mabo
commerce, art and industry, explored so thoroughly by Dermody and Jacka
in their formative study of 1970s and 1980s Australian cinema.3 Australian
Rules and Walking on Water were released in 2002 as part of a reprise of
a cultural-intervention strategy by the public sector in political circumstances
that do not favour left-liberal initiatives. In partnershipwith the 2002
Adelaide Festival of the Arts, SBS Independent television (SBSi) initiated a
package of feature films which contest neo-conservative ideas of national
identity, recent history and media memory. This intervention followed the
success of Unfinished Business: Reconciling the Nation, a ground-breaking
package of programs broadcast nationally on the multicultural television
channel SBS over ten days from25May to 3 June 2000. This package included
nine new dramas and documentaries, six existing films, and live coverage of
the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk. As a work of cultural intervention, Unfinished
Business was compiled and broadcast to coincide with Corroboree
2000, Reconciliation Week and National Sorry Day.4 It was an ambitious
and partisan moment of cultural intervention which had its origins in the
release in 1997 of Bringing Them Home, the report of the Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission on the Stolen Generations.5 Unfinished
Business was the brainchild of SBSi’s general manager, Bridget Ikin,
a feature film producer best known for her work with Jane Campion. Ikin
workedwith commissioning editor JohnHughes (an activist filmmaker who
has since the 1970s worked across a range of genres inflected by political
modernism) to put together Unfinished Business in conjunction with local
filmmakers. During this period, SBSi made a significant shift in its conception
of multicultural broadcasting, going far beyond its origins in multilingual
radio programming aimed at non-English-speaking ethnic communities.
This shift entailed a rethinking of nationhood in terms of Indigenous,
white settler and migrant experiences which cannot be assimilated into
a unified national identity or be contained within multicultural identity
politics.
In 2001–02, Ikin followed up SBSi’s success with Unfinished Business
by negotiating an ambitious package of five feature films with Peter Sellars,
controversial artistic director of the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.
With the backing of SBSi and the Adelaide Festival, these low-budget feature
films attracted funding from a variety of public sources including the
AFC, SAFC, NSWFTO and FFC, taxpayer-funded organisations which are
an essential part of the infrastructure of commercial film production in
Australia.6 However, rather than a market-driven, commercial-industrial
strategy, the SBSi-Adelaide Festival package is remarkable for its renewal of
a 1970s strategy of cultural intervention under the auspices ofmulticultural
television and a regional arts festival. This feature film initiative is all the
42
Elites and Battlers
more remarkable for attracting public funding under the neo-conservative
Howard government, whose attack on left-liberal ‘cultural elites’ has been
institutional as well as rhetorical. One of the reasons SBSi was able to implement
a left-liberal strategy for cultural intervention in a neo-conservative
climate has been its multicultural charter, which requires it to represent a
diversity of voices, including Indigenous and non-Anglo voices which are,
by and large, absent from commercial television and even the ABC.
The SBSi-Adelaide Festival strategy of bringing together a variety of culturally
motivated partners from the public sector (with some commercial
commitment from the distribution sector) involves an activist ethos and
an aesthetics of poor cinema.7 By adopting an interventionist rather than
commercial ethos, the strategy reinvents a cinema of erfahrung (a cinema of
reciprocal experience between filmmakers and audiences). This notion of
cinema as a public sphere involvingmutual recognition emerged in independent
cinema in West Germany, the United States and Britain from the late
1960s. It helped shape an alternative, independent cinema of social activism,
identity politics and personal experience in Sydney andMelbourne through
the Filmmakers Co-operatives and other independent organisations during
the 1970s.8 Three decades later, Unfinished Business and the SBSi-Adelaide
Festival initiative revive this commitment to a dialectical exchange between
filmmaker and audience, engaging with issues of national history, personal
memory and identity politics of race, gender, ethnicity and class. At the
same time, looking beyond the national, SBSi participates in the growing
international phenomenon of a postmodern politics of memory and experience
which, in late modernity, is more interested in ‘present pasts’ than in
modernism’s ‘present futures’.9
This chapter argues that, between the resurgence of a cinema of reciprocal
experience (or erfahrung) and a recent boom in media memory in traumatic
and entertainment forms, the social imaginary of Australian identity and
what Dixson calls its ‘anchoring Anglo-Celtic core’ has undergone significant
shifts.10 Some of these shifts are evident in the way the past intrudes
on the present in the contemporary settings of Australian Rules andWalking
on Water. Unlike the majority of films in the 2000–02 cycle of Indigenoussettler-
national history films, Australian Rules and Walking on Water are
contemporary films set in recognisable locations, the former in a struggling
South Australian fishing town, the latter in the affluent eastern suburbs of
Sydney. These places are ‘locales’ in the sense that characters and events
typical of those locales (for instance, a football Grand Final between the
sons of sheep farmers and the sons of fishermen, won by the sons from the
Aboriginal mission) are bound up in vernaculars which originate in those
very times and places. In this sense, although the two films might appear to
43
Australian Cinema after Mabo
represent a conservative opposition between ‘bush battlers’ and ‘city navelgazers’,
both are concerned with the emergence of new vernaculars – as
idiom and architecture of post-national identities.11
Finessing with the Anglo-Celtic Social Imaginary
in Australian Rules
Australian Rules was adapted from the coming-of-age novel Deadly, Unna?
by Phillip Gywnne. The decision to change the title for the release of the
film is a risky one, given that most Australian films tend to play down
their national origins in order to compete for the attention of the multiplex
cinema audience. The change in title also risks an instant turn-off for nonfootball
fans, who recognise the title as a reference to the AFL code, favoured
over Rugby codes in the southern states and known colloquially as Aussie
Rules. A film title which threatens to critique national identity by taking a
metaphoric look at the rules governing boys and football promises an update
on mateship as the core of Anglo-Celtic identity. Australian Rules literally
goes over this parched ground, examining the cracks of race, gender and class
which appear as the thin topsoil of white working-class mateship is eroded
by Indigenous, middle-class and feminine vernaculars. The blend and clash
of different vernaculars in the film was paralleled by the media controversy
over the protocols for white filmmakers borrowing stories and characters
fromanAboriginal community. The sustained debate overwho has the right
to tell Indigenous stories, or to give permission for those stories to be told,
is one indication that contemporary mateship, conceived as a level playing
field with no special privileges for non-male, non-white Australians, can no
longer pass itself off as an inclusive, anchoring core of national identity.12
In an effort to explain the persistence and cultural transmission of the
‘anchoring Anglo-Celtic core’ of Australian identity in the face of multicultural
and global influences, feminist historian Miriam Dixson has
turned to philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis. Ricoeur
describes the social imaginary as ‘an opaque kernel’ ‘beyond or beneath
the self-understanding of a society’, a ‘foundational mytho-poetic nucleus’
that precedes cultural representations or ideas.13 For Castoriadis the social
imaginary is dynamic and creative, instituting and conserving patterns of
meaning. Dixson extends the idea of nation as an imagined community by
adopting Castoriadis’s view that the social imaginary bestows on each historical
period ‘a quite specific . . .mood’.14 In Dixson’s view, ‘the experience
of convictism, the originary power of an authoritarian, centralised state,
Anglo-Irish rancour, and race and sex relations’ give the Australian social
44
Elites and Battlers
imaginary its ‘unique patterning’.15 This idea of the persistence of an apparently
outdated Anglo-Celtic social imaginary is useful for understanding
Australian Rules as a post-Mabo, perhaps post-national project under the
auspices of SBS multicultural television.
There is a turning-point moment in Australian Rules when an outsider,
a talent-spotter for the national AFL competition, makes a speech about
football and opportunity and mateship. Like the viewer, he is a silentwitness
to the entrenched codes of race, class and gender that rule Prospect Bay’s
footy club.However, he is there to support the local club and its transmission
of the values ofAustralianmateship throughtheAFLcode.As a beneficiaryof
the social mobility offered by sport, he believes that ‘when men get together
wonderful things happen’. Speaking from experience, the ex-champion says
of football, ‘It’s kept me alive. Taken me places.’ But his attempt to inspire
a new generation of players is interrupted by Pretty Boy from the back
of the hall: ‘More gunyah bullshit.’ Pretty Boy no longer believes in the
inclusiveness of the white man’s code of mateship. His words are timely and
economic: they mark his vernacular as dissident and Aboriginal. The real
bullshit occurs seconds later when the ex-champ is pressured into presenting
the best-on-ground medal to the coach’s son, taking it away from matchwinning
goal-sneak Dumby Red. This is an injustice that no amount of
self-serving racism among the townspeople can deny and it leads directly to
Dumby Red’s tragic death.
The gap between whitefella faith in the ethos of Australian mateship and
blackfella anger at ‘gunyah bullshit’ is represented in the opening shot of the
film in a close-up of the bare, cracked earth of the local football ground, well
past its glory days. This eroded playing space is the meeting ground on which
white working-class wordsmith Gary Black (‘Blacky’ to all except hisMum)
and Dumby Red (‘Dark Prince’ of the Aboriginal players from theMission)
get under each other’s skinwith shared fantasies of sporting and sexual feats.
The opening sound bite, a rich polyglot of voices calling out across the oval,
invents a vernacular of friendship which thrives on differences of race and
gender. The film revels in these vernacular spaces, opening the listener’s ear
to the language not only of the footy clubroom (‘no more finessing’, ‘go the
guts’) but also the pub (‘a lemonade for the boys’), the pier (supernovas, the
universe and sweet talking), the street (‘now you’re even talkin’ like one of
them’) and the embattled home (‘gutless fucking wonder’, versus ‘we don’t
use those words in this house’).
There are two spaces in the film that are marked out as no-go areas for
Gary Black and the film viewer. What we hear from these spaces, and what
we glimpse of them, disturbs the familiar, generic Australian vernaculars of
club, pub and pier. The first off-limit space is theMission, place of origin of
45
Australian Cinema after Mabo
the film’s tongue-in-cheek (Dumby Red) and political (Pretty Boy) Indigenous
vernaculars. The boys from ‘the Mish’, together with Dumby’s sister,
Clarence, and father, Tommy, enter the town spaces, making themselves
seen and heard as a distinctive community, but not an exclusive one. Gary
(Blacky) is addressed by Tommy, with affection, as ‘you little black bastard’,
while Dumby Red says to Gary ‘you plenty blackfella too’, after explaining
the niceties of team-play based on not ‘shaming’ your cousin.However, Gary
is not a blackfella and that’s made clear towards the end of the film when
he has to front up to Dumby Red’s funeral, prompted unexpectedly by his
foul-mouthed mate, Pickles. Gary’s right of entry to the Mission, renamed
Aboriginal Land, is not automatic. Only Tommy can give Gary the nod to
enter, after Clarence vouches for him. Although Tommy is relegated to the
back bar of the pub in town, his authority in his community is a marked
contrast to that of Gary’s Dad.
The problem of discredited white authority in Australian Rules dovetails
with the doubt the film sheds on the anchoring core of Anglo-Celtic identity
in Australia, the creed of egalitarianism, fair go, mateship. The most
disturbing and profoundly unresolved space in the film, where white male
authority is put to the test, is in Gary’s family home. The off-limit space in the
home is the parental bedroom where something violent and ugly is going on
between the parents. The muffled sound of sexual and emotional violence
is tormenting for the children and, through the soundtrack, for the viewer.
The father’s authority, symbolised by the forbidden block of chocolate in
the fridge, is enforced by this muted undercurrent of trauma in the family.
When the father finally asks Gary to close ranks, to choose sides overDumby
Red’s shooting, even the mother (who has encouraged Gary’s development
as a footballer, but more importantly as a literary wordsmith) agrees – ‘He
is your father.’ The film has several options for finding its way through this
impasse between new forms of friendship (evident on the footy field where
Gary and Dumby Red lead the team to an unlikely victory orchestrated by
Gary’sMum) and old forms of white male authority (enforced in the home
and in the football club by the father, the publican and the coach).
The first option is the slap. Clarence, the clever girl from theMish (Aboriginal
Land)whomoves fluently between her brother’s street talk and Gary’s
love of literary language, knows where to draw the line. When Gary wishfully
declares, in a moment of private eulogy, that Dumby Red’s light will
shine forever, Clarence slaps him back into reality: ‘Shut up. He’s dead.’ Yet
Gary cannot take sides with her against his father, who shares the town’s
deep sexual ambivalence towards women from theMish as ‘gins’, ‘sluts’, and
‘black velvet’. The second option is the paternal look.A‘gutless fuckingwonder’
in his father’s eyes, a ‘little black bastard’ in Tommy’s more affectionate
46
Elites and Battlers
gaze, Gary is caught between these two paternal figures.WhenTommy drops
Gary home afterDumby Red’s funeral, Tommy (Dumby’s father) and Gary’s
father (Dumby’s killer) exchange an intransigent look that contains a history
of death as the irreconcilable ground between white settlers and Indigenous
Australians.As a coming-of-age film, Australian Rules is unable to go further
with this historically charged look between anAboriginal father and theman
who shot his son, but the moral authority belongs to Tommy.16 Again Gary
is unable to go against his father in this moment, but when Tommy drives
away, the showdown between father and son finally begins. As the third
option, Gary’s resistance to his father’s authority takes a physically passive
form, echoing his survival tactic against the Thumper in the Grand Final.
Encouraged by his younger brother’s silent, pleading, fraternal look, Gary
(like his mother) takes a beating from his father, and (like Tommy) wins a
moral victory. This victory leads directly to the emergence of Gary’s voice as
the narrating voice and author of the story. However, his lone voice on the
soundtrack comes at the cost of the mixed vernaculars that opened the film.
In the end scene at the pier, Clarence and Gary jump into the sparkling water
together. We see them frolic, but it is Gary’s voice, tutored by his mother,
that we hear, alone, in the final voice-over. Gary speaks for Clarence when
he declares, ‘We’re leaving. There’s nothing here for us in this tidy town.’
Although the film has taken us into rich territory for reshaping Australian
identity, this ending restores something of the status quo. Clarence’s voice
(female and Aboriginal) is silenced by Gary, just as Dumby Red has been
forever silenced and Gary’s mother’s voice has been quietened by the father’s
violence. We cannot help wondering what Clarence might have said if she
had been given the last word, or if her voice had been allowed to overlap
with Gary’s. It is hard to believe there is nothing there for her after what
we’ve glimpsed and heard of her community at theMish. This cultural erasure
of Clarence’s experience, in favour of the male protagonist honing his
voice as a young writer, takes us back to the footy ground, now silent and
deserted, its polyglot vernaculars dead and buried with Dumby Red and
the Best-on-Ground medal. The possibility of a new politics of open-ended
identity based on the interplay of Indigenous, white settler and literary vernaculars
(which might even have found a way to include Gary’s stoned and
racist mate, Pickles, and the angry, articulate Pretty Boy) is lost. What is
gained, however, is a genuine discrediting of One Nation’s nostalgia for an
anchoring core of 19th-century Anglo-Celtic mateship. In the world created
by Australian Rules the social imaginary has tempered its benign affection
for canny battlers fromthe bush. The long-standing ethos of mateship as the
core of national identity is revealed as corrupt and exclusive. Forwomen, for
Aboriginal men, and for young male writers interested in the fertile ground
47
Australian Cinema after Mabo
of cultural mingling, mateship is a shorthand code for a parched, violent,
non-viable formof national identity. Part of the non-viability of this formof
male authority is the economic and cultural changes demanded of the populace
as Australia moves fromits beef, wheat, wool and minerals-based economy
of the 19th century to join late modernity’s transnational service and
infotainment-based economy in the 21st century. In this borderless economy,
identities, likepeople, have becomecommodified,readily exchangeable
in the flux of the marketplace where authority has become more corporate
and less fraternal-paternal.
Recovering the Keating Years in Walking on Water
If Clarence and Gary manage to get away from Prospect Bay it is conceivable
that they might turn up somewhere in close proximity to the floating populace
of Sydney’s cosmopolitan beachside suburbs. This dislocated milieu is
given a transnational or borderless identity through a local experience of livingwith
the AIDS crisis inWalking onWater, a film that might be understood
as a long recovery party after a big night out at Moulin Rouge. If Australian
Rules is grounded in a recognisable Anglo-Celtic social imaginary disturbed
by the intermingled identities ofworking-class, white settler and Indigenous
Australians, then Walking on Water imagines post-national identity as
something entirely provisional, utterly experimental. In this socially mobile
milieu, characters slip the noose of class, ethnicity and gender. What binds
them together is guilt and grief within contingent communities which act a
little like families, a lot like friends. These communities include the local pub
with its meat tray raffle, the shared household performing the last rites for
AIDS sufferer Gavin, the streets and clifftops of the Bondi-to-Bronte stretch
of lifestyle suburbs, and the gay dancefloor where no one has authority and
it’s up to you to handle your drugs, your gender issues, and your sexual
orientation. This milieu has its own vernacular, a post-national one that
owes something to Keating’s vision of an outward-looking, cosmopolitan
Australia where the ockers and larrikins, shearers and Anzacs, footballers
and lifesavers have long been transformed into mere icons of Australian
popular culture, irrelevant to daily life but suitable for opening and closing
the Sydney Olympics in a true Mardi Gras parade of kitsch or camp style.
Although the view that Australia is a British-derived diaspora has been
under attack since multicultural nationhood became a matter of government
policy in the 1970s, the emergence of PaulineHanson and OneNation
in the mid-1990s has led to a populist revival of support for a return to
Anglo-Celtic forms of national identity. This nostalgia for Australia as a
48
Elites and Battlers
provincial outpost of the British Empire was gently probed in The Dish
(Rob Sitch, 2001) with its bumbling but well-intentioned locals keen to put
on a good showfor theAmericans in an English village kind of way. Focusing
on the emergence of style as a defining element of Australia, Malouf takes a
different angle fromDixson on theAnglo-derived social imaginary. Looking
at Australia from the vantage point of Britain, Malouf sees a shift from the
19th-century concept of Australia as the antipodean ‘underworld’ to a 20thcentury
romancewith Australia as a provisional place ‘of perpetual lightness’
where ‘your own freer self might suddenly break loose’.17 From the vantage
point of Australia, the view is slightly different for Malouf. He argues that
the debt to the mother country is not so much Australia’s founding settler
figures (of convicts and squatters, land selectors and gold-diggers) but the
ongoing international connections Australia enjoys with other outposts of
the former British Empire. The passport and currency linking these outposts
is a late Enlightenment, post-civil war form of English as the metaphorical
language of Shakespeare and the ‘reasonable’ language of parliamentary
democracy.18 Defining the social imaginary of settler societies (whether
long-standing, like Britain, or recent, like Australia) as ‘experiential rather
than essentialist’,19 Malouf locates Australian independence from Britain
two decades after the Second World War alliance with the United States
in the Pacific. Britain’s hands-off approach to the transplanted bit of itself in
the antipodes finally forced Australia out of its Commonwealth comfort
zone and into contact with new trading partners when Britain joined the
European common market in the 1960s.20 This places the emergence of the
cosmopolitan moment earlier than 1970s multiculturalism and much earlier
than the Hawke-Keating floating of the currency and deregulation of
the banks which signalled the end of an isolated economy in the 1980s. For
Malouf, Australia was always an experimental place, ‘Made in England’, but
cut loose in the 1960s to improvise its way into an independent and ultimately
enviable style ofMediterranean living, shaped by old entanglements
and new opportunities.21
This experimental style of living, featured in Walking on Water, has its
origin in changes in Australian culture dating from the 1960s. The historical
mood of that era was sustained until the demise of Keating’s Labor government
and the election of Howard’s neo-conservative coalition in 1996. The
death knell of left-liberal cultural influence was sounded by the triumphant
xenophobia of the Tampa crisis which ensured the re-election of Howard in
2001 on the grounds of his border protection and Pacific Solution policies
on refugees and asylum-seekers.22 Walking on Water was produced in the
aftermath of this decisive defeat of left-liberal agendas which had been in
ascendance since the late 1960s. Although the film’s characters appear to
49
Australian Cinema after Mabo
belong to an urban elite who have forsaken family ties as the mainstay of
their lives, they have been toughened by everyday adversity as AIDS forces
them to invent new ways of dealingwith unprecedented situations. Living in
Sydney’s perpetual lightness, they are simultaneously immersed in an underbelly
of grief. Their emotionally shell-shocked state is a response not only to
the continuing catastrophe of AIDS but also to the populist attacks on ‘elite’
forms of cosmopolitan identity. These attacks on ‘political correctness’ were
effectively launched in the 1990s by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party of
bush battlers and displaced workers protesting against Asian immigration,
funding of special programs for Aboriginal communities, and the eclipse of
Anglo-Celtic Australia by multiculturalism.
The underbelly of grief in Walking on Water goes deeper than the AIDS
crisis and its effect on gay communities in cosmopolitan Western cities
defined by their place in late modernity’s global infotainment and service
economy. In the context of SBSi and its multicultural charter, Walking on
Water mourns a 1960s cosmopolitan ethos of open-ended experiment with
identity and lifestyle. This experiment shifted in the 1990s from excitement
and opportunity in the service economy to something closer to a daily grind.
Charlie works in the hospitality industry; Anna and Gavin were partners in
a design business; Gavin’s family from the industrial town ofWhyalla run a
laundromat. As Anna puts it, in the new work hard, party harder economy,
she is ‘Workaholic. Alcoholic’.
The SBSi package of feature films is involved in a shift in identity politics
from ethnic diasporas maintaining their language and connections to
their homelands, to an oppositionalmulticultural and Indigenous aesthetic
aimed at unanchoring the core Anglo-Celtic imaginary. Walking on Water
takes this shift a step further. Anna (Maria Theodorakis) and Charlie (Vince
Colosimo) are friends who inherit the beachside house they share with
Gavin when he dies. His death brings his mother, brother, sister-in-law and
niece to Sydney from remote industrial Whyalla. This narrative premise of
the family gathering at the deathbed has obvious potential for a drama of
identity politics around class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.However, ethnicity
is unmarked in the film, except through the names and contrasting
appearances of the actors. Anna and Charlie have no back-story in Greek
and Italian immigrant families to contrast with Gavin’s Anglo family from
the country. Gavin’s family are Northern European blonde, but his closest
friends are Southern European brunette. The film treats this difference as
unremarkable.Neither does the film dramatise AIDS and homosexuality, or
class and gender, as the cause of family strife. Its finely nuanced conflicts (for
which Roger Monk won the 2002 AFI award for Best Original Screenplay)
are post-identity issues to do with shared social and symbolic experiences.
50
Elites and Battlers
The nuances of who shares these difficult experiences, and how, are registered
in the film as much through the breath as through a hard-boiled
cosmopolitan vernacular.
InWalking onWater the breath dominates the soundtrack at the climactic
moment of Gavin’s death. This climax comes early in the film; the rest is a
long denouement, a protractedmomentof holding grief and guilt inside, like
holding the breath and waiting for a moment of release in order to breathe
out. For those who witnessed Gavin’s last, strangled breath, grief is blocked
by guilt and blame which cannot be spoken because, in a sense, the botched
manner of Gavin’s death is not the point. And neither is his homosexuality.
For Charlie, the trauma of suffocating Gavinwith a plastic bag returns as the
traumatic sound of Gavin fighting for breath, his body defying the gift of a
morphine-assisted death. ForAnna, the blame for Gavin’s undignified death
is shifted to Charlie, giving her the moral authority to carry out Gavin’s last
wishes to the letter, culminating in her insistent removal of wisps of white
baby’s breath from amid the red roses on his coffin.
For Simon, the death of his brother opens up a liminal space which he
attempts to cross by trying on aspects of Gavin’s lifestyle. Sending his wife
and daughter back toWhyallawith his mother, Simon stays behind to collect
the ashes.While Charlie doses himself up with the last of Gavin’s morphine
and faces the end of a love affair, Anna and Simon seek release in sex, drugs
and alcohol. Grief breaks out of the contained body first for Simon. On the
dancefloor with Anna at a gay nightclub, he finds that it takes considerable
emotional fortitude to handle his brother’s party-hardened lifestyle. He
breaks down, and Anna takes him home and puts him on the phone to his
wife.We hear the breath return to his body as the stranglehold of tightened
emotions is released through sobbing.
For Anna, there is no refuge, after all, in controlling Gavin’s funeral
or in uncontrolled partying with Simon. A long-standing denizen of the
Sydney designer lifestyle, she knows how to handle herself all too well. Her
grief comes in a solitarymoment of sobbing in the car, that modern space of
isolated sorrow, after she drops Simon,with Gavin’s ashes, at the airport. For
Charlie, grief and guilt bring loneliness and a moment of despair, taking him
out to the clifftops where he contemplates the drop into the ocean crashing
on the rocks below. Putting aside their quarrel, Anna comes looking for
Charlie and draws him back into connection. This moment of tenderness
between the estranged friends brings Charlie some relief and he too breaks
down.
Only Margaret, Gavin’s mother, cannot find a place to ease the bodily
weight of her grief. Desperate to escape Anna’s tight control of the official
spaces of mourning, Margaret retreats to a hotel room, longing to sink
51
Australian Cinema after Mabo
into that other place of solitary grief, the warm bath. But there’s only a
cold, tiled shower in her hotel room soMargaret’s grieving is limited to her
defiant theft of souvenirs fromGavin’s bedroom.Grief inWalking onWater is
tangible, tactile. It can be felt in Gavin’s things as each of the characters takes
something to remember him by. Simon wears his shirt, Charlie swallows the
last of themorphine,Annahas hiswill at her fingertips,andMargaret pockets
the chipped ornament that Gavin once hurled at a lover. In these sensual
contacts between bereaved bodies and objects once touched by Gavin, the
past becomes vividly tangible in the present.
What unites these otherwise solitary mourners is their shared sensual
experience of grief in a milieu where living (in perpetual lightness) is a bit
like walkingonwater: impossible, butsomehowthe only option for displaced
cosmopolites, whether fromthe country or the city. Although Gavin’s family
does return to Whyalla, to their laundromat business, there is no nostalgia
for a simpler life involved in their return home. Nor are they cordoned off
from cosmopolitan ways of experiencing the unanchored, floating quality
of modern life. Walking on Water refuses to put them in the role of battlers
from the backblocks casting a disingenuous eye over the pretensions and
shenanigans of city folk. The relaxed and comfortable Australia of the 1960s,
wryly celebrated in The Dish, is nowhere in evidence in the party city that
produced Moulin Rouge and Walking on Water. At the beginning of the
new millennium, there is only the recovery party to survive, and an open
future to contemplate, at the end of the film, when Gavin’s house is put
up for sale/lease. Although Anna and Charlie’s cosmopolitan world belongs
more to the outward-looking Wiggles (a hugely successful local export for
children’s television cited in the film) than to the inward-looking code of
Aussie Rules, it is a world whose mood is imbued, like Australian Rules, with
an urgent sense of the recent past. It is this urgent mood, of the past pressing
in on the present, that raises the question of how historical consciousness
can be perceived in films which appeared to be deeply embedded in the
present and whose endings look to the future.
Memory and the Mood of the Times
As Australian Rules and Walking on Water make clear, there is an argument
to be made that cinema is a throwaway consumer product which touches
lightly on contemporary experience and makes it recognisable through the
genre of Australian film. In this genre, identity is contingent. It is lightly
assumed in an amnesiac culture where social mobility and endless opportunities
to reinvent yourself, to leave your past behind, to discard restricting
52
Elites and Battlers
identities of class, race, ethnicity, gender and nation, are taken for granted
as one of the benefits of modernity and the transnational economy. Yet a
mood of sustained loss, of unresolvable grief pervades both films, implying
that memory and identity, rooted in particular locales, are not so easily
discarded. And that living within modernity’s new global coordinates of
imagined experience through the media, the internet, and free-flowing consumer
goods under bilateral trade agreements, requires something more
than a resilient adaptation to the future as it arrives in the form of jobs in
the service, lifestyle or infotainment industries. If Australian Rules shows
how hard it is to relinquish white male authority underwritten by mateship,
Walking on Water shows how hard it is to keep your footing in the global
melting pot where authoritative forms of identity have long been dissolved
in favour of corporate teams, sole contractors, and their clients. Yet through
their sense of locale, their use of local vernaculars as a shorthand for the succinct
ways in which film characters (and the generic audience for Australian
films) ‘get’ each other, both films convey the particularity of experiences
which are local and transnational in flavour. It is this flavour or mood which
defines historical consciousness in the present.
If the SBSi/Adelaide Festival feature film deal of 2002 begs to be considered
as a form of cultural intervention, we might expect it to enjoy a
different relationship to the audience from the commercial-industrial film
product discussed in Chapter 2. The concept of erfahrung, or reciprocal
experience, is useful for describing the intimacy between filmmakers and
audiences whose experience and expectations of cinema are grounded in
1960s social movements that have their residue in the ethos of cultural
intervention as it appears in the 1990s at SBSi and other film sites like Film
Australia. The cinema produced in this activist milieu might claim to be
offering the audience an experience which has more local flavour, more
depth and more authenticity than the commercial-industrial cinema (most
of which is imported from global infotainment conglomerates running the
film production armof their business out ofHollywood).Acommoncharge
against the commercial-industrial product is that it offers its audience a fleeting
form of experience, erlebnis, which serves as a momentary distraction,
a consumer event which fails to leave a trace in memory or consciousness.
Further, the ubiquity of erlebnis as the dominant mode of experience in
commodity culture leads to a kind of amnesia or instant forgetting based on
infotainment overload. As AndreasHuyssen suggests, the peculiar feature of
postmodern media overload is not somuch the instant forgetting inherent in
information updates, redundant technology, or retro fashion, but Western
modernity’s increasing preoccupation with the past, whether as historical
memory of 20th-century traumas like the Holocaust or as entertainment
53
Australian Cinema after Mabo
memories in blockbusters like Titanic (James Cameron, 1997).23 Huyssen
argues against the conservative view that sees a boom in memory practices
since the 1980s as compensation for the loss of traditional values grounded
in stable communities and nations, nostalgia for that which definesWestern
modernity. Rather, Huyssen advocates a shift from a ‘discourse of loss’ to
one ‘that accepts the fundamental shift in structures of feeling, experience,
and perception as they characterize . . . our present’.24 In this formulation
it is not memory of the past which is compensatory, nor is it a matter of
opposing a quality cinema of erfahrung to a commodity cinema of erlebnis.
Rather, what is at stake in the proliferation of memory practices, from
museum villages to family histories, is historical consciousness as a component
of postmodern identity. ForHuyssen postmodern identity is informed
not just by endless recoding, recycling and citation of past forms but by the
desire or necessity to act and speak from within the present structures of
experience.25 These acts may be shaped by the transnational yet they are
necessarily local, regional and national. And they are shaped by ‘differently
paced modernities’ in terms of the fragmented forms of local experience
with which they are entangled.26
From this perspective, ‘differently paced modernities’ produce different
structures of experience which are historically and geographically grounded
in the local, regional and national. The issue of identity politics in Australian
film might not be a matter of opposing interventionist films from themulticultural
imaginary to commercial-industrial films indebted to an anchoring
Anglo-Celtic imaginary. It is possible to argue that the doggedly commercial
project, The Dish, shares the same modernity as the interventionist project,
Australian Rules. In this modernity, small-town Australia (of the 1960s) is
on the cusp of change and only those who can leave behind the embattled
identity of the little Aussie footballer will gain a foothold in the bigger playing
field beyond the town limits. The structures of perception in both films
are decidedly those of the white male making a shift from the rough code
of 19th-century bushmen to a more polished code of 21st-century corporate
fraternity. Similarly, the low-budget urban drama, Walking on Water,
the quality multi-strand thriller, Lantana, and the blockbuster digital FX
musical,Moulin Rouge, share the same Sydney-based experience ofWestern
modernity as urbane, cosmopolitan, middle-class. The structures of perception
and feeling in these films are shaped by genre, as well as by time and
place. In Walking on Water and Lantana identity is shaped by the exigencies
of middle-class life in an open economy. Here, the national suddenly
counts for less than it used to, as do the imperatives of gender, sexuality and
ethnicity. InMoulin Rouge, although the setting is a digitised, hypertheatrical
Paris at the end of the 19th century, the mood and feel belong to the
54
Elites and Battlers
Sydney 2000 Olympics and its year-long hyper-party to mark the end of the
millennium.
Together, these films achieve a sense of what it feels like to be living,
tenuously, in the globalised present, in a cosmopolitan place which derives
its lifestyle fromtransnational consumer culture, and its vernaculars, in part
at least, from the Anglo-Celtic social imaginary of The Dish and Australian
Rules. For the generic audience with a long-standing interest in Australian
film, these different modernities share a common feature. They are imbued
with a discourse of loss, whether repudiation of an exclusive and outdated
brand of mateship as the basis of national identity in Australian Rules, or
nostalgia in The Dish for the benign moment before the 1960s heralded a
change of era, or acceptance of an underlying feeling of loss as endemic
to modernity’s cult of social mobility and perpetual change in Walking on
Water, Lantana and Moulin Rouge. Unlike the explicitly post-Mabo films
(The Tracker, Black and White, Rabbit-Proof Fence, One Night the Moon,
Yolngu Boy, Beneath Clouds), Australian films with contemporary settings
tend not to register their historical consciousness by dramatising historical
injustices. Rather, their historical consciousness is registered in the way they
take an interest in finding cinematic devices for evoking in the audience the
structures of feeling and perception that speak to the experience of an era
of change which Huyssen and others call late modernity.
The final question for this chapter is the short-lived role of SBSi in reviving
a 1960s activist, interventionist ethos – to open up spaces for understanding
some of the structures of contemporary experience, feeling and
perception in Australia. Under the leadership of Bridget Ikin, SBSi was
able to anticipate political events in its programming policies during the
first two terms of the neo-conservative Howard government. By supporting
programs which contested that government’s deprecation of ‘navel-gazing
cultural elites’, SBSi insisted that the past is not over and done with in
Australia.
From a cultural-interventionist perspective, policy frameworks are
bound up with aesthetic and ideological issues.We are arguing that film and
television industry policy in the post-Mabo period is shaped by and reshapes
the social imaginary of the nation, which is itself undergoing fiercely contested
redefinition in the era of globalisation, courtesy of the bipartisan
policy of economic rationalism and the divided cultural politics of the history
wars. We approach these issues directly through our reading of films
(rather than of policy papers, industry reviews, funding practices).
Howdowe explain an apparent contradiction in films during theHoward
government’s third termin office? On the one hand, film and television policy
is formulated by a neo-conservative federal government keen to refute
55
Australian Cinema after Mabo
the black armband view of Australian history in favour of an oft-quoted
‘relaxed and comfortable’ ethos, a government keen to dismantle the institutionswhich
have been a platformfor left-liberal agendas since theWhitlam
era, and keen to attract the votes of those disaffected by bipartisan economic
policies. On the other hand, the years 2000–03 have seen an unprecedented
cluster of feature films taking a left-liberal approach to the history and
present impact of British colonisation of Australia, at the same time that
these films have adopted various strategies for negotiating the misfit between
global and local moments of experience. The ability of SBSi to go against
the political grain shows that the discrepancy between global-scale actions
(shaped by transnational corporations and theUnited States as superpower)
and responses to local situations has opened up spaces for different vernaculars,
each of which participates in a media politics of memory.
The dismantling of the left-liberal cultural agenda has gathered momentum
since the 1996 election, impacting on the independent filmmaking
community whose values were formed in the 1960s social movements and
counterculture. This impact goes beyond ideological defeat of a cinema
of erfahrung. It has been institutionalised, particularly through a series of
conservative appointments to the cultural organisations which owe their
existence to the changes that started to happen in the late 1960s as middle
Australia blasted its way out of the mindset of the British-loving Menzies
era. As this chapter has argued, there is common ground between culturalinterventionist
and commercial-industrial films in Australian cinema. It
is likely that this common ground will become stronger as the industry
deals with the fear that local histories and stories that can only be remembered
and narrated in the Australian context will be swamped by a flood
of cheaper imports under the bilateral free trade agreement. This agreement
was finalised between Australia and the United States on 9 February
2004, arousing further anxiety that free trade will spell the end of Australian
content in cinemas, pay TV, and future digital media delivery systems. Partnerships
between free-to-air public television and commercial broadcasters
in the production of feature films, mini-series and documentaries will rely
even more on the pragmatic activism of board members, bureaucrats and
programmers, with SBS Independent as one recent model of a cinema of
cultural intervention.27
Notes
1 Miriam Dixson, ‘Identity: history, the nation and the self’. In Joy Damousi and Robert
Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis,Melbourne
University Press, 2003, p. 120.
56
Elites and Battlers
2 David Malouf, ‘Made in England: Australia’s British inheritance’, Quarterly Essay,
no. 12, 2003, p. 64.
3 Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening Of Australia, vol. 1, Sydney:
Currency Press, 1987.
4 Belinda Smaill, ‘SBS Documentary and Unfinished Business: Reconciling the Nation’,
Metro, 126, 2001, pp. 34–40.
5 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home. Report
of the National Inquiry into the separation from their families and communities of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, Canberra, 1997.
6 The SBSi package of feature films included Australian Rules, Beneath Clouds, The
Tracker, Yolngu Boy and Walking on Water (all released in 2001–02).
7 James Ricketson, 1979, ‘Poormovies, richmovies’. InAlbertMoran andTomO’Regan
(eds), An Australian Film Reader, Sydney: Currency Press, 1985, pp. 223–7.
8 On cinema as a public sphere of erfahrung see Thomas Elsaesser, New German
Cinema, London: BFI, and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 157–9.
9 AndreasHuyssen, ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’. In Arjun Appadurai (ed.),
Globalization, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 57. Thank you to Nathalie
Brillon for drawing this article to our attention.
10 Dixson, ‘Identity’, p. 120.
11 Stuart Macintyre, The History Wars, Melbourne University Press, 2003, pp. 3–4.
Macintyre argues that while Keating as PrimeMinister asked ‘egalitarian’ Australians
to look outward to Asia and the global economy, Howard promoted the notion of a
‘self-indulgent elite’ as ‘a foil for the battlers’.
12 A session at the November 2002 Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Film
and History Association held at Flinders University in Adelaide raised the complex
issues of procedures for working with the appropriate people in Aboriginal communities
to ensure that the right to tell a story has been granted in line with filmmaking
protocol devised by the Australian Film Commission.
13 Quoted in Dixson, ‘Identity’, p. 120.
14 ibid., p. 128.
15 ibid.
16 The moral authority of Tommy, the father, is a reminder of the moral authority of
the grandfather in the New Zealand film Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002). However,
WhaleRider emphasises the poignancy of the grandfather’s struggle to transmitMaori
culture when he takes to his bed, beaten by disappointment, opening the way for a
mythic solution, rather than one that addresses the historical reality shown in the
film.
17 Malouf, ‘Made in England’, pp. 62–3.
18 ibid., pp. 46–49.
19 ibid., p. 59.
20 ibid., p. 63.
21 ibid., p. 65.
22 For an account of the cumulative impact of the Howard Government on the leftliberal
political agenda in place since the election of theWhitlam Labor Government
in 1972, see RobertManne, ‘The Howard years: a political interpretation’. In Robert
Manne (ed.), The Howard Years, Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2004, pp. 3–53.
23 Huyssen, ‘Present pasts’, p. 67.
57
Australian Cinema after Mabo
24 ibid., p. 71.
25 ibid., p. 73.
26 ibid., p. 54.
27 Meaghan Morris has produced a subtle reading of the committee-based forms of
activism which have brought about the cultural changes now under attack from
the neo-conservatives appointed by Howard’s government. See Meaghan Morris,
‘Epilogue: future fear’. In M. Morris, Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture,
Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 219–34.
58
4
Mediating Memory in Mabo – Life
of an Island Man
Since the High Court’s judgment inMabo and others v. The State of Queensland
(No 2) (1992),1 ‘Mabo’ has become a household word in Australia. In
his commentary on the cultural implications of the decision, Jeremy Beckett,
anthropologist and witness for the plaintiffs, claims that media and politicians
have added a new word to the Australian vernacular.2 ‘“Mabo” ’, he
says, ‘has come to stand for the whole issue of Aboriginal land rights, as in
“Mabo law”, “Mabo deal”, “Mabo show” and of course, “Mabo madness”; if
it has not already become a verb, it soon will.’3 For Beckett, the over-use of
‘Mabo’ in popular discourse has, among other effects, ‘overshadowed’ the
fate of the leading litigant.4 Put simply, ‘Mabo’ is a name without a face.
This cultural oversight, this gap between a judgment and a historical subject,
prompted the making of the award-winning biographical documentary
film Mabo – Life of an Island Man (Trevor Graham, 1997). In this chapter
we undertake a close analysis of this film, considering the role it has played
in mediating public recognition of both the Mabo decision and Mabo ‘the
man’. We are interested in how this documentary has become a popular
history of Mabo and what this success tells us about shifts in documentary
filmmaking in Australia in the 1990s and the forms of spectatorship they can
enable.
Up Close and Personal
In the past fifteen years we have witnessed major changes in all areas of
independent documentary film: funding, production, style, distribution
and reception. These changes can be broadly attributed to the shift away
from the cinema as the key site of independent documentary film to television.
The new emphasis on narrative and personalisation, typified in successful
television documentary series such as Australian Story (ABC-TV),
has generated debate, much of which tends to be framed by old familiar
oppositional terms, such as fact and fiction, critical intervention and
59
Australian Cinema after Mabo
entertainment, the personal and the social.5 But some commentators are
more open in their thinking on this shift towards television. John Hughes,
filmmaker and former Commissioning Editor for SBS Independent (1998–
2001), suggests thatwe have in fact reached a stage where the desire of public
sector television networks to develop new ideas in the area of documentary
‘is occupying some of the territory that has previously been occupied by
filmmakers themselves in producing critical or observational intervention
in the culture’.6 A survey of successful ‘breakthrough’ documentaries – the
kind that get people talking – shows that many use a mix of techniques
associated with television, such as a strong sense of narrative, drama and
character and a focus on the personal, while still allowing for critical insight
into social processes: Facing theMusic (Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly,
2001), Ordinary People (JenniferRutherford, 2002), Rats in the Ranks (Robin
Anderson and Bob Connolly, 1996), The Good Woman of Bangkok (Dennis
O’Rourke, 1991), Losing Layla (Vanessa Gorman, 2001). It follows then that
what is required is a critical practice that can go beyond conceptual oppositions
such as those mentioned above, addressing how these documentaries
and others position the spectator and what forms of social recognition are
enabled by these new modes of appeal.
One of the most successful documentaries of the past decade is Mabo –
Life of an Island Man. When it was first screened at the 1997 Sydney
International Film Festival it received a standing ovation that lasted more
than five minutes and was voted Best Documentary Film. Since then, it
has won numerous other national and international film awards, including
history and cultural awards.7 It had a successful national theatrical release
and has been screened several times in prime time on national television
(ABC Australia), while Currency Press recently published the script – a
publishing first in Australia. Reviews indicate that this phenomenal success
is largely due to the distinctive personal style of the film.8 John Ryan, for
example, writes: ‘Moving away from his earlier treatment ofMabo-the-case,
Graham’s film has brought Mabo-the-Man much closer to us.’9 The film
uses first-person narration, recounting throughout details about the making
of the film and the relationship between the filmmaker and its subject. It
uses personal testimony by family members and friends, and it also includes
a number of dramatisations of events, including Bob Maza’s outstanding
readings of EddieMabo’s love letters to hiswife Bonita. A number of reviews
and feature articles suggest that this intimate style of filmmaking brings us
closer to the significance of the historic judgment than amore conventional
documentary could. Tom Ryan encapsulates this view in his description of
the film as ‘an intimate history’.10
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Mediating Memory
But what exactly is an intimate history? What is at stake when conventional
historical discourse is replaced by ‘up close and personal’? Or to put it
slightly differently, what are the implications of a history designed to move
its audience? We raise these questions because although the film’s director
claims to diverge from the documentary principle of (assumed) objectivity,
the film is nevertheless fuelled by the ideal of national education. Mabo –
Life of an Island Man serves in many contexts as an official history of the
case, including many secondary and tertiary curricula.11 In doing so, this
intimate film fulfils the requirements of the traditional social role of the
documentary, that is, the ‘task’, as Terry Morden describes it, of ‘guid[ing]
citizens through the complexity of modern life towards an active role in the
democratic processes’.12 But it also deploys the language and techniques of
intimacy to organise non-Indigenous spectators into a particular affective
response to the death of Eddie Mabo.
In media reports at the time of the release of his film,Graham often states
that his aim was to tell a personal story and tomove people. These sentiments
are reiterated in the introduction to the published screenplay of the film,
where he writes: ‘The success of the film in Australia indicates that there
is a willingness amongst Australians to embrace reconciliation and social
justice, provided the issue can be made to touch them personally’ (emphasis
added).13 This attitude accordswith what Lauren Berlant identifies as ‘forms
of intimate attachment’ – attachments that are, she argues, increasingly
replacing and transforming former relations between the public sphere and
the private.14 Berlant claims that formsof intimate attachments such as those
between ‘nations and citizens’ or ‘churches and the faithful’, or even more
mundane forms such as ‘the intimacy between people who walk dogs or who
swim at the same time each day’, have generated ‘a specific aesthetic’. On the
nature of this aesthetic, she makes the point that intimacy is an expression
that relies on or is a response to what she describes as ‘shifting registers
of unspoken ambivalence’.15 She gives the example of lovers: ‘When things
become ambivalent between lovers’, she says, ‘they resort to the intimacy of
talking about the relationship’.16 Likewise, she continues, ‘when citizens feel
that the nation’s consented-to qualities are shifting away’ they also seek the
‘language of intimacy’.17
In the rest of the chapter we show how in order to mediate social recognition
of both theMabo decision and its namesake, Graham’s filmMabo – Life
of an IslandMan generates a formof intimate attachment between the film’s
spectators and its subject. Moreover, we will show how it does so largely by
provoking the particular range of emotions associated with tragedy. First
we examine the film’s use of techniques of faciality, such as biography and
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
portraiture, to create an intimate picture of Eddie Mabo as a tragic hero.
Then we argue that the film can also be understood as generating a second
kind of intimate proximity, one in which the gap between the name and face
of Mabo is made visible as a series of traumatic defacements.18
The Mask of Tragedy
On one level, Mabo – Life of an Island Man is a straightforward biography:
it organises the events of Eddie Mabo’s life into more or less chronological
order and in such a way that the narrative unifies these events into a
single purpose in life, namely Mabo’s struggle for land rights. By using the
trope of the face as the means of mediating social recognition of Mabo, the
film is also a portrait machine. It combines archival material and interviews
with Mabo’s family members, friends and political allies to trace out the
contours and features of Mabo’s unique personality. We learn that he was
‘family-orientated’, ‘generous’, ‘humorous’, ‘egotistical’ and ‘proud’. These
testimonies are intercut with numerous family snaps and other sources of
photographic close-ups ofMabo’s face, including footage from Land Bilong
Islanders (1990). Together, these techniques ‘flesh out’, as one reviewer put
it, a recognisable face for the hitherto faceless name.19 At times the film
brings us so relentlessly close to the face that we find ourselves, like ancient
physiognomists, scrutinising Mabo’s facial features as evidence of his true
nature. Certainly this is what film critic Evan Williams does when he concludes
Mabo was a ‘hero-martyr’: ‘in that magnificent broad countenance,
with its grey, wiry mane, there was something of the sage, the prophet, the
visionary. He looked the part.’20
About three-quarters of the way into Mabo – Life of an Island Man, the
metaphoric defacement of ‘Mabo’, which the film aims to redress, is suddenly
literalised in the shocking image of a racist attack on Eddie Mabo’s
grave. This attack occurred in June 1995, immediately after a Torres Strait
Islander tombstone-unveiling ceremony held in Townsville to commemorate
Eddie Mabo and to celebrate the High Court judgment.21 We learn
that while Indigenous and non-Indigenous members ofMabo’s community
joined together with representatives from federal and state governments in
a cultural celebration, unknown attackers spray-paintedMabo’s grave with
racist graffiti, including two large swastikas and the racist epithet ‘Abo’. The
attackers also prised a life-size bust ofMabo from its central position on the
headstone, leaving in its place a large gash in the otherwise smooth marble
surface. In an interview after the release of the film, Graham describes his
personal response to the attack: he says, ‘[I] was . . . absolutely horrified
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Mediating Memory
and devastated . . . I fell into a crumbling heap.’22 He also explains that
the desecration of the grave is the ‘real reason’ for making the film: ‘Bonita
[Mabo] was pestering me to go and film the tombstone opening . . . so I got
a crew together who went up to Townsville to film the tombstone opening
and the celebrations. Then, of course, the day after the grave was trashed . . .
the real reason for making the second film was a sense of outrage about his
grave being trashed.’23 At this point in the film we discover that the defacement
of the grave is the true origin of the film. In the light of this image,
this violent origin, the film’s stated aim of ‘giving the name a face’ takes on
deeper significance.
As an attack on the sacredness of the dead, defacement of a grave is a
powerful act of hate. In 1990, when graves were attacked by a small group of
anti-Semitic demonstrators in the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras, France,
100 000 people gathered in Paris to protest. They marched through the
streets of Paris, joined by the then president, Franc¸oisMitterrand. But while
in France the racist attack on Jewish graves sparkedwidespread direct action,
here the violence of defacement was swiftly subsumed in a struggle of competing
ideologies or what Graham aptly describes as ‘a media battle of symbols’.
24 In theDaily TelegraphMirror, conservative columnist Piers Akerman
claims that the defaced grave represents ‘a wedge between black and white’,
the embodiment, in his mind, of the Native Title Act.25 The Australian takes
a more personal approach, using a large photograph of Bonita Mabo and
her two grandsons crouched on the edge of the defaced grave to complete its
neo-liberal point of view of the family as tragic victims. In whatwe might call
a ‘metropolitan’ point of view, The Australian report takes a strong moral
stance only to locate the cause of the attack ‘elsewhere’, namely in rural
Australia, in the deep recesses of the psyches of ‘a handful of racists’.26
Graham’s film actively engages in this battle of symbols. In its documentation
of the unveiling ceremony, the commanding black marble headstone
is framed as a symbol of Reconciliation. The dream of a unified nation is
captured in the figures of Bonita Mabo and Annita Keating (the latter representing
the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating) reflected side by side in
its shining surface. The reflective surface of the headstone serves as a mirror
in which spectators can narcissistically insert themselves into a positive
vision of the future. After the attack, however, this image of unity becomes
an impossible point of view. The slow pans and jerky camera movements
across the disfigured grave mimic the dazed faces of those at the scene. No
longer able to reflect the symbolic space of a unified nation, the defaced
headstone is, literally, bereft of messages. De-metaphorised, the headstone
is visible for the first time in its literal sense – that is, as a marker of the site
of death. It is mute in a way that only death is: silent and silencing. This
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
confrontation with the physical fact of death is never more forceful than in
the sequence of images that document the disinterment of the coffin: the
sounds and images of the manual labour required to exhume the casket,
the sight of the hole in the ground in Townsville’s cemetery where Mabo’s
body once lay. Fromthis point onward, viewing is not simply an act of social
recognition but a rite of bereavement.
The final section of the film is primarily a documentation of the family’s
renewed mourning and the reburial of Mabo’s body on his island home.
Here, the narration becomes even more intimate as Graham explains that
after the attack on the grave he had no choice but to continue filming. We
would argue that it is also at this turning point that we begin to understand
the film as a ‘work of mourning’: it repeats the scene of death as a way of
working through it and inevitably moving beyond it. But it is also in this
final ‘act’, titled ‘Journey home’, thatwe are reminded of the close association
betweenmourning and tragedy. The final section reproduces the devastation
of the attack and subsequent reburial by way of redeeming the suffering
incurred in this unexpected resurfacing of death. It does the latter by shaping
the events of the attack and reburial into the easily recognisable final act of
a tragedy – the Hero’s Return. In Cinema Papers, editor and co-producer
Denise Haslem is quoted as saying that when she and Graham were editing
the film, ‘they recognized that the three acts fell into a Greek tragedy so
easily, there was no other way to edit it’.27 Following the structure of classical
tragedy, the film is, its director claims, a case of ‘life imitating art’. Graham
says: ‘the film is very much like the hero’s journey. I keep comparing it to
Luke Skywalker going out to conquer the universe.He’s battling the empire,
but the tragedy is, unlike Luke, he dies before his great victory.’28
As a tragedy, the affective experience of this film is grounded in spectators’
recognition of a generic plot structure, rendering ‘the face behind the name’
as the face of a tragic hero.29 To seeMabo through the lens of tragedy allows
us to interpret the circumstances of his death as ‘dignified endurance’ of
an injustice, while the reburial on Murray Island becomes ‘poetic justice’:
Mabo,who spent his life fighting for land rights, finally returns home.While
this structuring of the events of Mabo’s life creates a powerful and moving
cinematic experience,we need also to consider the limitations of recognising
Mabo, and by association the Mabo decision, in the terms of tragedy. Take,
for example, Evan Williams’s review. He writes: ‘His [Mabo’s] premature
death has enshrined him as a legend, a mythic figure more potent than he
was in life.’ Here, Williams suggests that as with all tragic heroes, Mabo is
more powerful dead than alive. Indeed, Williams goes on to suggest that
had Mabo survived, had we seen him in his moment of victory, the film
might not have been as good as it is. Or, to use his term, it might have been
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‘spoiled’, by which he means ‘gloatingly heroic’ rather than ‘gentle, elegiac’.
This is the thing about tragic heroes: death is not only their fate but also
their nature.
As with so many others,Williams is moved by the way in which the film
ends – ‘on a note of exquisite sadness’, to use his words. Responding to
this film’s tragic mood, he also implies a certain kind of fatalism. With its
emphasis on fate, tragedy can serve to mask historical reality.30 The ‘sounds
of traditionalmusic’Williams refers to in his review, for example, are in fact
the sacredMalo dance, which was performed byMurray Islanders in honour
of EddieMabo. Filmed at night, the spectacle of the towering turtleshellMalo
mask, combined with the dirge-like rhythms of traditional drums, enhances
the drama of this act of commemoration. But to see the performance only
in terms of the eternal time of tragedy is to overlook its historical specificity.
What the film does not tell us is that this was the first time this dance has
been performed in more than eighty years (that is, nearly the entire duration
of the colonisation of the Torres Strait Islands.) In her in-depth study of the
Mabo judgment,Nonie Sharp convincingly argues that the resurrection and
performance of the Malo dance in honour of Eddie Mabo is an historic act
of ‘cultural revival and resistance’.31
Likewise, by constructing the reburial ofMabo onMer as aHero’sReturn,
the film overlooks the fact that the state also played an important role in
Mabo’s ‘journey home’. The then federal government funded the reburial
of Mabo’s disinterred body on the Murray Islands, concerned that if the
grave were to remain on the mainland it could easily become an ongoing
target for racist opposition to native title legislation. As Graham says in his
narration, Mer is, possibly, the right place for Mabo to be buried, but for
all the wrong reasons. The final shot of the film is a silent, grainy image
of Mabo spear-fishing in the shallow waters of Mer. He is a commanding,
tragic figure. But we are mistaken if we interpret Mabo’s reburial on his
island home as compensation for the violence of defacement, as some kind
of mythic equivalent to the recognition of land rights.
The Trauma of Non-recognition
So far we have argued thatMabo – Life of an IslandMan makes EddieMabo
recognisable as a tragic hero. But this is only one formof recognition enabled
by this complex film. The gap between name and face, judgment and historical
subject, which the film seeks to conceal, also provides an opening for a
second and arguably more radical perspective on the defacement ofMabo’s
grave. Unlike tragedy, which, as we argued, can mask historical specificity,
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the image offers a way of understanding
this image of defacement as an aesthetic experience that jolts us into a historical
formof recognition – that is, a remembrance of the traumatic history
embedded in the name.
Benjamin was fond of Karl Krauss’s observation that ‘the closer the look
you take at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back’.32
When we see our name, or the name of a loved one, perhaps, misspelled,
out of context, or, as in this case, defaced, the familiar name stares back at
us like the face of a stranger. Constructionist theories of language tell us
that what we grieve on these occasions is the loss of the concept of self. That
is to say, the strangeness of the name exposes the arbitrariness of the sign.
In Benjamin’s philosophy of language the sign is never arbitrary. On the
contrary, the inherent difference between name and thing made visible in
moments of alienation, such as those mentioned above, reveals the fetishistic
nature ofwords. Benjamin was fascinated by what he perceived as the ‘magic
of language’: the way in which words and things interpenetrate and in time
come to resemble each other.33 Following on from this, we could say that
the gap between name and self created by the defacement of the name is
an actualisation of the original loss of the particularity of the thing in its
moment of coming into being as a name. And in this way, the severed name
becomes what Benjamin calls ‘a dialectical image’, an image in which ‘the
Then and Now come together in a constellation like a flash of lightning’ to
illuminate current concerns.34
As a dialectical image, the cinematic image ofMabo’s defaced headstone
reveals the origin of the history embedded in Mabo. Here, the shock effect
of the image of ‘Mabo’ disfigured by swastikas and the word ‘Abo’ renders
the name faceless and unrecognisable. The name is depersonalised. But it
is also true to say that having been obliterated and estranged, the defaced
name actualises the unspeakable history of defacement that attaches to this
name – that is, terra nullius, the original non-recognition of Indigenous
Law and culture. In this sense, the film is not only a historical record of
race hatred but also a cultural form that enables historical recognition and
public memory of Australia’s particular history of defacement.
As a recurring image, the defacement of ‘Mabo’ takes the form of a
traumatic experience. Cathy Caruth defines trauma as ‘an overwhelming
experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the
event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrollable repetitive occurrence
of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’.35 On several occasions in
this film members ofMabo’s family allude to the repetitive nature of the violence
of non-recognition. In an over-the-shoulder shot we see BonitaMabo
being interviewed by a young television reporter at the Townsville cemetery
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Mediating Memory
immediately after the discovery of the racist attack. In contrast to the image
in The Australian, she does not appear tragic or pitiful. To the contrary,
she answers the reporter’s banal questions in a steeled, almost automated
mode of response.When the reporter asks howthe attack makes her feel, she
replies: ‘It’s like a nightmare, starting all over again.’ In a following scene,
Mabo’s son also implies that the attack on the grave is something already
experienced when he explains how it has ‘opened up old wounds’. History
and trauma come together then as we recognise the images of defacement
in this film as a traumatic presence. This trauma is, as we see, unspeakable,
and it is in its precise irruption in and disruption to language that the
defaced name expresses or actualises the history of the effacing violence of
non-recognition embedded in it.
Seeing the History in the Name
This second view of ‘Mabo’, in which we face the gap between the name
and face rather than foreclose it as a tragedy and thereby veil the historical
specificity of the event, opens up a different view of the name and naming.
Fromthis perspective, it is possible to ‘read’ the life story presented in thefilm
through the history of the name. We learn that Mabo was born on Murray
Island in 1936, the son of Robert and Paipe Sambo. When his mother died
shortly after his birth, he was adopted by Benny (his maternal uncle) and
MiagaMabo.He was raised and educated onMurray Island until 1957 when
the Murray Islander Council of Elders exiled him to the mainland, where
he lived under two names. He was known as Eddie Mabo by most people,
but also as Koiki, his Meriam (Islander) name by other Islanders and close
friends. Already, the history of Mabo’s name reveals the traces of colonial
contact.
Taking a closer look, we can also see how the apparent fluidity of ‘Mabo’
became an issue in the hearing of theMabo case. Reproducing large sections
fromthe earlier film, Land Bilong Islanders, this film provides the only audiovisual
documentation of theMabo hearings. In his commentary on the case,
Beckett reminds us of the well-known fact that theHigh Court’s recognition
of the collective native title rights of theMeriam people of theMurray Islands
was extended to all Indigenous Australians.36 He also brings to our attention
the less known fact thatMabo’s ‘own claim to land was dropped in the final
stages of the case’.37 This ‘terrible irony’, as Beckett refers to it, occurred
because in the determination of facts and issues of the case conducted by the
SupremeCourt of Queensland, JusticeMoynihan foundMabo’s claims to be
‘invalid’.38Moynihan concluded thatMabo was not the adopted son ofBenny
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
and Miaga Mabo and therefore not entitled to make his claim. In addition,
Moynihan believedMabo was ‘an unreliable witness’ and describedMabo’s
explanation of Meriam inheritance custom as ‘self-seeking’.39 Moynihan’s
refusal to recogniseMabo’s land claim was in effect a refusal to recognise his
name. The film implies thatMabo never really recovered from the shock of
this act of non-recognition. Bonita Mabo recalls her husband’s reaction to
this news. ‘He was devastated’, she says.We also learn thatMabo died a few
months later, aged fifty-five. In the days leading up to his death he wrote a
long, detailed genealogy of his name.
As with the film and Beckett’s commentary on the case, Nonie Sharp’s
cross-cultural analysis of the Murray Islander’s land case defends Mabo’s
credibility. She analyses the extraordinary demands placed on Mabo to
explain himself during the hearing of evidence in the determination of
the facts and issues of the case, reporting that ‘In the first fourteen days
of the hearing of Eddie Mabo’s evidence . . . 289 objections were made by
Queensland’.40 She argues that the demand for Mabo to explain himself,
along with the subsequent non-recognition of his claim, is part of the wider
trivialisation ofMeriam Lawthat occurred throughout the case. She explains
how the case ignores the significance of adoption and fostering of children,
as well as the wider system of name-holders, including the inherent code of
secrecy and specific modes of oral performance of this particular system of
inheritance.41 She argues that when JusticeMoynihan deemedMabo’s claim
to be ‘self-serving’ he was also refusing to recognise a crucial principle in
Meriam Law: to claim to own the land is ‘to be responsible for it’, including
the responsibility of passing it on. In Meriam Law, a claimant is ‘a name
holder on behalf of the group who are the joint owners’.42
These kinds of suspicions and trivialisation of Indigenous culture are
not new. Underlining the non-recognition of Mabo’s family name and the
subsequent refusal of his claim to native title is the racist supposition that
Mabo was not a ‘proper native’. Beckett notes how many of the legal and
cultural commentaries on the judgment focus on the fact that the case
differentiated between Islander and Aboriginal cultures.43 If, however, we
read the history of non-recognition in Mabo’s name, we can see that both
the Queensland Supreme Court and the High Court’s treatment of Mabo
are a repetition of the state’s past treatment of Aboriginal culture and its
current reinstatement of that attitude of suspicion in the form of the strict
procedures and criteria of the Native Title Act (1993) (and its subsequent
amendment). The recent Yorta Yorta claim exemplifies the limitations of
native title as a formof legal recognition.When Justice Olney of the Federal
Court ruled against the Yorta Yorta native title claim to land in northern
Victoria and southern New South Wales, he put the view that the ‘tide
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of history’ had washed away the group’s native title: ‘Notwithstanding the
genuine efforts of the members of the claimant group to revive the lost
culture of their ancestors, native title rights and interests once lost are not
capable of revival.’44 Thus the terrible paradox of native title: the very history
theMabo judgmentpromised tooverturnis precisely ‘the tide’ usedby judges
such as Olney to deny claimants their native title rights.
The traumatic history of non-recognition revealed in the shock ofMabo’s
defaced name reminds us of the material and social aspects of naming. In
modern self-oriented societies, the proper name is considered sacred, but
only because it is widely regarded as equivalent to what is called ‘the essence
of self’. It is a view that works to conceal the inherent sociality and power
of naming. It is also a view that excludes other cultural conceptions of
sacredness. In the opening of his oral history, Mabo talks about his proper
name as something he was ‘assigned’.45 He also explains how ‘Mabo’ is the
name he ‘grew under’. Here, the name is not given some transcendental
identity with self but recognised as part of a social practice that places,
obliges and even limits the bearer in relation to others.We are also reminded
by Mabo’s understanding of naming that, far from being primarily about
notions of self, a proper name is that which entitles us to property and land
rights. Not the name as a bearer of the concept of self but what Judith Butler
calls ‘the action of names’: to have a name is, she argues, to have the potential
power to name another.46 Eddie Mabo knew this about names, and it was
because of this knowledge that the Australian courts regarded him with
suspicion. Graham’s film portrays Mabo as an activist, an archivist, and an
expert in colonial histories and law, all of which the courts perceived as
too white-faced. As Beckett observes: ‘It is ironic that while anthropologists
became credible expert witnesses by writing, “natives” render themselves
inauthentic by reading: tainted with literacy it seems they can’t go home
again!’47 And as the film shows,Mabo did not go home again until after his
death, until after his name was defaced, yet again.
In this chapter we have shown how Mabo – Life of an Island Man makes
EddieMabo recognisable to Australian audiences as a face, indeed as the face
of native title.We have also tried to show how this intimate portrait of ‘the
man behind the name’ also enables another kind of recognition.We argued
that the close-up detail of the events following the commemoration service
in Townsville shocks us into a recognition of the other face of Mabo, the
underside of the mask of tragic hero, if you like, made visible in a series of
traumatic defacements: the gaping hole at the centre of the marble headstone
where Eddie Mabo’s bust was once attached, the entirely unfillable hole in
the ground in Townsville’s cemetery where Mabo’s body was once buried,
the racist erasure ofMabo’s name by swastikas and the epithet ‘Abo’. In these
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
images we can, we believe, recognise the origin of the traumatic history of
non-recognition of Indigenous Australians, that is, the effacing violence of
terra nullius. Most importantly, the film allows us to see how this particular
violence repeats itself even now in current forms of non-recognition
of Indigenous Australians, such as the procedures and implementation of
native title legislation that regard all Indigenous Australians with suspicion.
Notes
1 This chapter is a new and developed version of Therese Davis’s article ‘The name
and face ofMabo: questions of recognition’, Metro, 127 and 128, 2001. On theMabo
decision, seeMabo – TheHigh Court Decision, Discussion Paper, June 1993, Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service. Also see Noel Pearson, ‘Mabo: towards
respecting equality and difference’. In Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (eds),
RaceMatters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies
Press, 1997; Murray Goot and Tim Rowse (eds), Make A Better Offer: the politics of
Mabo, Sydney: PlutoPress, 1994;W. Sanders (ed),‘Mabo’ andNativeTitle:Origins and
Institutional Implications,Canberra:Centre forAboriginal EconomicPolicyResearch,
Australian National University, Research Monograph, no. 7, 1994.
2 Jeremy Beckett, ‘TheMurray Island land case and the problem of cultural continuity’.
In ‘Mabo’ and Native Title: Origins and Institutional Implications, p. 7. Many thanks
to Tim Rowse for recommending Beckett’s article and Nonie Sharp’s cross-cultural
analysis,No Ordinary Judgement –Mabo, TheMurray Islanders’ Land Case,Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996.
3 ibid., p. 7.
4 ibid.
5 For an overview of these debates, see Steve Thomas, ‘Whatever happened to the social
documentary’, Metro, 134, pp. 152–160.
6 Paul Davies, ‘“Between fact and fiction”: speculating on the documentary with John
Hughes’, Metro, 136, pp. 108–9.
7 Other film awards and nominations to date include: Third place, Certificate of Creative
Excellence for the categories Documentary, Current Events, Special Events,
United States International Film andVideo Festival, 1998; Finalist, Best International
Documentary, ‘Hot Docs’, Toronto, Canada; Winner, Best Documentary Award,
Australian Film Institute Awards, 1997; Winner, Best Script Award, NSW Premier’s
Literary Award, 1997.
8 See: ‘Themanbehind the name’ (CairnsPost);‘Mabo family album’ (DailyTelegraph);
‘A portrait of the man who was theMabo case’ (Age); ‘Mabo the man’ (Herald Sun);
‘Powerful portrait of Mabo’ (Age).
9 John Ryan, ‘Mabo – Life of an Island Man’, Artery, 6(8) 1997, p. 5.
10 TomRyan, ‘Mabo – Life of an IslandMan’, Sunday Age (Melbourne), 10 August 1997,
C2.
11 In 1997 the film won the NSW Premier’s Audio-Visual History Award. It is a highly
sought after educational resource, distributed by Film Australia, along with accompanying
teaching notes and a bibliography on native title. The film has been a set
text on the NSW HSC curriculum. The screenplay, published in 2000, is also a set
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text. Finally, the film forms the basis of a comprehensive, sophisticated CD ROMand
website production on Mabo by Film Australia.
12 Terry Morden, ‘Documentary. Past. Future?’ In Patricia Holland, Jo Spence and
Simon Watney (eds), Photography/Politics II, London: Comedia and Photography
Workshop, 1986, p. 69.
13 TrevorGraham,Mabo – Life of an IslandMan, Original Screenplay, Sydney: Currency,
1999, p. xx. It is interesting to note that this is the first documentary screenplay to be
published in Australia, perhaps, the world, providing further evidence of the film’s
function as a historical record of Mabo.
14 Lauren Berlant, editorial, Critical Inquiry, 24,Winter 1998, p. 284.
15 ibid., p. 286.
16 ibid., p. 87.
17 ibid., pp. 286–87. Also see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘The state of shame: Australian
multiculturalism and the crisis of indigenous citizenship’, Critical Inquiry 24, 1998.
18 This analysis of defacement is indebted to Michael Taussig’s conceptualistion of the
terminDefacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of theNegative, StanfordUniversity
Press, 1999.We also gratefully acknowledge his helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this chapter.
19 Veronica Matheson, Sunday Herald Sun (Melb), ‘TV Extra’, 9 November, 1997, p. 3.
20 Evan Williams, ‘Enough redemption already’, Weekend Australian, ‘Review’, 19 July
1997, p. 11.
21 For more detail on the unveiling ceremony andMabo Day celebrations in Townsville,
see Noel Loos and Koiki Mabo, Edward Koiki Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land
Rights, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
22 Jim Schembri, ‘A portrait of the man who was theMabo case’, The Age (Melbourne),
30 July 1997, p. 7.
23 Deborah Niski, ‘No man is an island’, Sunday Age, 27 July 1997, C5.
24 ibid.
25 Piers Akerman, ‘Black man’s burden’, Daily Telegraph Mirror, 6 June 1995, p. 11.
26 Fiona Kennedy, ‘Racists desecrate Mabo’s gravestone’, Australian, 6 June 1995, p. 1.
27 Margaret Smith, Cinema Papers, 119 (August, 1997), p. 38.
28 Jim Schembri, ‘A portrait of the man who was theMabo case’, Age, 30 July 1997, p. 7
29 Aristotle, Poetics (52a, pp. 2–4), as quoted in Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics,
London: Duckworth, 1986, p. 171.
30 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. John Osborne,
intro. George Steiner, London: Verso, 1977, p. 62.
31 Sharp, No Ordinary Judgement, p. 41.
32 Walter Benjamin, ‘On SomeMotifs in Baudelaire’. In Hannah Arendt, Illuminations,
transl. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1992, p. 196.
33 Walter Benjamin, ‘On language as such and the language of man’. In Peter Demetz
(ed.), Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, transl. Edmund
Jephcott, New York: Schocken Books, 1986, p. 330.
34 See Walter Benjamin, ‘“N” (Re: the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress)’,
trans. LeighHafrey and Richard Sieburth. In Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy,
Aesthetics, History, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 42–83.
35 Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations inMemory, Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994. We gratefully acknowledge Dr Jodi Brooks whose
71
Australian Cinema after Mabo
work introduced us to trauma theory and who has been extremely helpful in her
comments on this chapter.
36 Beckett, ‘The Murray Island land case’, pp. 12–13.
37 ibid., p. 7.
38 In his judgment, Justice Moynihan wrote: ‘I was not impressed with the credibility
of EddieMabo. I would not be inclined to act on his evidence in a matter bearing on
his self-interest . . . unless it was supported by other creditable evidence’, as quoted
in Beckett, ‘The Murray Island land case’, p. 18.
39 Noel Loos and KoikiMabo, Edward KoikiMabo:His Life and Struggle for Land Rights,
Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996, p. 16.
40 Sharp, No Ordinary Judgement, p. 41.
41 ibid., p. 78.
42 ibid.
43 Beckett, ‘The Murray Island land case’, pp. 8–10.
44 See ‘Native title claim “washed away”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 1998,
p. 1. For an Indigenous perspective on developments in the Native Title debate,
see ‘Native Title and Wik: The Indigenous Position: Coexistence, Negotiation and
Certainty’, position paper, National Indigenous Working Group, ATSIC, Canberra,
1997.
45 Loos and Mabo, Edward Koiki Mabo, p. 26.
46 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London:
Routledge, 1997, pp. 28–38.
47 Beckett, ‘The Murray Island land case’, p. 22.
72
Landscape and Belonging
after Mabo

5
Aftershock and the Desert
Landscape in Heaven’s Burning,
The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy
Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy,
The Missing
The impetus for this chapter comes out of a particular viewing experience
which we are calling ‘aftershock’.1 For us, this experience is associated with
the unbearable weight of history embedded in the Australian landscape film
of the 1990s. The landscape cinema of the 1970s established Australian film
as an international genre. The ‘AFC genre’, as it was christened by Susan
Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, was defined by the period film which became
the flagship of an inward and backward-looking national identity through
quality films like Sunday Too Far Away (KenHannam, 1975), Picnic atHanging
Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) and My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong,
1979).2 However, after a decade of official support through the Australian
Film Commission, the period film was repudiated as the nation’s standardbearer
during the commercially oriented 1980s, particularly after the first
two Mad Max films (George Miller, 1979, 1981) reclaimed the landscape
for a contemporary, outward-looking cinema. The cinematic landscape has
re-emerged as a more complex figure of national identity in the 1990s, after
the High Court ended the nation’s sustaining myth of terra nullius.
Writing about the landscape tradition in Australian feature films of the
1970s, Ross Gibson argues that ‘the majority of Australian films have been
about landscape’.3 They participate fully in the 200-year-old landscape tradition
whereby non-Aboriginal Australia, ‘underendowed’ with myths of
belonging, tried ‘to promote a sense of the significance of European society
in the antipodes’.4 Gibson emphasises a myth of belonging structured
around an unknowable, untamable landscape, viewed as ‘an awesome opponent’
rather than ‘a nurturing mother’, a ‘primitive . . . storehouse of some
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
inexhaustible and ineffable Australianness’.5 Taking the Mad Max trilogy as
a turning point in the landscape tradition, Gibson argues that from the end
of the 1970s, as official Australian culture became more open to contamination
by international popular culture, there was ‘a conscious intent to revise
the old myths’ of a ‘flawed but marvellous’ society taking on the character
of a ‘flawed but marvellous’ continent. Gibson concludes by suggesting that,
given the rapid pace of economic and cultural internationalisation evident
by the late 1980s, these well-established ‘national myths are also altering’.6
With hindsight, more than a decade after Gibson’s essay was written, it
is possible to argue that national events have been as significant as international
contamination in the rewriting of nationalmyths, and in the renewed
force of the landscape tradition evident in the cycle of Indigenous–settler
films released in 1999–2002. This extraordinary cycle includes nine feature
films: Australian Rules (Paul Goldman, 2002), Beneath Clouds (Ivan
Sen, 2002), Black and White (Craig Lahiff, 2003), The Missing (Manuela
Alberti, 1999), One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2000), Rabbit-Proof
Fence (PhillipNoyce, 2002), Serenades (Mojgan Khadem, 2001), The Tracker
(Rolf de Heer, 2002), and Yolngu Boy (Stephen Johnson, 2001).
For us, the landscape films of the 1990s provoke shocks of recognition
of a continent which has been anything but the sublime void of European
projections. Rather, there is now a popular awareness that the continent
has been written over by Indigenous languages, songlines, dreaming stories
and Law for 40 000 years or more. Since the Mabo decision at least, the
image of the outback landscape in cinema provokes recognition of historical
amnesia (rather than an unknowable, sublime, interior void) as the founding
structure of settler Australia’s myths of belonging.
In this chapter we are interested in how a familiar icon of Australian
cinema, the landscape (in particular the desert landscape, the outback),
is suddenly made strange (unbearable even) by a historic event and how
this raises questions to do with historical amnesia, shock and memory in a
national cinema. Althoughtheimageof theAustralian redcentre as a vastand
empty space is ubiquitous in television and advertising, we will confine our
argument to particular moments fromseven feature films which, in different
ways, are symptomatic of the fresh impact of a familiar icon occasioned by
theMabo decision.Thepersistent returnof the landscape is evident in a range
of contemporary Australian genre films, whether the period film, the road
movie, the identity quest, or outback melodrama. Some of these films have
had critical recognition. Most of them have been routinely produced and
consumed within the protocols of what O’Regan calls ‘a mundane national
cinema’ which has no expectation of dominating the box office in its own
market.7
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
In order to sneak up on this post-Mabo experience of aftershock, we
want to place these films in relation to three critical categories which have
been important in making sense of the ad hoc diversity of Australian films.8
The first is the landscape tradition, closely associated with the AFC-funded
period film which, although less popular than the urban ocker films, defined
Australian national cinema from the mid-1970s into the 1980s. The 1998
release of Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar
and Lucinda revives the 1970s period film and tries to compensate for the
historical amnesia, or national innocence, of the genre. A notable exception
to the genre’s myth of innocent settlement of unoccupied territory is The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978).
The second category is the purgatorial narrative of failure and defeat
whereby a melancholic male protagonist merely survives (rather than conquers
or transforms) a pitiless natural landscape and an exiled, insular
society.9 If the loner-hero in Mad Max is the ultimate figure of subsistence,
the survivor-heroes of Sunday Too Far Away and Gallipoli (PeterWeir, 1981)
are emblematic of the bush battler’s ethos of making a virtue out of defeat.
The non-viable landscape of the outback and the defeated, melancholic male
are revived by Russell Crowe and Ray Barrett in the operatic, deterritorialised
road movie Heaven’s Burning (Craig Lahiff, 1997). Some elements
of the ethos of survival are also evident in two contemporary Indigenous
stories, Yolngu Boy and Serenades. But in the full-blown melodrama The
Missing, outback redemption from European angst comes at such a price
that the modest ethos of survival begins to look like good sense rather than
moral failure.
The third category, to which less critical attention has been devoted, is
comedy as the popular face of Australian cinema. The popularity of comedy
stretches from the larrikin humour of The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond
Longford, 1919), to the backblocks farce of the Hayseeds and the Rudd
families of the 1930s and 1940s, to the urban ocker films of the 1970s, to
the globe-trotting PaulHogan in Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986), to
the quirky suburban comedies of Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992),
Muriel’s Wedding (Paul J. Hogan, 1994) and The Adventures of Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994). The suburban grotesque is
revived and transported to the outback in Holy Smoke (Jane Campion,
1999), deflating the spiritual aspirations embodied by the film’s international
stars, KateWinslett and Harvey Keitel. The suburban wasteland, and
its particular forms of family strife, provide the motive for a trip to the
desert by a middle-aged woman and her father in The Last Days of Chez
Nous (Gillian Armstrong, 1992). Their trip is more like a Sunday drive than
a road movie, but like Holy Smoke, the prevailing ethos is down-to-earth
77
Australian Cinema after Mabo
deflation of any impulse towards the sublime brought on by the expanse of
the desert.
If we take the High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992 as a historic event
which caused a paradigm shift in our thinking about identity, the land, and
belonging in Australia, then our relation to landscape, as the template of
national identity inAustralian cinema, might also be undergoing a paradigm
shift. In order to understand the effect of this paradigm shift on the impact
of the landscape film after Mabo, we use the terms ‘shock’, ‘aftershock’ and
‘afterwardness’.10 The shock recognition of terra nullius as a myth breaks
through the protective shield of historical amnesia, but at the same time
the shock itself entails a protective numbing effect. The initial recognition
of the historical truth behind the 1992 Mabo decision came as a shock to
the nation as it reassessed its founding myth. But the shock did not become
traumatic until the rise of OneNation and the beginning of the history wars
in the mid-1990s. The historical event only becomes traumatic afterwards,
through the process of left-liberals and neo-conservatives repeatedly going
back over what ‘really happened’ in the past without being able to agree
on what it means now. This process of going back over historical events
is experienced as traumatic because the highly contentious revision of the
nation’s past activates unconscious fantasies which, by definition, cannot be
directly acknowledged.11
Shock of Secular Modernity in Oscar and Lucinda
Thinking about history in terms of modernity, rather than postmodernism
and the end of history, entails questions of memory and the peculiarly
modern sensory experience of montage and shock. This aesthetic experience
of shock is associated with the technologies which shape industrial and
urban experience, from the factory assembly line to the phantasmagoria of
the city with its tenement living, congested traffic, advertising billboards,
theme parks and crowded cinemas. The modernity paradigm, taking its cue
fromWalter Benjamin, approaches cinema as an ‘optical unconscious’ which
brings reality closer.12 Cinema’s framing and editing system is not unlike
the visual montage of modern life seen from the moving window of a bus or
train or car. The framing and editing of everyday life as a series of montages
(which give us a close-up or a bird’s eye view of what is normally unseen)
offer a radical rethinking of history as the source of national identity through
national cinema. Rather than identification with a national past imagined
by a flagship national cinema, Benjamin’s concept of cinema as an ‘optical
unconscious’ insists on cinema’s capacity to produce shocks of recognition
78
Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
of the past in the present in a dialectical image, not of the past as it really
was, but of ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.13 Michael
Taussig argues that this ‘flash of recognition’ and its ‘numbing aftermath of
shock’ depends crucially on a ‘singular act of recognition of past in present’ a
fleeting act of recognition which depends on ‘the perception of similarity’.14
However, the similarity between past and present is not based on continuity
or cause-effect.Nor is it a matter of history repeating. Rather, history flashes
up ‘as a sudden rejuxtaposition of the very old with the very new’, as a
‘resurgence’ of the old in ‘the (Euroamerican) culture of modernity’.15 The
resurgence of the image of the desert landscape in Australian films at the end
of the millennium is a case of the image of a pre-historic, empty landscape
suddenly becoming recognisable, post-Mabo, as a land with a history.
As Laura U. Marks argues, official history ‘actually shields consciousness
from experience . . . It takes a shock to unroot a memory, to create
a flow of experience’.16 The return of landscape cinema, after Mabo, provokes
a shock recognition of an unburied, unreconciled national history.
This unrooted memory of a traumatic colonial past has decisively displaced
cultural nationalism’s bush legend and its ethos of mateship as the origin
of an egalitarian nationhood. A key instance of this shock of recognition
occurs in Gillian Armstrong’s period film Oscar and Lucinda. The
story is set in the colonial period from 1848 to 1870 and culminates in a
wager between Lucinda, an Australian heiress (whose fortune derives from
her mother’s subdivision of land), and Oscar, an English clergyman and
obsessive gambler, estranged from both his father’s puritanical religious sect
and his adopted Anglican brethren. The wager between Oscar and Lucinda
involves transporting a modern church of iron and glass from Sydney to
Bellingen through ‘unmapped country’. The delivery of the church to a
bush town in northern New South Wales takes Oscar on a journey from
Christian faith to secular enlightenment and costs him his life. The scene of
Oscar’s death by drowning in the sinking church entails a ‘shock of recognition’
for the viewer whereby the past corresponds with the present, not only
as a revision of colonial history but as an unrooting of collective or social
memory. It is this unrooted memory of the past that endures after the film,
and after the historical event in the present to which the film corresponds.
The shock that creates a flow of memory, through which we recognise history
in the present, comes from the dislocated sound of Oscar’s prayer. This
prayer for forgiveness seems to echo out over the landscape. However, the
familiar landscape of the ‘untamed’ Australian bush is transformed by the
fantastic image of the floating glass and iron church as it slowly cracks and
fillswith water. Oscar’s prayer, togetherwith the image of the sinking church,
remind us of the bloody cost of his wager, and of colonial settlement: the
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
massacre of the Kumbaingiri tribesmen and the murder of the treacherous
leader of Oscar’s expedition. The pictorial stillness of the landscape, its
supposed ‘emptiness’, is profoundly disturbed by Oscar’s prayer: ‘Forgive
me. Forgive me. Forgive me for my pride. Forgive me for my ignorance.’
The aura of untarnished history embodied in the untouched landscape of
the 1970s period film is brought to light in this scene as we hear the words
that, at the time of the film’s release in 1998, were intimately tied to the
politics of recognition (or non-recognition) of the belated traumatic effects
of terra nullius. When the weight of European modernity and Christianity,
both represented by the glass church, entombs Oscar, there appear to be no
witnesses. But in an earlier scene, as the church floats down the river to its
destination, the amazing sight is witnessed by Aboriginal children. Through
these silent witnesses, Oscar and Lucinda, like Paul Keating in his Redfern
Park speech, asks us to imagine the shock of colonial history, not only as
we recognise it now, belatedly, but as Indigenous Australians continue to
experience it in the present.
It is the belatedness of the shock of recognition that changes the meaning
of history in Oscar and Lucinda. It makes us ask what is the real historical
event taking place here in our viewing of the film? This is a different
question from how the past is represented in the film. The timing of the
film’s release in 1998 meant that the shock effect of the Mabo decision
had begun to shift from recognition of the myth of terra nullius to fears
about native title (Howard’s Ten Point Plan was announced amid controversy
at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention). Oscar’s prayer for forgiveness
also corresponded with Howard’s refusal at the same Convention to apologise
as Prime Minister of Australia to members of the Stolen Generations
whose stories had caused waves of belated shock and grief in Indigenous and
settler communities after the release of Bringing Them Home.17 There is a
further belated context for understanding the film.With a budget of around
$16 million, Oscar and Lucinda was one of the first features to be produced
out of Sydney’s Fox Studios and distributed by Twentieth Century’s
art-house subsidiary, Fox Searchlight. Shot partly in England, the film, like
Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981), was able to exploit Australia’s historical ties to
Britain, and to extend its market appeal by casting Ralph Fiennes in the role
of the benighted Oscar, as well as launching the international career of Cate
Blanchett, the Australian actor who went on to star as the English queen
in Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998). In this sense, the film looks outward
to reclaim a place for the Australian period film in international cinema,
and backward in time to Australia’s origins in British colonial policy. The
film’s remembrance of the British origins of settler Australia came at a time
when Australian nationhood was well entrenched in two post-Anglo-Celtic
80
Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
modes: themulticultural and Indigenous mode whereby acceptance of ethnic
diversity had been official policy for twenty years; and the melting pot
mode which had long made a virtue of a cosmopolitan identity forged by
enthusiastic consumption of international brands, alongside local products.
By the time Armstrong’s film was released in 1998, the shock of recognition
of the landscape, not as something timeless and natural but as a sign within
an Indigenous cultural system, had started to become familiar, not only in
cinema but also through international recognition of Aboriginal culture,
particularly through dance, art and music. This sense of a familiar shock
of recognition, of being shocked again, of becoming unshockable as more
and more landscape images after Mabo evoke a traumatic colonial history,
is what we mean by aftershock. Our use of the term to describe post-Mabo
cinema implies that Indigenous and settler Australians alike are still living
through the unresolved trauma of colonial settlement.
Aftershock in Heaven’s Burning, The Last Days
of Chez Nous and Holy Smoke
Aftershock in contemporary films is the space of everyday life and its fantasised
revision of the desert landscape to fit new historical circumstances.
This repeated recognition of constellations between past and present states
of trauma in landscape films is best understood in terms of what Patrice
Petro describes as the ‘aftershock’ of latemodernity rather than the shock of
early modernity that Benjamin and other critical theorists grappled with in
the 1920s and 1930s.18 In aftershock, recognition does not pass in a fleeting
moment; it endures through repetition, replacing the numbness of shock
with the everydayness of a jaded kind of recognition, akin to boredom. Petro
connects boredomwith the non-eventful repetitions of everyday life and the
remakes of popular culture.19 She argues that the remake ‘has more to do
with repetition and duration – with a history in which nothing happens –
than with transformation and change’.20 When a national cinema routinely
remakes its nationalist myths through repetition of landscapes and characters,
we are in the temporality of the everyday, of the present, of aftershock,
where, as Petro argues, nothingmuch that is new happens. The everyday, in
this schema, is opposed to the temporality of history where change occurs
as an event which can be documented.21 In this version of history, theMabo
decision is an event, something that can be documented as official history.
However, it is the duration of the effect of the event over time, its aftershock,
that concerns us here.How does the Australian landscape signify the enduring
repetition of the past for those characters (and viewers) who journey
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
into the dead heart of the continent in films with contemporary rather than
historical settings?
Landscape films set in the present draw on a range of genres, including
melodrama, the road movie, the personal relations film, and the adventurequest.
The post-Mabo effect can be understood in these films in terms of the
everyday dislocations andmundane repetitions of aftershock as a benumbed
or bored state. Many of the landscape films of the 1990s seem to be preoccupied
with what Jacka argued for in 1988, that is, ‘reconceptualising the
nation’, not in terms of costume drama but ‘according to the vicissitudes
of everyday life’.22 The turn to genres other than the period film indicates
a national cinema interested in taking up the dislocations of contemporary
life. One way of thinking about a post-Mabo cinema of dislocation might be
to think about how, in the aftershock ofMabo, the outback is no longer available
for the kind of Romantic locationism extolled by Charles Chauvel.23
For Chauvel, the land was a source of an Australian national identity for
Europeans. His location films, particularly Sons of Matthew (1948) (set in
the Queensland bush) and Jedda (1954) (set in the Northern Territory outback),
have had a lasting impact on the landscape tradition, exemplified by
Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy (1989), TraceyMoffatt’s acclaimed remake of
Jedda.
When characters traverse the outback landscape in an Australian road
movie, the desert is confirmed as an utterly natural location for the spiritual
crises of a secular society suffering the aftershock of modernity and
its colonial underpinnings. As Roslynn Haynes has established, the desert
landscape has been investedwith a range of meanings in Australian art, film,
literature, travel writing, tourism and environmental studies. Explorers,
missionaries and anthropologists, as well as nation-building miners, irrigators
and pastoralists, have variously seen the desert as a wilderness to
be mapped, redeemed or exploited; a recalcitrant Nature defeating heroic
human endeavour; or a timeless, numinous landscape inciting awe and fear.
Under British colonialism, scientific modernity separated the knowing subject
(usually masculine) from the land as object (usually feminine).24 This
rational, scientific view is incomprehensible in terms of Aboriginal Law,
defined as a ceremonial body of knowledge based on reciprocity between
ancestors, the land and all physical beings.25 In the European view, the desert
without an oasis was an ungodly void, a stark reminder of paradise lost. In
the Indigenous view, natural landmarks, visible everywhere, were fully alive
with indwelling spirits and the Law.26
The ascendancy of the alienated European view of the landscape has
been challenged in the 1990s, especially in films which deal with conflicts
between two laws, Indigenous and settler. This issue is taken up in Chapter 6.
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
What’s interesting about the contemporary journey to the desert, in the
films we discuss below, is how the purgatorial narrative is undergoing a
transformation, a remake, as white masculinity faces a crisis of non-viability
and white femininity faces a spiritual crisis. It is the downright ordinariness
of these crises, their origin in the stifling sameness of suburban life, barely
relieved by the monotonous duration of the endless road journey through
vast expanses of unpopulated space, that points to the phenomenon of
aftershock as a facet of contemporary Australian road movies.
In the 1990s, the trip to the desert has been undertaken by alienated urban
dwellers, their journeys motivated by a crisis, usuallywith the lawor the family.
The landscape films place their protagonists in classic outback settings
– mostly a flat, dry red earth where the road and the car (or motorbike)
are the only signs of modernity’s toehold on a vast, inhospitable continent.
Although none of these films shares Oscar and Lucinda’s historical revision
of the nation’s origins, each of them takes the secularity of modernity as
a central concern. In these films the desert landscape functions as the fantasy
setting or mise-en-sc`ene for a secular approach to the sacred (projected
onto the Aboriginality of the land) through negation. This negation of the
sacred is endemic to the spiritual quest in Australian cinema. It speaks to
the problem in modernity of the spiritual as something pre-modern which
becomeseasily realignedwith 20th-century fascism or 21st-century religious
fundamentalism. In the Australian vernacular this negation is a recurring
refrain best articulated as ‘there’s nothing out there’ by Sophie Lee in Jane
Campion’s Holy Smoke, echoing Bill Hunter’s ‘There is no god’ in Gillian
Armstrong’s The LastDays of ChezNous. This negation of the sacred is paradoxical
in that it both recognises and negates the landscape as sacred. It is as
if the characters who journey into the outback are held captive by a secular
modernity which allows the nation to continue to deny native title despite
the Mabo and Wik cases.
Heaven’s Burning
One of the most internationally contaminated road movies to emerge from
the pack in the 1990s wasHeaven’s Burning.More than any of the genre’s critical
or popular successes, including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994), Doing Time for Patsy Cline (Chris Kennedy,
1997), True Love and Chaos (Stavros Efthymiou, 1996), The Goddess of 1967
(Clara Law, 2001) and Kiss or Kill (Bill Bennett, 1997), Heaven’s Burning
remaps the Australian landscape to speak directly to the experience of international
contamination.Moreover, it does sowith the distinctive local accent
of playwright and screenwriter Louis Nowra, keen observer of the legacy of
Hawke-Keating’s deregulated Australia.
83
Australian Cinema after Mabo
Heaven’s Burning is a reprise and an update of the landscape tradition
for several reasons: it retains an acute, critical sense of Treasurer Keating’s
deregulated Australia even as it tries to exploit the Asian film market; it
remaps the Australian landscape for a tourist gaze and a corporate takeover
even as it peoples it with the road movie’s cast of outlaws, ratbags and
no-hopers; its characters are beyond integration into a multicultural ideal;
three out of four of its father-son couples are spectacularly non-viable; and
Russell Crowe takes the recessive Australian hero (Colin) to a new level of
passivity while YoukiKudoh’s inspired rendition ofMidori’s transformation
from Japanese honeymooning bride to hostage, bank robber and romantic
outlaw upstages the Hollywood action heroine.
Heaven’s Burning consciously exploits the landscape tradition for a tourist
gazeandforanelusive SoutheastAsianfilmmarket.But itdoes so inways that
emphasise Australia’s dislocated place in a deregulated global economy. The
familiar cinematic landscapes are deterritorialised in the film’s remapping
of Australia. This road movie’s deranged map makes a geographical impossibility
of Midori and Colin’s escape route from the international tourist
city of Sydney via the eerie flatness of South Australian saltpans, through
the red dust outback of New South Wales, and then, somehow, back to the
unlocatable beach for the film’sWagnerian finale.
The four father-son figures in Heaven’s Burning are divided into two aesthetic
types: active comic book avengers (a Japanese salaryman armed by
his hapless boss, and an Afghan father who teaches his son a thing or two
about torture) who cannot be integrated into a residual ideal of Australian
multiculturalism; and passive icons of Anglo-Australian masculinity (the
drought-stricken farmer and the city cop) whose limited capacity for action
cannot hold death at bay for the young couple on the run. This stand-off on
the frontier of masculinity leaves the field of action wide open for the heroine,
Midori. Heaven’s Burning opens with an extreme close-up of Midori’s
eye, looking for a way out of the art-directed, corporate landscape in which
she finds herself playing the role of the demure Japanese bride, honeymooning
in Sydney. Midori’s first act is to rescript her role by staging her own
kidnapping. Her plans come undone and she finds her genre in the road
movie, learning to improvise, saving Colin, stealing a truck, and staging a
second, more successful bank robbery. With her heroic credentials established,
Midori takes charge of her own make-over, providing the costumes,
make-up, hairstyle and setting for her final transformation into an incendiary
image of l’amour fou. Colin’s passivity and his father’s hostility cannot
dampen her spirit – in the outback she can breathe. Right up to her final
breath, Midori contaminates the film with an ethic of daily self-invention
in the space of the Australian road movie whose only border is death.
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
If the opening shot of the film belongs to Midori, so too does the film’s
inspired finale which begins at a Bachelor and Spinster ball and ends in
apocalyptic flames on the beach. At the beach, the viewer is rewarded with
three telling shots.Thefirst is a sublime close-up ofMidori’s faceshimmering
through the flames as she farewells Colin and puts the gun to her head in
a final, assured act of self-possession. The second is of the police officer,
Bishop, and his rookie offsider, on the beach, witnessing the explosion of
the car. The overturned car burns as Bishop sits on the beach with his arms
around his knees and looks out to sea. The film leaves him there as the
camera cranes up and away from the beach, pulling out to sea to reveal the
coastline of an island – a place to leave behind, to depart fromby air. Unless
you are on that plane, however, you are still here, implicated in Bishop’s
contemplative gesture of survival – sitting on the beach looking out to sea
as heaven burns.
Heaven’s Burning is deeply ambivalent about the future of this islandcontinent
in the Asia-Pacific region. The final shot raises the possibility of
abandoning the project of Australia altogether. The film has shown its landscape
to be a montage of images peopled by blind, stoned and otherwise
ill-equipped figures, most of whom are male. Fathers have nothing to hand
on to their sons except outmoded technology and fundamentalist ethics.
When Midori holds the gun to her head and squeezes the trigger, the narrative
comes to a spectacular end. Her eye, which opened the film looking
for a way out, is transferred to Bishop looking out to sea, and then to the
viewer contemplating the final shot of the receding coastline. Like Bishop,
we sit and contemplate the scene, sidelined from the field of action which
opened so briefly for Midori.
The Last Days of Chez Nous and Holy Smoke
In The Last Days of Chez Nous the trip to the desert, which occurs in the
middle of the film, presents the landscape as a tourist attraction and a site for
everyday squabbles and unfinished business between a middle-aged writer,
Beth (Lisa Harrow), and her father (Bill Hunter). The resolute secularity
of everyday life in Australia is embodied by Hunter as the laconic Aussie
bloke whose trip to the desert affirms the sacred through negation – if this
trip is purgatorial then this is the purgatory of the family sedan and the
Sunday drive. In the early stages of the desert journey the rising tension
between father and daughter enclosed in the moving car is contrasted with
the release of erotic energies at home between Beth’s husband and her sister.
However, although it costs Beth her marriage, the trip to the centre of
Australia opens up a new vista for Beth. Alone in the family sedan with her
father, having the same pointless fight they’ve been having for twenty years,
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
it seems they are more alienated than ever. They end up in separate hotel
rooms, watching TV alone. Whatever their intentions, they are isolated
and numbed by the repetition of suburban family rites in the desert, just
as they were in the city. However, when Beth and her father finally leave
the car to walk companionably in the desert (her filial love declared and his
parental voice silenced), Beth is able toput tohimtaboo questions aboutGod
and death that the suburban Australian male rarely encounters in cinema.
Surrounded by the expanse of red earth that has become symbolic of the
Australian psyche, this good Aussie bloke does his best with the question of
God, recalling a visit to a cathedral in Budapest which left him ‘unconvinced’
about God. However, on the fear of dying he enters a wry plea, ‘Oh, fair go.’
This laconic conversation is the highlight and endpoint of a journey which
is filmed as resolutely uneventful and secular. Beth’s questions are posed in
the empty space between the domed cathedral in Budapest and the sacred
rock (Uluru) at the heart of the Australian continent, both unseen in the
film.What is represented, fromBeth’s suburban verandah, is an unassuming
churchspire, barely visibleamongthe treesandrooftops of the inner city.The
image of the spire turns Beth’s mid-life crisis into a spiritual quest. The spire
refers us back to European culture, which has articulated its metaphysical
questions of death, God and the soul in relation to the father. When Beth
sets off to find the spire in the last shot of the film, the spiritual quest in
Australian cinema is broughthomefromthe purgatorial desert to the secular
suburbs.
By contrast, Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke maps the spiritual wasteland of
suburban space onto the exotic desert landscape, exaggerating the incongruity
between identity and place which is characteristic of Australian films.
Holy Smoke begins and ends its spiritual quest in India. In between, the
Australian outback (filmed in a manner reminiscent of Albert Namatjira’s
paintings) becomes the gothic backdrop not for the usual purgatorial quest,
but for both a desecration and a comic deflation of the spiritual aspiration.
The plot involves a suburban family kidnapping their daughter Ruth so that
cult-exiter PJ can negate her ecstatic faith in Indian cult leader Baba. Rather
than total negation of the sacred, the film’s deflation is aimed squarely at
Australian suburbia and its secular indifference to the desert (imagined as
something between a pub crawl, an ostrich farm and a theme-park motel).
Locked together in a spiritual and sexual battle, Ruth (British star Kate
Winslet) and PJ (American star Harvey Keitel) are slyly defeated, not by
their inner demons or by the desert, but by the intrusion of the suburban
grotesque in the form of Australian television personality Sophie Lee. The
kaleidoscopic desert landscape provides the mise-en-sc`ene for a desecrating
encounter between secular and spiritual fantasies of seduction. The contrast
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
between Ruth and her sister-in-law Yvonne (Sophie Lee) is indicative of
the way the film invites a double gaze at two familiar figures in the desert
landscape: that of the sophisticated foreigner and the naive local. Ruth’s key
scene involves stripping naked in a desert landscape bathed in moonlight. At
a moment of spiritual crisis, she becomes abject, urinating in distress before
seducing PJ. By contrast, Sophie Lee’s kitsch Yvonne visits PJ at night, indifferent
to the outback location. Dressed in suburban froufrou from K-Mart,
she naively narrates her sexual fantasies about Hollywood film stars before
giving PJ a casual blow job. When Lee’s character says, towards the end of
the film, ‘I’ve thought about it and there’s nothing out there’, she negates
the desert as a purgatorial space in the Australian metaphysical imaginary.
It is this negation of the sacred, the perception of the outback in terms of
nothingness, that reprises a staunchly secular view of Australian interiority
in the above films, refusing the re-enchantment of modernity sought by
films like Serenades and Yolngu Boy, and the Aboriginalisation of the sacred
in The Missing.
Afterwardness in Serenades, Yolngu Boy
and The Missing
If shock, in Benjamin’s sense, is associated with singular and fleeting acts
of recognition, with flashes of involuntary memory which ‘slip by’ provoking
a chain of correspondences or associations, then aftershock (which
endures rather than flashes by) might be thought of in terms of a mode
of revised memory that Susannah Radstone calls ‘afterwardness’.27 In her
essay on history, memory and fantasy in Forrest Gump, Radstone makes a
distinction between the historical recovery of repressed traumatic events
and the psychoanalytic understanding of traumatic memories as symptoms
of unacknowledgable primary fantasies. Whereas historical approaches to
memory focus on the tension between official history and popular or unofficial
memory (presented in a narrative of historical events in a cause-effect
pattern), psychoanalytic approaches reject linear temporality in favour of the
psychic temporality of ‘afterwardness’. For Radstone, afterwardness ‘refers
to a process of deferred revision’28 whereby ‘the analysis of memory’s tropes
can reveal not the truth of the past, but a particular revision prompted by
later events’.29 A further difference between history’s use of popular memory
and the Freudian concept of memory is the role of primary fantasies
(of origins, of desire, of sexual difference) in shaping experience in such a
way that memories (always formed in terms of fantasies) cannot be mapped
onto historical events in any straightforward way.
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Thinking about post-Mabo landscape films in relation to this account
of ‘afterwardness’, the landscape in non-history films (whether the deterritorialised
road movie, the art-house relationship drama, the full-blown
exploitation melodrama or the adventure-quest) is the mise-en-sc`ene of
contemporary, everyday fantasies of origins (where do I come from?), desire
(what do I want from the other?) and difference (how do I understand the
enigma of the other?). If Australian film is a genre of international cinema
noted for its landscapes (the outback, bush, suburbs, beach), then memory
in contemporary Australian films is spatial (prompted by place) as well as
temporal (historical event). The continuing process of ‘deferred revision’ or
‘afterwardness’ informs our definition of a post-Mabo cinema as a kind of
backtracking through the cinematic landscapes of pre-Mabo cinema.
Serenades and Yolngu Boy
Two adventure-quest films released in 2001 borrow from the landscape
tradition that was inaugurated by Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971). Both
films contribute to a contemporary multicultural cinema concerned with
the transformation ofAustralian identity andmemory. Serenades andYolngu
Boy are both concerned with the way identity can be remade in the many
intersections between tradition and modernity. Inthis sense the two films are
deferred revisions (or fantasised memories) of the archaic as it resurfaces
in modernity. At one level, the two films construct an argument, from a
present-day multicultural perspective, about what happened to traditional
identity in the wake of British colonialism. But more than this, they struggle
toexpress the archaic in themodernthroughcinema’s adventure-quest genre
whereby the protagonist is forced to leave home and undergo a number of
ordeals before returning home and being recognised as the hero. The hero’s
identity is confirmed in the adventure-quest through the slaying of the
dragon, sea monster or behemoth (something primeval or archaic) which
threatens the social order. The conundrum for the protagonists of Serenades
and Yolngu Boy is that it is their Aboriginality which is aligned with the
archaic, while the threat comes from the behemoth of modernity. In this
sense, the films revise the desecration of the archaic which led to the death
of the unrecognised hero (David Gulpilil) inWalkabout. The films also lend
credence to the idea that outback films which Aboriginalise the land as
timeless and untamable are inevitably remaking Chauvel’s Jedda.
Unlike the films discussed above, Yolngu Boy and Serenades use the
desert landscapes of central and northern Australia as authentic locations
for coming-of-age stories of Aboriginal characters forced to negotiate
between different cultural traditions and legal frameworks. Both films are
propositional: their schematised characters and plots present an argument
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
as well as an adventure-quest narrative, with central and northern landscapes
as backdrops rather than expressive characters in their own right.
There is a sense that both the lyrical and the melodramatic potential of the
two films are held in check, refusing the stunning exoticism of Roeg’s vision
in Walkabout and the romantic locationism of Chauvel’s vision in Jedda.30
Cinematic excess is avoided in favour of a judicious argument in favour
of revised Aboriginalities based firmly in modernity, not relegated to the
primitive, the exotic or the archaic.
Although Serenades is set in central Australia in the 1890s and draws on
historical research by Christine Stevens into the meeting points between
German Lutheran missionaries, Aboriginal women and Afghan cameleers,
it has a weaker historical sense than the contemporary drama of three paths
taken by three young men in Yolngu Boy. In Serenades, although the story is
located in time and place, the landscape itself appears unlocated and dehistoricised.
As a set of horizons which hem in Jila (Alice Haines), the outback
becomes mythic and poetic rather than bound up with culture and history.
The film was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Mojgan Khadem,
whose family was forced to leave Iran in 1978 to save her mother from
being executed for her activities on behalf of Iranian women. As an allegory
of a young woman trying to find her own identity within the confines of
three paternalistic religious cultures, Serenades is not unlike Tom Cowan’s
infamous feminist allegory Journey Among Women (1977). Both films resonate
with contemporary feminist understandings of decolonisation and
the nexus between gender, race and sexuality. Yet both films retain a radical
feminist sense of the Australian outback as a space beyond civilisation
where universal themes of freedom can be reprised and myths of female
links to the earth can be reincarnated. The final image of Jila returning to
her birthplace to dance out her own identity in relation to the land rejects
the patriarchal rule of Aboriginal, Christian and Muslim cultures. Unlike
Yolngu Boy, however, Jila cannot find a solution to her identity in the Aboriginal
culture that allowed her Afghan father to win her Aboriginal mother
(for a single night) in a card game. By isolating Jila in the landscape, reinventing
her identity through her feet in contact with the earth, Serenades
revives an autochthonous fantasy of woman having sprung from the land
itself. Unlike Khadem’s family who took the historical option of becoming
refugees, Serenades opts for a universal myth of origins, forgetting history
(and the different predicaments of women in a range of religious cultures)
by ending outside time and place.
By contrast, the location of Yolngu Boy in Yolngu country is essential to
the meaning of the story. The film conveys an essential belief about the connection
between the land, identity and the Lawthrough Baru/MaralitjaMan
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
(performed by Yolngu dancerMangatjay Yunupingu). Here, knowledge is a
matter of initiation into the Law, not a matter of individual desire to invent a
new identity. The spectacular landscapes of North East Arnhem Land, from
Yirrkala, through Kakadu National Park, to the city of Darwin, provide a
variety of challenging obstacles in the adventure-quest undertaken by three
Yolngu boys facing initiation into different futures.While the landscapes in
this context are spectacular andmythic in line with genre conventions, they
are also culturally specific in ways that are not immediately translatable. The
land is clearly inhabited, not by a timeless people but by the Yolngu people
whose ties to country now centre on Yirrkala, best known as the home
ground of the popular band Yothu Yindi.
Yolngu Boy breaks with images of the desert as an inland, unliveable place
by revealing Arnhem Land’s proximity to the sea and by assuming that
the land is able to sustain its people, physically and spiritually. The film
is a hybrid of an adventure-quest film mixed with the strong cultural and
historical coordinates of social realism. Rather than the typical adventureordeal
(established in The Back of Beyond, John Heyer, 1954, and remade
inWalkabout) of children lost in the outback waiting to be found, the boys’
journey is a quest for the right path through the hazards of modernity. One
of the sly jokes in the film occurs in the last part of the journey through
Kakadu when the boys’ idyllic swim in a waterhole is interrupted by the
arrival of a busload of tourists, who give the boys a lift into Darwin. This is
one of the many ways the film reprises the fantasy of a timeless Indigenous
culture under threat of seduction by the behemoth of modernity.
If Serenades is historically dislocated as an outback melodrama in which
Jila is exchanged between Aboriginal, Christian and Muslim men, then
Yolngu Boy is firmly anchored in the proposition of two laws/three pathways
for young Aboriginal men in the remote communities of northern
Australia. The decolonisation process proposed by Yolngu Boy is more literal
than the symbolic ending of Serenades. Botj (Sean Mununggurr) is
driven by petrol-sniffing and petty crime to suicide;Milika (Nathan Daniels)
opts for integration into modernity through a professional career in AFL
football; and Lorrpu (John Sebastian Pilakui) chooses initiation into traditional
Aboriginal Law. Although the choices might appear clear-cut, the
untranslatable aspects of Yolngu culture are also evident in the challenges
faced by the boys. If Botj shares the tragic fate of many on the frontier
between two cultures, then Lorrpu andMilika represent two paths towards
a more reconciled future where the Law into which they are being initiated
stands for self-determination and difference within modernity. Although
untranslatable difference is carefully respected in the collaborative process,
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
Yolngu Boy refuses to position Yolngu Law as something archaic threatened
with extinction by modernity.
The Missing
At the end of the Mabo decade, as the impact of landscape begins to soften
into something less keen, it comes as a shock to see the return of European
fantasies of the outback asanarchaic source of primitivismwhichcan redeem
modern alienation and spiritual angst. In the dream-like logic of TheMissing
(Manuela Alberti, 1999), the archaic becomes the antidote for the spiritual
ills of Tommaso, a Vatican priest sent back to Australia by his wise superior
to rediscover ‘true values’. In contrast to the disenchanted negation of the
desert as sacred in Holy Smoke, the priest’s journey to the desert in The
Missing seeks spiritual rebirth through an encounter with the Aboriginal
spirit-world (projected onto the antipodean landscape by the European
imaginary). Although this kind of appropriation of Aboriginal culture is
often seen as insensitive exploitation, it can also be seen as part of a gradual
process of the Aboriginalisation of settler identity. The controversial nature
of this process is evident in themixed reception of GermaineGreer’sproposal
that, as a political act, Australians need to rethink their identity in terms
of ‘becoming Aboriginal’.31 However, David Tacey, among others, argues
that left-liberal critiques of ‘becoming Aboriginal’ are misguided and that
‘spiritual convergence is a fact’ in contemporary Australia.32
TheMissing is an unabashed exploitation film with a European art-house
sensibility. It revives stock figures of the antipodean imaginary, including
Tommaso, the lugubrious priest who has lost his faith, and the exotic figure
of the black tracker (David Ngoombujarra) who moves between two laws.
Writer/director Alberti adds several tabloid figures to the mix: the truckdriving
serial killer (a throwback to Spielberg’s cult telemovie Duel, 1971); a
missing teenage daughter in search of her origins; and a pious, churchgoing
mother whose guilty sin is about to be punished. The style of the film is
established in the opening contrasts between the dark interiority of Vatican
politics and the shimmering horizons of antipodean animism. Mysterious
and occult images of the archaic begin to impact on Tommaso’s mind,
culminating in a rapid montage sequence of extraordinary primitivism,
indebted to voodoo and zombie movies of the 1930s. The archaic intensity
of these images peaks when Tommaso is surrounded by a frenzied circle
of white-painted Aboriginal faces and speared in the knee as payback for
his unwitting role in the deaths of a young Aboriginal boy and the tracker.
This sequence is quickly followed by a gratuitous action sequence of the
serial killer’s truck bearing down on Tommaso, only to jacknife over the
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
embankment and explode in a fireball. Tommaso is saved from his death
struggle with the driver by a hefty spear thrown by the ethereal spirit-man
whose image is then absorbed back into the heat haze.
The desire to exploit the archaic in The Missing vies with the competing
impulses of the action flick, art-house angst and the supernatural thriller.
As a recent remake of the white man’s purgatorial ordeal in the desert,
the film is remarkably indifferent to contemporary concerns about cultural
insensitivity and the projection of fantasies of guilt and desire onto the
enigmatic other. Four characters, including his illegitimate daughter, die so
that Tommaso can be redeemed. The film seems unconcerned about these
bodies it leaves behind in the Australian outback. The final scene celebrates
Tommaso’s rediscovery of true values, an epiphany that takes him from
the Vatican to the streets of southern Italy to play soccer with young boys.
Whether his ordeal in the desert, and the deaths of those he came closest to,
will bring on a further round of traumatic memories seems doubtful.
These deferred revisions of the outback landscape involve a post-Mabo
recognition of what Taussig calls ‘the surfacing of “the primitive” within
modernity as a direct result of modernity . . . [and] its everyday rhythms of
montage and shock . . . made possible by . . . the camera and the movies’.33
In other words, in the cinematic journey to the desert we see the makings of
a post-Mabo fantasy of an autochthonous origin for Australian nationhood.
This fantasy incorporates the aftershock of terra nullius for Indigenous and
settler Australians. It means that the landscape is no longer the template of
an untroubled national identity grounded in European modernity. Rather,
identity politics, based on post-Mabo awareness of the land’s living history,
can no longer be satisfied by innocent images of unsullied desert landscapes.
Notes
1 Our use of ‘aftershock’ is indebted to Patrice Petro, ‘After shock/between boredom
and history’. InPatriciaPetro (ed.), Fugitive Images: FromPhotography toVideo,Bloomington
IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 265–84.
2 On the period film or ‘AFC Genre’ see Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The
Screening Of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, vol. 2, Sydney: Currency Press,
1988, pp. 28–37.
3 Ross Gibson, South of theWest: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia,
Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 63.
4 ibid., pp. 64–5.
5 ibid., p. 71.
6 ibid., p. 81.
7 Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, London & New York: Routledge, 1996,
p. 113.
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape
8 See ibid., pp. 167–88, on the diverse projects, pathways, and unstable identity of
Australian cinema.
9 See Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Films and the Construction of
Australian Narrative, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp. 49–52.
10 In this chapter the concept of ‘afterwardness’ is indebted to Susannah Radstone,
‘Screening trauma: Forrest Gump, film and memory’. In Memory and Methodology,
New York and Oxford, Berg, 2000, pp. 79–107.
11 See Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on afterwardsness’. In John Fletcher and Martin Stanton
(eds), Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation,Drives, London: ICA, 1992, pp. 217–23.
12 Walter Benjamin, ‘A small history of photography’. In One-Way Street and Other
Writings, transl. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter, London: New Left Books,
1979, pp. 240–57.
13 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’. In Hannah Arendt (ed.),
Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969, p. 255.
14 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York:
Routledge, 1993, pp. 39–40.
15 ibid., p. 20.
16 Laura U. Marks, ‘A Deleuzian politics of hybrid cinema’, Screen, 35(3) 1994, p. 258.
17 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home. Report
of the National Inquiry into the separation from their families and communities of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Canberra, 1997.
18 Petro, ‘After shock’, p. 265.
19 ibid., p. 276.
20 ibid., p. 279.
21 ibid., p. 265.
22 Elizabeth Jacka, ‘Australian cinema: An anachronism in the ’80s?’. In Susan Dermody
& Elizabeth Jacka (eds), The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ’80s,
Sydney: Australian Film, Television and Radio School, 1988, p. 126.
23 See StuartCunningham, FeaturingAustralia: TheCinemaof Charles Chauvel, Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1991.
24 RoslynnHaynes, Seeking the Centre: The AustralianDesert in Literature, Art and Film,
Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 3–4.
25 On Aboriginal Law, kinship and landscape see Eric Michaels, For a Cultural Future:
Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu, Melbourne: Artspace, 1987, pp. 28–34.
26 Haynes, Seeking the Centre, pp. 12–15.
27 Radstone, Memory and Methodology, p. 85.
28 ibid., pp. 85–6.
29 ibid., p. 86.
30 On Roeg’s landscape vision in Walkabout see Louis Nowra, Walkabout, Sydney:
Currency Press, 2003. On Chauvel’s locationism in Jedda remade in the studio by
tracey Moffatt in Night Cries, see Meaghan Morris, ‘Beyond assimilation: Aboriginality,
media history and public memory’, Aedon, 4(1) 1996, pp. 12–26.
31 Germaine Greer, ‘Whitefella jump up’, Quarterly Essay, no. 11, 2003. For a range of
responses to Greer see ‘Correspondence’, Quarterly Essay, no. 12, 2003.
32 David Tacey, ‘Spirit place’. In John Cameron (ed.), Changing Places: Re-imagining
Australia, Sydney: Longueville Books, 2003, pp. 243–8.
33 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 20.
93
6
Coming from the Country
in Heartland, Cunnamulla
and Message from Moree
At the end of The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) David Gulpilil’s character,
mimicking the lone hero of the Western, rides off into the far distance
towards the horizon, leaving behind the young follower who will make his
own way back to civilisation, a more civilised man after his enlightening
encounter with the violence of the frontier between two laws.1 In this sense
The Tracker re-imagines the frontier violence of the colonial encounter by
suggesting, through the figure of The Follower, that there is an alternative
national history to the ‘self-innocenting narrative casting our national forebears
as caring, Christian civilisers motivated by concern for the hapless
natives’.2 Two things matter here. The first is what will happen afterwards,
after the return to civilisation, after the end of the frontier wars. The second
is how these events, these violent conflicts on the frontier between two laws,
will be understood afterwards, how they will be translated by the surviving
generations of both sides of the conflict who will, at some point, face each
other in the post-colonial context of the nation. The key claim here is that
founding colonial or ‘frontier’ conflict lives on, afterwards in the nation’s
actions and in subsequent translations of an unreconciled history between
Aboriginal and settler Australians. Through Mabo,Wik and native title legislation,
conflict over the meaning of an unreconciled national history (the
history wars) has continued to be about land and its possession, about who
is entitled to possess or repossess the land, and to name it, under what
system of law.3 There are other strands in the conflict over the meaning
of reconciliation which also come into play. These strands have to do with
the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty through treaty, apology, compensation
and self-determination under two laws, between which there is no
adequate system of translation.4
In cinema, the difficulty of rendering the Aboriginal meaning of occupation
and possession of the land is everywhere in films about place, particularly
places which in different discourses are called ‘the country’, ‘the bush’,
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Coming from the Country
or just plain ‘country’. The first term belongs to the victors in the frontier
wars, the settlers with their British laws of claiming, leasing and owning the
land. The last term belongs to Indigenous Australians for whom the Law
and Country confer identity, culture and tradition, even where the violence
and trauma of colonialism have disrupted continuous possession. The middle
term, ‘the bush’, has been invented and reinvented by settler Australians
at moments of crisis in national identity, the first being the 1890s and its
cruel economic recession coincidingwith cultural nationalism, the bush legend
and the move towards Federation.5 The second is the neo-conservative
revival of the figure of the bush battler by One Nation and then by the
Howard government in the 1990s as part of a populist backlash against
native title, asylum-seekers and ‘handouts’ to minorities. The battler is a key
figure in whatMick Dodson callsHoward’s ‘triumphalist view of Australian
history’ based on ‘brave settlers conquering a people and a landmass: the
victory of a superior way of life’.6 A fourth term, ‘the environment’, has also
entered the debate, tying environmental catastrophe to issues of national
history through the work of Tim Flannery on the way that environmental
disasters caused by the myth of terra nullius, colonial patterns of settlement
and postwar nation-building schemes have created a crisis about the sustainability
of current living standards in Australia.7 An Indigenous critique
of the environmentalist idea of ‘wilderness’ as uninhabited land has also
been developed by Fabienne Bayet-Charlton, who has challenged the green
movement to deal with the impact of the Mabo decision on green ideology
and on notions of ecotourism as the future for non-urban Aboriginal
people.8 At stake in these different versions of land and landscape is the
national shift (whether gradual or sudden, embraced or denied, whimsical
or profound) entailed in the thought, recommended as a morning mantra
for every Australian by Germaine Greer, that we are living in an Aboriginal
country.9 This is a shift in the social imaginary legally enshrined in theMabo
decision, ending the myth of terra nullius.
The focus of this chapter is on the ways that the ABC-TV mini-series
Heartland (1994), Dennis O’Rourke’s auteurist documentary Cunnamulla
(2001) and Film Australia’s documentaryMessage fromMoree (Judy Rymer,
2003) send a message to the viewer about what’s going on in the country.
The assumption that life in the country (as opposed to the city) is shaped by
what happened after the frontier wars is axiomatic for these programs. In the
1990s, reconciliation policies at the national level have influenced film narratives
about the survival ofAboriginal communities and the various ways that
settler and Indigenous Australians have intermingled in the country. However,
these narratives have found their way through the public film-funding
bodies (Film Finance Corporation, Australian Film Commission and Film
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Australia) to ABC Television, and can thus be construed as contributing in
some way to the national interest rather than to the commercial-industrial
sphere of entertainment. In the commercial sphere, feature films like No
Worries (David Elfick, 1992) and The Bank (Robert Connolly, 2001) revise
and update the familiar trope of the innocent goodness of the country versus
the sly corruption of the city, long established in the Dad and Dave comedies
of the 1930s, as well as in pastoral family melodramas tied to a celebration
of the nation’s primary industries, such as the classic Cinesound film The
Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall, 1933).
However, although it has a bush tradition,10 Australian cinema has no
genre to compare with the Hollywood Western, through which American
cinema has explored its founding mythology of wagon-train pioneers violently
engaged in the Manifest Destiny of Westward expansion through
Indian territories. AsMarkMcKenna has shown in his history of encounters
between Aboriginal and settler communities in the Eden–Monaro region,
pioneer histories have had a vested interest in projecting frontier violence
onto others (other pioneers or warrior tribesmen) in order to preserve a
benign family vignette of pipe-smoking forefathers reminiscing, from the
comfort of their vine-clad verandahs, about the hard slog of settling the
land.11 This vision has been maintained in films exemplified by the ABC-TV
mini-series The Farm(KateWoods, 2001) about cockies doing it hard on the
land inherited from their pioneering forebears. These narratives attack new
policies of deregulating the banks and dropping tariffs and trade barriers
which protected primary producers and small business from the vagaries
of the international market. In this kind of film, the history of taking the
land from its original inhabitants has been erased from the family album
and national archive alike. Alternative, politicised images which endeavour
to overcome historical amnesia and remember the origins of the ‘the
bush’ in Aboriginal dispossession have come from the public sector with
the input, again, of the Film Finance Corporation, Film Australia and ABC
Television.
Although the desert as a vast inland tract has served as a template for
national identity in Australian landscape cinema, it is usually represented as
a liminal space, a threshold of experience for characters on a journey from
the city to someplace else. The ‘country’ or the ‘bush’, by contrast, is inhabited
by stock characters such as shearers, jackaroos, pastoralists, farmers,
publicans, soldiers, squatters, footballers, miners,wives, girlfriends and barmaids.
‘Coming from the country’ can mean several things in Australia: it
can mean coming from the land (usually a large, remote pastoral lease in
the outback), coming from a farm (wheat, dairy, sugar, cotton) likely to be
located on the fertile coastal fringe or a little further inland), coming from a
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Coming from the Country
rural industrial area likeWollongong orWhyalla, or coming from one of the
many small towns on the fringe of the continent which service the surrounding
farming district. It means not coming from the city or fromthe suburbs.
It can include the fishing town-cum-beach resort featured in films like High
Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987) and Mullet (David Caesar, 2001), but only
if you came from there in the first place, not if you moved there from the
city as in the popular comedy-drama series SeaChange (Artist Services and
ABC-TV, 1998–2001). And not if you’re a Pitt Street farmer growing avocadoes,
macadamias or coffee in the north, or running a boutique vineyard
in the south or west. And not if you’re an Indigenous Australian for whom
country might be a site of memory and identity and a basis for renegotiating
settler definitions of Aboriginality.12
When city folk go to the country they are usually in some kind of trouble,
existential or with the law, but when country folk arrive in the city (Mick
Dundee in New York at the end of Crocodile Dundee, or Cathy Duncan
in Canberra at the end of Message from Moree, for example) they usually
manage to impress the urban sophisticates who underestimate their
resourcefulness. If earlier Australian films (before the revival of the industry
through government subsidy in the 1970s) were mostly concerned with
Australia’s ambivalent relation of dependency on the British motherland,
films set in non-urban areas since theMabo decision display different levels
of awareness of historical debate about the legacy of violence on the frontier
during the colonial years. The trauma of a settler family losing the farm
has been explored in feature films (No Worries, The Bank) and in miniseries
(The Farm) in terms of the deep attachment to land handed down
from one generation of pioneers to the next. The frontier wars have been
erased from memory in these terra nullius films: the enemy here is usually
nature in the form of bushfire, drought, flood or pest, joined more
recently by the deregulated banks and their promotion of foreign currency
loans.
In films funded for broadcast on national television, however, there is a
new kind of message coming from the country. In Heartland, a mini-series
produced just after the 1992Mabo decision and screenedonABC-TVin early
1994, before the Wik and native title legislation of 1996, issues of Aboriginality,
identity, law and belonging are explored through social melodrama.
Althoughthe story is contemporary, the historical consciousness of the series
stretches back beforemodernity and colonialism, and forward into a future
based on a difficult and piecemeal process of reconciliation within families
and communities, if not at the national level. In Cunnamulla, released in
2001, a small outback Queensland town at the end of the railway line appears
to reprise the ugly working-class outback town featured in Wake in Fright
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
(Ted Kotcheff, 1971). Decades later, this prototypical remote town, once
enlivened by male rural workers, appears to be socially and economically
non-viable, at least as it is reprised in Cunnamulla.However, it is the enigma
of everyday experience, etched into bodies and faces, and the endurance of
habitual ways of thinking and living in towns like Cunnamulla, as the nether
world of colonial and global processes, that captures O’Rourke’s attention in
his auteurist documentary. InMessage fromMoree, broadcast on ABC-TV in
2003, the documentary formenables a relatively transparent argument about
practical reconciliation based on a mix of talking heads and observational
footage.13 But the message itself retains something enigmatic, something
untranslatable in the experience of Aboriginal administrator Cathy Duncan
as she takes over the running of Moree’s Aboriginal Employment Service,
set up by white cotton farmer Dick Estens, in a northwest New SouthWales
cotton town notorious for its overt racism.
If there is something enigmatic and untranslatable in the messages coming
from these films, the enigma has nothing to do with exoticising the
other or the country. Rather, we draw on Jean Laplanche’s argument that
‘the message from the other’ is enigmatic because the other (as a subject in
Freud’s sense) is already possessed by an unconscious history.14 The sense
of something enigmatic, of something that is difficult to translate in these
films, might be traced back to whatever the camera, as an optical unconscious,
has picked up of the afterwardness of traumatic frontier histories
buried in different parts of the country where the films were shot. On the
peculiar temporal structure of trauma as belated and repetitive, Laplanche
has insisted that traumatic experience involves two moments: ‘it must be
internalised, and then afterwards relived, revivified, in order to become an
internal trauma’.15 Further, Laplanche argues that although the memory of
the original event can be reinterpreted afterwards, there is always something
enigmatic or untranslatable in traumatic experience.16 The enigmatic
aspects of whatwe see and hear in these filmswill be considered here as messages
from a repressed or not fully conscious past which has left memory
traces in land, landscapes, faces, voices and bodies.
The untranslatable aspect of these messages, revealed in the unconscious
optic of cinema (its close-ups, its mise-en-sc`ene, its montage), arises from
different understandings of what country might mean to Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians. These differences occur within the dynamic
context of two laws: Law underpinning traditional Aboriginal societies
and laws imposed by the transplanted British colony. The lack of a treaty
between settler and Indigenous Australians means that the living system
of two laws has never been officially recognised. The ABC-TV mini-series
Heartland operates precisely in this territory, using the heightened morality
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Coming from the Country
play of melodrama to bring the shifting and permeable frontier between
black and white Australia into view. The mini-series is a significant breakthrough
as a collaborative project between the national film-funding bodies
and the national public broadcaster, matched only by the mini-series
Women of the Sun (1982) in its capacity to break new ground in television
through its sustained attention to what Marcia Langton has defined
as ‘Aboriginality’: an intersubjective space created by Indigenous and non-
Indigenous Australians, not only at the level of collaborative production but
also as a viewing experience.17
Laying Down the Law in Heartland
Social melodrama, in its mundane television mode, is characterised by
polarised moral conflicts accompanied by heightened emotional affect. In
melodrama the family is often the site of intense moral and emotional conflict
around issues of difference,whether of class, gender, age, race, ethnicity,
sexuality or religion. These differences are usually polarised into a struggle
between good and evil, and the resolution usually comes at some cost or
involves some sort of sacrifice. Heartland begins with the generic sacrifice
of a young Aboriginal woman who is brutally murdered on the beach in
the rural town of BrooklynWaters. The overarching plotline of the series is
then organised around the efforts ofAboriginal police liaison officerVincent
Burunga (Ernie Dingo) to prove that Ricky (on remand in Sydney’s Long
Bay gaol) did not kill his girlfriend, despite his drunken confession to the
crime. The second plotline involves the development of a love affair between
Vincent and a white woman, Beth (Cate Blanchett), a radio producer who
has left her husband in Sydney and arrived in BrooklynWaters to settle her
deceased uncle’s estate. Beth discovers that her uncle Jock had a relationship
with an Aboriginal woman from the Mission (the ‘Mish’) and that the gate
between her uncle’s house and theMish is always open. From this basic plot
material Heartland generates a number of subplots. The first is to do with
Vincent discovering his place within (or between) two laws by returning
to his outback community. The second revolves around a family from the
Mish finding a lost son who had been removed to a white foster family
thirty years earlier. The third is to do with Beth returning to her seductive,
designer lifestyle in Sydney and seeing her husband and former colleagues in
the radio world through new eyes. Each of these subplots generates a series
of moral dilemmas which are also dramas of origins, desire and difference
(see Chapter 5).
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
As social melodrama, in the formof the mini-series, the various subplots
can be read as secondary elaborations of Freud’s primary fantasies of origin
and desire. As secondary fantasies, the conflicts and dilemmas of Heartland
are ways of imagining and refiguring racial, sexual and generational differences
in Australia. The linchpin of this refiguring is Vincent, the lead
character who stands between two laws. If the young Aboriginal woman is
sacrificed in order to initiate the narrative of racial hatred and injustice in
a small town, in the end it is the town’s reasonably well-intentioned white
cop, Phil, who is sacrificed so that order can be restored. The restoration
of law comes after racial tensions explode in the town, forcing a reluctant
Vincent back into the role of go-between. In an ending which reprises the
figure of the black tracker, Vincent catches one of the serial killers, then
carries Phil, his severely wounded mate, out of the scrub. Despite Vincent’s
desperate efforts, Phil dies in his arms in the back of the police car. Vincent
literally lays the white law to rest in this scene. The series ends with Alf, the
Aboriginal elder from the Mission, passing on what he knows of Country
and Law to Ricky and young Jason, while Vincent and Beth contemplate
their future together. As Vincent suggests with a sly look, this future might
include ‘breeding out the white’.
Heartland ’s reshaping of the social imaginary has the quality of afterwardness,
of historical consciousness or culturalmemory of colonial conflict,
being reshaped in the present.18 Such re-imagining of the past in terms of
the law is built into Heartland’s preoccupation with the difference between
‘our way’ and ‘your way’, a difference which entails unequal but shifting
power relations between two laws. This difference is often untranslatable,
so characters constantly find themselves caught up in an effort to explain
and understand someone else, often in the context of heightened emotions
of fear, desire and distrust.
The question of where the heartland of Australia might be located, geographically
and culturally after the Mabo decision, is central to the exploration
of the conflicts created by the plotlines in Heartland.Here Aboriginal
characters interact with their own mob and with the white laws and practices
that protect the ingrained racist habits of the settler community and
normalise entrenched, everyday hatred, whether in the schoolyard or the
criminal justice system. The moral centre of the film is located in the Aboriginal
elders, whether in outback Western Australia, Vincent’s traditional
country, or in coastal BrooklynWaters at theMish. Early in the series, when
Vincent returns home to make good the illness visited on his daughter by
parental transgression of ‘skin’ laws, he learns that he still has a place in
Aboriginal Law, even if he decides not to be further initiated. In the geographical
location of the outback, on aworking station run by theAboriginal
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Coming from the Country
community who belong there, to country, the difference between the two
laws is stark and, for Beth, incomprehensible.
The experience of incomprehension is dramatised as a conflict between
Vincent’s respect for Aboriginal Law as essential to his identity and Beth’s
insistence that traditional practices such as payback are barbaric, and that
believing a child’s sickness is brought on by being ‘sung’ is unenlightened
superstition. The clash is resolved when Vincent refuses to do payback,
handing over the responsibility for Law to his brother. However, the child
recovers, confounding Beth’s faith in secular enlightenment. A birth, followed
by a ceremony of identity conferred on the newborn by the women,
and a first kiss between Beth and Vincent, resolve the conflict in utopian
ways, but it is crucial that Vincent’s return to the coast, to work the difficult
ground between two laws in Brooklyn Waters, is sanctioned by a male
elder.
This sanction enablesVincent tomove between ‘ourways’ and ‘yourways’
in future episodes, as the subplots unfold around contemporary social issues
to do with unemployment, alcohol and community violence; white resentment
against ‘handouts’ to Aboriginal students and community businesses;
the return of a lost child removed from his Aboriginal mother by welfare;
the danger of Ricky becoming another black death in custody; and the
temptation of a career in the city for Beth and for Ricky’s younger brother,
a promising young footballer who wants to go to the city to develop his
talent. Each of these issues dramatises what is happening, now, between
Indigenous and settler communities, after the frontier wars. A subtext of
habitual, entrenched racism, as the legacy of our colonial past, runs through
the series, its virulence inexplicable from within the diegetic world ofHeartland.
One way to understand the enigma of this virulent undertow, most
evident in the community of BrooklynWaters, is to think of Heartland as a
metaphor for what Australian identity might be if the nation defined itself
in terms of Aboriginality, in Langton’s sense, as an intersubjective reality
which is the hidden foundation of the nation. This intersubjective concept
of the nation as Aboriginal is precisely what is foregrounded in Heartland.
Each of the locations explored in the series involves different kinds of
conflicts between two laws. In outbackWestern Australia, the remote Aboriginal
community looks like a model of self-sufficient enterprise, with the
beef industry underpinning the community’s cultural self-determination.
Yet the series makesmuch of the enigmatic and untranslatable aspects of the
Law which sustain Aboriginal identity, even as the remote outback community
embraces modernity. The enigmatic is coded in the music and sound
effects which accompanyVincent’s return home. TheAboriginal song which
Vincent and Beth sing together as they arrive and depart in their four-wheel
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
drive, and the tentative dance Beth performs with the women, appear to
open a doorway between two cultures. Yet the threshold is impossible for
Beth to cross. Her insistent questions and bewildered complaints, as she
finds herself in incomprehensible situations, are often met with silence. In
the end she has to learn by doing, by joining the crowd of children gathered
around the new baby as they too learn the rituals and traditions open to
them under the Law.
The situation is not reversed forVincentwhen he finds himself in Sydney,
staying with Beth and her former husband Garth in their harbourside house
with champagne views. There is nothing untranslatable in Garth’s competitive
bonhomie, just as there is no enigma in the actions of the traffic police
when they pullVincent over for driving an expensive sports car up a one-way
street. If Vincent’s sense of identity, his origin, has been tested and made
stronger by his return home, Beth’s identity, without origin, has little to
support it during her marriage crisis. There are no elders in her world, no
place to which she belongs in relationship with the land and with others.
In Sydney there are only transient friends, a mortgaged property, and a
dog-eat-dog media hierarchy whose values, determined by ratings and the
manipulations of talkback radio, no longer coincide with hers.
If Vincent and Beth represent different worlds, from which they are both
in some sense alienated, the true historical drama of identity, of being caught
between twoworlds, is played out in BrooklynWaters (that rural in-between
place which is neither city nor outback) by Eddie/Ben, the lost boy taken
from the Mish by the welfare. He has two names, two lives, two families to
juggle, and no memory of ever being Eddie. His attempts to embrace an
Aboriginal identity flounder as he is assailed by a series of untranslatable
messages from his wife, his rediscovered community at theMish, and from
the white townspeople who say, ‘makes no difference of course’. It does make
a difference, of course, but the difference is enigmatic. He is told by Alf, the
wise elder at the Mish, to feel his Aboriginality, his lost origins, in his heart
and through the soles of his feet. Alf tells Eddie it doesn’t matter that he can’t
remember his family: they remember him. But it does matter, and there is
no resolution to Eddie/Ben’s story.
All the ends do not tie up neatly in Heartland. The series ends in the
bush where the rural town, with its history of embittered race relations,
remains the site of daily struggles (exemplified by wise community elder
Alf and liaison officer Vincent) to make a difference in the present. But the
shift in perspective that the viewer is asked to make in Heartland involves
thinking about what happened after the British colony pushed the frontier
out from the first urban settlement, at Sydney Cove, to the bush, and to
the outback. ‘What happened’ is perhaps best understood through Eddie’s
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Coming from the Country
story: recovering his lost narrative as a stolen child (his origins repressed and
layered over by a social policy of assimilation) points to the bigger story of
howthe nation might recover fromrepressing its origins in acts of dispossession
of identity, language, land and culture, once guaranteed by Aboriginal
Law. Heartland suggests that Indigenous Law itself, though still powerful, is
now even more difficult to transmit to the next generation. As we discover
through Eddie’s thwarted efforts to assume his lost identity too quickly, and
Beth’s halting efforts to understand Vincent, reparation is a slow, gradual
process of learning through contact, of not giving up on what is so difficult
to translate. As Alf is always advising, ‘Give it time’. However, as Eddie’s
exit from the series (after failing to save an Aboriginal enterprise because
the equipment has been stolen by one of the white bureaucrats) demonstrates,
the justifiable impatience of young men for rapid change works
against the slow workings of moral authority vested in an untranslatable
Law. The story of young Aboriginal women in terms of the Law is a mute
point in the series. Their narrative function (as sacrificed victims of malevolent
racism or as city lawyers making a dent in the justice system for young
Aboriginal men) restores cultural transmission of the Lawasmen’s business.
Women’s business is touched on but remains enigmatic, becoming a source
of humour in the series, a shortcut for settling differences between Vincent
and Beth.
The moral heartland of the series derives its authority from tradition,
from the Law as it is practised in Vincent’s outback country. This moral
authority also survives, in a less powerful form, on the Mish, through male
and female elders for whom ‘our way’ of doing things has evolved as each
new policy era inaugurated new forms of survival and endurance in Aboriginal
communities. Heartland imagines this history as a story of endurance
through the repetition of everyday encounters between the survivors of the
frontier wars. These encounters, which culminate in what the tabloid media
might call ‘a race riot’ at the police station, bring into disrepute the law of
the land imposed by British settlement. The main achievement of Heartland
is that it requires the viewer to bear witness, emotionally, to the daily
struggle of living under two laws of the land, whereby the dominant law is
unable and unwilling to translate the extraneous messages coming from the
original Law of this land. The main problem obstructing social justice and
destroying bush communities,Heartland suggests, is the failure to recognise
the ongoing effect of terra nullius. This founding myth created a history of
denial that there is anything at all to be translated, that there are two laws
shaping the reciprocal experience of Aboriginality in Australia. This is not to
suggest that settler Australians should aspire to become Aboriginal, further
appropriating a Law and a land which is not theirs for the taking. Rather,
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Heartland, coming so soon after the Mabo decision through the large-scale
conflicts of social melodrama, suggests the need not somuch for a symbolic
reconciliation of two laws as for a profound, imaginative recognition of the
enigmatic messages coming from ‘country’. This would include recognition
of what is untranslatable in those messages. Beth, like Eddie, is always
positioned as the one who doesn’t understand. Unlike Eddie, she hangs
around, learning as she goes that there are indeed things she might never
understand. These things have a lot to do with the way history is embodied
as a kind of unconscious to which Vincent himself does not have access.
This unconscious imbues messages from the other with a strangeness or an
enigma that is not easy to translate.19 At times Vincent cannot explain to
Beth what he knows or what he feels because the meaning is in his history
rather than in his head. The difficulty of understanding different histories
of race, gender and culture in the bush, the city and the outback is raised
explicitly in the final episode of Heartland when Beth says to Phil that she
doesn’t think she’ll ever understand Vincent. Phil’s question to Beth lingers
in the air, leaving Beth and the viewer to ponder the answer, ‘Because he’s
black? Or just ’cause he’sVincent?’ This enigmaof social identity (blackness)
versus the singularity of the other (Vincent) is precisely the territory that
Dennis O’Rourke explores in Cunnamulla, a controversial montage of ten
characters inhabiting an isolated rural town in outback Queensland.
Redeeming the Battler in Cunnamulla
Depending on where you come from, Cunnamulla can be seen as a depressing
portrait of ten Australians locked into lives as dry and dusty as the
cracked earth of the inland plains which, against the environmental odds,
continue to support the district’s pastoralists and their sheep runs. Or it
can be seen as a ‘symphonic’ montage of moments in the short-lived cinematic
lives of ten characters who are ‘basically just living’.20 The film opens
to the sound of sheep dipping and closes to the sound of Chopin. If a
rapprochement between redneck Australia, built on the sheep’s back, and
a cultured Australia, attuned to its European origins, is indicated by the
soundtrack, then it is one that takes hold in the mind of the film’s auteur,
Dennis O’Rourke, rather than in the characters he creates through mise-ensc`
ene and montage. For Paul, facing a prison sentence for a lifestyle built on
break-and-enter, there is no culture in Cunnamulla. By ‘culture’ he means
there is nothing in Cunnamulla to compare with the Aboriginal dancing
and other things he learned during his stay in metropolitan Melbourne. If
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Coming from the Country
the outback stands for the sacred and for traditional Aboriginal culture in
the social imaginary, this is not how Paul experiences Aboriginality in Cunnamulla.
The same could be said for the other inhabitants of O’Rourke’s
observational documentary world. Unlike the social melodrama of Heartland,
O’Rourke attaches no clearly coded set of universal meanings to his
cast of characters.
Dispensing with a narrative structure, Cunnamulla has no time-frame
of events to structure meaning for the viewer. Relying on observational
techniques, O’Rourke’s auteurist presence behind the camera corrupts the
documentary ideal of detachment and distance between off-camera filmmaker
and on-camera subject. This corruption of documentary distance is
an essential part of what makes the film an auteurist project.What matters
to O’Rourke is the transformative power of cinema, a power that requires
an artist rather than a social activist behind the camera and at the editing
bench. What interests O’Rourke is the transcendent possibility of the
filmed moment, the ‘pure cinematic power’ of ‘the landscape of the human
face talking’.Whereas social melodrama edits for clear-cut political meaning
as well as emotional affect, O’Rourke deploys affect, ‘this emotional, sexual
energy that drives us all’, in the way he relates to his subjects through
a conscious strategy of mutual vulnerability. For O’Rourke the power of
the documentary lies in the tone or atmosphere captured by his ‘recording
angels’, the cameras and microphones that do his bidding. They record
sound and image, but they also do something else: they capture the moment,
‘something that’s in the air’.21
For O’Rourke, the characters in his film understand their role in this process.
For him, it is this engagement between the apparatus of cinema, the eye
of the filmmaker, and the screen presence of the characters that transforms
observed reality into something meaningful. However, the intended meaning
is not explicable. It happens symphonically, through formal variations
on a theme. The first character introduced in the film isNeredah, married to
Arthur, the town’s taxidriver. The tone of the film is set by the static camera
and microphone recording a corner ofNeredah’s kitchen, framing the landscape
of her face, capturing the grain of her voice as she peers out through
the louvres and tells O’Rourke the first of her stories, beginning with the
one about throwing lollies out the window for the neighbouring kids. It’s
the repetition in her story of the throwing of the lollies that is arresting. It
sets the tone for what is to come in Neredah’s later scenes where she repeats
the act of spitting as she tells another story of setting a young man straight
by spitting on him in front of the crowd at a Bingo/Housie night. Neredah’s
storytelling style and something of her worldview is underlined again in
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
another scene where she relishes and repeats the word flogging as she tells
the story of encouraging a father to give his daughter a flogging with a fence
paling, immediately after his release from gaol for child abuse. Neredah is
confident of a sympathetic hearing and neither the camera nor the editing
makes any judgement about her stories. Rather, O’Rourke edits for an ‘ineffable’
meaning, ‘a meaning which I don’t myself fully comprehend’.22
At its most successful, what happens in Cunnamulla is that the audience
is forced to experience the enigma of each of its singular characters, of
moments in their daily lives, shaped but not explained by social, economic
and historical forces. The most forceful are the moments of stillness before
the camera, moments in which the characters settle themselves in the frame
and then proceed, in their own time, to fill the silence of being filmed with
comments or stories or complaints which spring from the immediacy of
their lives. Sometimes there is a conversation or argument with a friend,
parent or neighbour, but mostly what happens is an act of composure, of
self-possession, of self-disclosure before the camera.Whether this disclosure
revives the shameful character of the ugly Australian or redeems the enduring
character of the bush battler is a moot point. If the first view prevails,
Cunnamulla becomes another far north badland in the national psyche. If
the second view triumphs, Cunnamulla helps to solve an enigma in contemporary
Australian politics. This enigma arises from the role of the battler in
the politics of shame.
For John Grech, watching Cunnamulla with an international audience
in Amsterdam at a documentary film festival, the film produced a familiar
cringe of shame, translated into a warning about ‘the real danger’ of subjecting
foreign audiences to ‘the stereotypical structures of meaning that
underlie this film’.23 Grech’s chief fear is that the film is ‘maintaining the
myth that Australia is (or can still be) characterized by an outback colonial
town’.24 Arguing against O’Rourke’s claim that the film redeems the inhabitants
of Cunnamulla, Grech laments the inability of anyone in the film
(or ‘Australians on the whole’) ‘to seek or give forgiveness’ for the colonial
legacy which continues to sap people’s lives.25 Declaring that ‘Cunnamulla
reminded me of the things I ran away from in Australia’, Grech does not
pause to consider the rise of the battler as amuch courted figure inAustralian
electoral politics since 1996.26
When One Nation won 23 per cent of the vote in the Queensland state
election in June 1998, it signalled the return of the enduring figure of the battler
under the banner of PaulineHanson, whose popularity peaked after her
maiden speech in federal parliament in September 1996. Through Hanson,
the uncensored battler spoke out against the hegemony of an ‘elite’ cultural
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Coming from the Country
agenda supporting Aboriginal grants, Asian immigration, native title, and
multiculturalism. Just as importantly to her supporters, Hanson also spoke
out against bipartisan, neo-conservative economic policies and the sale of
Australian assets, companies and jobs.27 Although OneNation faded quickly
from the political scene, the return of the battler as a proud rather than
shameful character in national history owes much to Howard’s fortuitous
discovery, courtesy of One Nation rhetoric, of the electoral key to a central
enigma in contemporary Australian politics. Robert Manne identifies
this enigma as the problem of how to attract the battlers while keeping
on board the winners of globalisation. Manne believes that Howard’s post-
Tampa policy on asylum-seekers ‘provided the solution to the riddle that
had vexed the major parties over the past 30 years’.28 Howard’s solution
involved abandoning bipartisan support for a progressive cultural agenda,
in place since the 1970s, by pursuing border protection policies which played
on new anti-Muslim fears. Followed by September 11 and the war on terrorism,
the Tampa incident took the heat off bipartisan economic consensus
and enabled Howard to ‘gazump One Nation and destabilise a Labor Party
caught between its traditional working-class voters and its post-Whitlam
professional middle-class support base’.29
The characters who disclose something of themselves to the camera in
Cunnamulla are neither benign battlers in theHoward mould, nor shameful
examples of the best and worst of Australia in Grech’s reckoning. O’Rourke
refuses to idealise the battler as the underdog in an international game
stacked against the rural working class. Instead he exposes the battler to the
steady gaze of his camera, inviting self-disclosure in the present moment
of filming. These moments do not add up to an argument for redemption,
as Grech might wish, or for political enfranchisement. Rather, what lingers
is a contrast between the old inhabitants, set in their ways (there’s nothing
like a good flogging), and the young, still hopeful of a slightly better
future (not going to prison, not getting pregnant at thirteen, not giving up
on recording music). Grech argues that for this to be a palatable image of
Australian identity for export, Cunnamulla needs to be contextualised by
‘a hundred or so other films where people have managed to change their
lives’.30 O’Rourke’s point is that his film is precisely about people ‘basically
just living’ their lives.31 If the shameless self-disclosure of these lives is intolerable
for the viewer, that might be because the unconscious history buried
in the message coming from Cunnamulla is that Aboriginality, in Langton’s
sense, as it is lived now by black and white Australians in this country town,
is a potent space for a dynamic Australian identity, one that (as Hanson and
One Nation demonstrated) cannot be relegated to a forgotten Queensland
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
badland forever.32 It remains to be seen whether this entangled, post-frontier
identity can be harnessed for long to a xenophobic border protection mentality
which does nothing to include the residents of Cunnamulla in the new
borderless economy.33
Message from Moree
IfCunnamulla lacks sufficient context for some viewers,Message fromMoree,
broadcast nationally on ABC-TV on 28May 2003, might be one of the films
Grech would like to show to international audiences to counter O’Rourke’s
recidivist image of the ugly Australian. Message from Moree is easily understood
as an inspiring story of social change in a New South Wales cotton
town with an uglier reputation for entrenched racism than the badlands of
Queensland. The message coming out ofMoree constitutes a paradigmshift
in the modern Australian social imaginary. For the first time since the end of
the 19th century, the bush is portrayed as the cutting edge of social change,
its cast of ordinary Australians achieving an extraordinary turnaround in
a racially riven town after decades of ‘all talk and no action’ from visiting
bureaucrats and politicians. The agent of change is portrayed as an unlikely,
uneasy partnership between a white cocky, cotton farmer Dick Estens, and
an Aboriginal woman, newly appointed chair of the Aboriginal Employment
Service Cathy Duncan. The only thing they have in common is that
they hate to fail, or at least that’s how they put it as their difficult partnership
begins to pay dividends for the black and white community of Moree, the
community defined as those who want to move ahead together, regardless
of the rednecks, the racists and the naysayers.
Message fromMoree openswith amontage of images and sound bites from
the recent past. Together the shock of these images helps support the film’s
claim that this is a documentary about a town coming back from the dead.
It begins with Dick Estens and his idea that what was needed to saveMoree
was an Aboriginal Employment Service to ‘get jobs and build leadership’
in the Aboriginal community. The film ends with Cathy Duncan revealing
that overcoming cultural ignorance on both sides is part of the solution,
but the real learning curve is understanding business: more precisely, learning
‘how to market what people don’t want, an Aboriginal job-seeker’. The
expansion of the Aboriginal Employment Service to other towns in the area
is the measure of success of the strategy of community-building based on
partnerships between those who have a stake in the outcome. Whether or
not this is the face of JohnHoward’s practical reconciliation model, the message
from the film is that community-building works.What works inMoree
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Coming from the Country
is the hard slog of committee work, of board meetings and communitybuilding
awards nights, of mentors working as cultural translators so that
white employers and black workers can find some common ground and be
part of the change inMoree.34 This change extends beyond the employment
issue to community-building through education, sport, debutante balls,
police liaison officers, the CROC festival and the girls’ footy comp. What
comes through for the viewer is not only the long history of acute suspicion
between black and white communities, but the diversity within these
communities, and the ‘dynamic buzz’ experienced by those who have taken
the unthinkable step of walking forward in partnership across the cultural
divide.
In a sense, the ‘can-do’ people of Moree have got together to overcome
basic problems beyond the ken of city folk.When CathyDuncan takes up her
job as chair of the Aboriginal Employment Service, Estens is ever-present,
with his boundless urgency for change impinging on Duncan’s tentative
assertion of her own authority. Yet somehow they persevere through the
board meetings and awards nights and NAIDOCWeek parade down a hostile
main street until they finally pull together as an equal team on a trip
to Canberra to lobby for support for their proposal to extend the Aboriginal
Employment Service beyond Moree. One of the joyous moments in
the film is when Duncan and another female member of the team dance
inside the revolving doors of a Canberra public service building, celebrating
the success of their proposal, but also perhaps their freedom from the very
bureaucracy that trained Duncan in administration in Moree. The message
fromMoree might be that the benefits of privatisation of employment
and other services might actually work in favour of initiatives that build
communities, ameliorate long-standing inequalities, and promise a different
future for Duncan’s children and for towns like Moree. The message
coming from the country in this documentary is that cosmopolitan Sydney
or bureaucratic Canberra are not the only winners in the open market;
that the divide between the winners and losers of globalisation is not simply
a divide between highly skilled urban professionals and disenfranchised
bush battlers; that the way to national recognition and self-possession for
Indigenous and settler Australians is not going to be through OneNation or
Howard’s opportunistic backlash against the left-liberal cultural agenda of
inclusion of the 1970s. And that the bush town, rendered abject by decades
of unresolved historical conflict, is just asmuch a potential and actual site of
canny social activism, on committees and in boardrooms, as the inner-city
haunts of the left-liberal ‘elite’.Message fromMoree tells us that this is so, and
that ourmutual ignorance and perpetual puzzlement about each other form
no impediment to social change and to the bigger picture of social justice
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
(which, as a 1970s precedent, might serve us better than the more sullied
1990s term reconciliation).35
Notes
1 On the ‘violent innocence’ of emergent nation-states, seeMarilyn Lake, ‘History and
the nation’. In Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication
of Aboriginal History’, Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003, pp. 164–6.
2 ibid., p. 165.
3 On the restoration of theKoori name Gariwerd to a mountain range named by settlers
as The Grampians, in Victoria in 1989, see Tony Birch, ‘“Nothing has changed”:
the making and unmaking of Koori culture’. In Michele Grossman (ed.), Blacklines:
ContemporaryCriticalWriting by IndigenousAustralians,MelbourneUniversityPress,
2003, pp. 145–58.
4 On the different meanings of reconciliation in relation to Aboriginal sovereignty
see Patrick Dodson, ‘Lingiari: until the chains are broken’. In Michelle Grattan
(ed.), Reconcilation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation,Melbourne: Black Inc, 2000,
pp. 264–74.
5 On the role of ‘the bush’ in a national history written as the story of modern nationbuilding,
see Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University
Press, 1958. On the bush as a key figure in Australian cinema, see John Tulloch,
Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982,
and Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of
Australian Narrative, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993.
6 Mick Dodson, ‘Indigenous Australians’. In Robert Manne (ed.), The Howard Years,
Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2004, p. 139.
7 Tim Flannery, ‘Beautiful lies’, Quarterly Essay, no. 9, 2003, pp. 4–16.
8 Fabienne Bayet-Charlton, ‘Overturning the doctrine: Indigenous people and wilderness
– being Aboriginal in the environmental movement’. In Grossman, Blacklines,
pp. 171–80.
9 See Germaine Greer, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’, Quarterly Essay, no. 11, 2003.
10 William D. Routt claims that the bush comedy or ‘backblocks farce’ of 1920–40, like
the bushranger film, may well be one of Australia’s few local genres. SeeW. D. Routt,
‘Always already out of date: Australian bush comedy’, paper presented at Seriously
Funny: 2004 National Screenwriters’ Conference, Melbourne, 2 April 2004.
11 See Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas Point: An Australian History of Place,
Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002.
12 On the politics of defining Aboriginality in non-essentialist terms, see Michael
Dodson, ‘The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality’. In Grossman,
Blacklines, pp. 25–42.
13 ‘Practical reconciliation’ is a contentious term. Our use of it here is influenced by
Noel Pearson on community initiatives and partnerships, rather than JohnHoward’s
assimilationist policies. See Noel Pearson, ‘Aboriginal disadvantage’, pp. 165–75, and
John Howard, ‘Practical reconciliation’. In Grattan, Reconciliation, 2000, pp. 88–96.
14 Cathy Caruth, ‘An Interview with Jean Laplanche’, Postmodern Culture, 11(2) 2001.

15 ibid., para. 7.
16 ibid., paras 36–56.
110
Coming from the Country
17 Marcia Langton,Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television: An Essay
for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by
and about Aboriginal People and Things, Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993,
pp. 23–40.
18 See discussion of ‘afterwardness’ in Chapter 5.
19 See Cathy Caruth, ‘An Inteview with Jean Laplanche’, paras 25–33. Laplanche
describes this ‘extraneity, or strangeness’ as foundational for the ego which is formed
as an internal structure to process ‘the reality of the other and his message’. For
Laplanche messages from the other are always enigmatic because the other has an
internal other, the unconscious.
20 Martha Ansara, ‘On the poetry of madness: an encounter with Dennis O’Rourke’,
Metro, 126, 2001, p. 29.
21 O’Rourke quoted in Ansara, p. 31.
22 ibid., p. 30.
23 John Grech, ‘Redeeming Cunnamulla or avoiding reality?’ Metro, 126, 2001, p. 22.
24 ibid., p. 22.
25 ibid., p. 24.
26 ibid., p. 23.
27 On Hanson’s maiden speech, see Robert Manne, ‘The Howard years: a political
interpretation’. In The Howard Years, pp. 14–17.
28 ibid., p. 43.
29 ibid., pp. 43–4.
30 Grech, ‘Redeeming Cunnamulla’, p. 24.
31 O’Rourke quoted in Ansara, ‘On the poetry of madness’, p. 29.
32 On the role of mythic badlands in preserving historical amnesia, see Ross Gibson,
Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press,
2002, pp. 172–3.
33 Whether the Queensland battler in the sugar cane industry will vote for Howard in
the wake of the 2004 bilateral trade agreement with the United States remains to be
seen.
34 On mundane committee work as the principal form of effective left-liberal activism
in Australian political culture, see Meaghan Morris, ‘Lunching for the republic’. In
Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture, Bloomington IN: Indiana University
Press, 1998, pp. 209–13.
35 From the point of view of ‘backtracking’ in Australian films, Cathy Duncan might be
seen as reprising a role first played by Essie Coffey, fromthe rural town of Brewarrina,
in collaboration with independent feminist filmmakerMartha Ansara, from Sydney,
in the film My Survival as an Aboriginal (Essie Coffey, 1979).
111
7
Coming from the City in The
Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange
Planet and Radiance
To be asked ‘where are you from?’ in Australia today is to imply not only
that there is geographic mobility within the nation’s borders but that your
family’s origins, within living memory, are elsewhere. Cultural commentators
have long pointed to the problem of being at home in Australia as
a recurring theme, usually articulated in terms of Australia’s lack of selfconfidence,
maturity and independence. The difficulty of asserting an independent
nationhood, particularly in relation toBritainandtheUnited States,
but also within the region, has often been linked to a set of national character
traits including defensive brashness, cultural cringe, cutting down
of tall poppies and a self-deprecating sense of humour. This set of traits
appears to contradict those depicted in the national archetypes of the independent
bushman, the courageous Anzac and the egalitarian fraternity
of the white working class. A further contrast emerges in contemporary
Australian cultural studies, repudiating the 19th-century bush as the template
for a British-derived national identity, turning instead to the cosmopolitan
city, the multicultural suburbs, and the hedonistic holiday coast
as templates for a dynamic, post-national, post-multicultural identity in the
21st century.1 The problem of belonging, of being at home in Australia,
of having a sense of identity, is evident in the afterwardness of the history
wars that followed the Mabo decision, and the futureshock of globalisation
across the new dividing line between ‘elites’ and ‘battlers’ in Australian
society.2
Homeas the place of belonging of white settlers inAustralia was put to the
torch by the shock reminder from the High Court in 1992 that terra nullius
was achieved at the cost of dispossession of Indigenous people from their
land, language and culture after 40 000 years of continuous possession. The
purported threat of native title claims against suburban backyards was just
one of themore extremeresponses to theHighCourt’s Wik decision in 1996.3
This unfounded fear troubled a nation of property-ownerswho, for the most
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Coming from the City
part, had spent their working lives materialising their democratic ideal of
Australia as a working man’s paradise through mortgages on quarter-acre
suburban blocks, with a weekender (or caravan) at the beach as the ultimate
Eden.
John Cameron divides Australians, most of whom are city-dwellers, into
two groups in terms of different histories of attachment to place: ‘Aboriginal
and white non-immigrant Australians are struggling with theWik decision
and the stolen generation . . . Immigrant Australians are . . . coming to terms
with the new land as it relates to their homeland experience.’4 The first group
of settlers can claim several generations of settler-ancestors going back as far
as 1788, past the point of personalmemory of a previous homeland. For most
of us personal memory goes back to our grandparents. Everything before
them becomes history or social memory. For long-termsettlers, complacent
pride in the achievements of a young nation over two centuries has been
put to shame by the Mabo decision and the history wars that followed. The
secondgroupof settlers is identifiedwith postwarmigration,whichoccurred
in waves, from Europe after the SecondWorldWar in the 1940s and 1950s,
from Vietnam and Cambodia as Australia and the United States pulled out
of that post-colonial conflict in the 1970s, and from refugee camps around
the world as displaced people queue for visas or board boats to various
destinations offering a future. This disparate group of recent settlers has a
personalmemory not only of grandparents but of the homeland they or their
parents or grandparents left behind. These two groups have been described
in terms of ‘a real social experiment which could have gone awfully wrong’.5
They are differently placed in relation to Australian national history and
the iconic figures (bushmen, Anzacs, cricketers) that dominate the Anglo-
Celtic social imaginary and underpin the national ethos of egalitarianism,
mateship and fair play, an ethos that is still invoked on occasion.6 The
second group is more likely to be negotiating generational conflicts over
maintaining a diaspora identity or blending the homeland identity into the
melting pot of Euroamerican consumer culture in the Australian suburbs.7
The first group is more likely to claim a longevity of attachment to specific
places (if not to the nation) and a sense of belonging to those places. In the
case ofOneNation in the 1990s, this sense of belonging was transformedinto
an aggrieved sense of entitlement to the land, earned through hard work to
pay off the mortgage and invest in the family’s future. Both groups proved
resistant to a left-liberal rhetoric characterising the nation’s forebears as
white invaderswho stole the land andmurdered, assimilated or incarcerated
(on reserves or missions) the original inhabitants. For both kinds of settlers,
forms of selective historical amnesia, supported by the modern nation’s
focus on progress and the future, have long sustained an image of Australia
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
as an enviably harmonious place, the lucky country,where people have made
sacrifices and undergone hardship in order to give their children a better
life, a better future.
The displacement of national history into family history, and of national
space into domestic space through suburban home-ownership, has enabled
certain blind spots to be maintained as cornerstones of Australian politics.
These blind spots are evident in the opinion polls and qualitative research
conducted on reconciliation issues during the 1990s. The key contradiction
identified by the 1999–2000 Newspoll commissioned by the Council
for Aboriginal Reconciliation is that ‘Australians want reconciliation but
they are not anxious to do anything that could carry an imputation that
they, or their generation, are to blame for what happened to Australia’s
first peoples’.8 As a measure of success, perhaps, of the neo-conservative
attack on ‘black armband history’, the Newspoll survey found that ‘almost
eight in ten agreed that, “Everyone should stop talking about the way Aboriginal
people were treated in the past, and just get on with the future”’.9
Research based on focus groups in 1999–2000 found universal agreement
‘that the position of the Aborigines in Australia today is a tragedy’.10 But
the majority also held the opinion that past ill-treatment does not warrant
special treatment today and that an apology to Indigenous people is
not necessary – a view held particularly strongly by postwar non-British
immigrants.11
Recent Australian films have taken a keen interest in the movement of
urban characters between different locales, from city centres of commerce,
romance and crime – Risk (AlanWhite, 2001), The Bank (Robert Connolly,
2001), The Monkey’s Mask (Samantha Lang, 2001) – to suburban shops,
bowling clubs and backyards as sites of community conflict and family
strife – TheWog Boy (Alexsi Vellis, 2000), Crackerjack (PaulMaloney, 2002),
Fat Pizza (Paul Fenech, 2003) – to the beach as a liminal space enabling a
variety of encounters with the past and intimations of the future – Mullet
(David Caesar, 2001), Walking on Water (Tony Ayres, 2002), Blurred (Evan
Clarry, 2002). Urban films of the 1990s tend to rely on comedy, along with
family melodrama or the crime thriller, to depict the experience of ‘getting
on with the future’. With some exceptions, the central characters in these
films are urban or coastal dwellers with limited direct experience of the
desert or the bush and even more limited experience of direct contact with
IndigenousAustralians. The generic audience addressed by these films might
be imagined as mostly urban film-goers for whom the Anglo-Celtic core
of the social imaginary, and the impact of the Mabo and Wik decisions
on Australian politics, might be a common point of reference rather than
identity.
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Coming from the City
The urban and coastal landscapes of Australia have yet to take on the
iconic status of the desert and the bush in Australian cinema. In this sense
feature films appear to lag behind Australian television, which has long
embraced the urban location of much of its audience. Television takes the
urban experience of its viewers and delivers it back to them as locations
rather than landscapes: the suburbs in soapies (Neighbours) and sitcoms
(Kath and Kim); the city in police series (Homicide); and the beach house in
comedy-drama (SeaChange) and reality-TV (Big Brother). If, in the case of
cinema, the desert has become the place for spiritual road journeys undertaken
by unsettledAustralians in the aftershock ofMabo, and the bush (or the
country) is the frontline of reconciliation-in-practice, then the suburbs, the
city and the beach might best be thought of as the future-oriented, amnesiac
places in Australian settler identity, the places where the residues of traumatic
histories take on surface, mimetic forms. The principal mimetic form
of interest here is the cinematic image of the house and its approximation
to the idea of home, whether it be a rundown suburban weatherboard, a
negatively geared designer apartment, a solid-brick family bungalow, a fibro
weekender, a caravan in the bush, or a Queenslander-on-stilts. These vernacular
forms of domestic architecture (adapted by architects for Australian
sites, and further imitated by set designers for cinema) have the capacity to
evoke sense memories, to provoke a chain of involuntary associations for
character and viewer alike of the urban lifestyle that has become recognisably
Australian.12 It is here perhaps, in phantasmagoric images from the
coastal-urban heartland conjured by the mimetic machine of cinema, that
the past becomes visible in the physiognomy of buildings and streets. This
physiognomic presence of history and identity in local architecture, in the
transnational modernity of urban landscapes, might suddenly be experienced
in a momentary shudder of recognition, like a snapshot capturing an
instant of time. Alternatively, the modernist focus on the future, on aspiration,
opportunity and progress, is a strong current in urban genre films,
particularly crime thrillers and romantic comedies. This chapter will compare
two explicitly post-Mabo films set in working-class suburbs, The Castle
(Rob Sitch, 1997) and Vacant Possession (Margot Nash, 1995) with two
films that look beyond the city to the coast to imagine a post-suburban
Australia and a post-national sense of belonging, Strange Planet (Emma-
Kate Croghan, 1999) and Radiance (Rachel Perkins, 1998). Although they
belong to different genres, each of these films features a particular kind of
house, the weatherboard shack, as the place of memory which preserves the
past (in The Castle) or stands in the way of a reconciled future (in Vacant
Possession and Radiance) or simply enables a breather from the intensity of
the present (in Strange Planet).
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
‘Beginning to Understand How the Aborigines Feel’
in The Castle
After the 10BA period of funding films through a tax write-off system,
the new policy era of the Film Finance Corporation was marked by the
popular success of three films, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994), Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992) and
Muriel’sWedding (Paul J.Hogan, 1994). These films instantly redefinedAustralian
cinema as quirky suburban comedy. Breaking with the satiric antisuburbanism
of Australian literary and theatrical culture, quirky comedies
applied a keen but not unkind eye to the daggy, grotesque and downright
ugly aspects of the maligned suburban lifestyle.13 Between them, Priscilla,
Muriel and Ballroom mapped out a certain mindset linking the inner city,
the suburbs, and the urban coastal sprawl in opposition to the interior, the
desert, and the outback. The drag queens from the inner city in Priscilla
had attitude, ambition and style in common with the rivalrous suburban
preeners in Strictly Ballroom, and the ‘dreadful’ eponymous Muriel from the
backwater sprawl of Porpoise Spit. If these drag queens, ballroom dancers
and Abba fans revived film comedy in the 1990s by upstaging the ockers and
larrikins of 1970s cinema, they did so with an edge of ambivalence about
the much lampooned, much celebrated AustralianWay of Life. This way of
life, based on the affordable Australian dream of a lifetime mortgaged to the
quarter-acre block, is a compromise between city and bush. The dream’s
origins go back to Governor Phillip’s proposal for the layout of housing in
Sydney in 1790.14 Since the mid to late 19th century, the dream has become‘a
central tenet of national life’ for the majority of Australians who are reputed
to enjoy the highest rate of home-ownership in the world.15 What the suburban
block seemed to guarantee was ‘a marvellous compromise’, a refuge
fromthe frenetic pace of the nerve-racking modern city togetherwith a taste
of the freedom offered by the bush, encapsulated in the Australian backyard
with its ubiquitous barbecue.16 For those devoted suburban commuters
who prospered during the postwar years and acquired a secure job in the
city and a family sedan (either Ford or Holden), the freedom of the backyard
might be supplemented by the weekender, a fibro shack somewhere
down the coast, or a kit-home, inland, beside a river or lake. These denizens
of the suburban dream, according to cultural pundits who bemoaned the
mediocrity of the suburbs, were unabashed hedonists pursuing material
goals and economic security to the overall detriment of the national culture,
which suffered the consequences as generations of talented people left
the country in pursuit of opportunities not available in the wasteland of
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Coming from the City
Australia. The signs of complacent insularity were said to be ‘the censorious
know-nothingness of Australian suburbanites and farmers’ and the ‘lack of
a living critical milieu’.17 The cost of an entrenched suburban lifestyle in
environmental terms has been a slow-burning issue yet to be admitted to
urban consciousness beyond concerns about expressways, wilderness areas
and endangered species. Similarly, an uneasy historical consciousness, awakened
in suburban homes by the Stolen Generations report in 1997, appears
to have been placated since the nationally televised Sydney Harbour Bridge
Walk for Reconciliation in May 2000 and the opening ceremony of the
Sydney 2000 Olympics.18 The sense that the past has been dealt with by the
nation, politically and ceremonially, was reinforced by the Sea ofHands and
the National Sorry Days. In the context of a pragmatic national ethos of
‘getting on with the future’, the extraordinary popular success of The Castle
(Working Dog, 1997) deserves attention, given that the plot explicitly refers
back to the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision.
The Castle is first and foremost a tongue-in-cheek comedy of suburban
manners. Its comic strategies are twofold.Thefirst reliesonthe comic disparity
between what we see (mise-en-sc`ene) and what we hear (direct narration
by Dale, the youngest of Darryl Kerrigan’s three sons). The voice-over is
delivered in the guileless style of a school essay topic, along the lines ofWhat
IDid in theHolidays orADay at the BeachwithMumand Dad.Thekey tothe
Kerrigans’ world is the everyday repetition of family rituals (which become
visual jokes for the viewer): Steve’s esoteric bargains from the Trading Post,
Dad’s trophy room,Mum’s gourmet home cooking. Through repetition the
mise-en-sc`ene opens up a comic distance between what the Kerrigans think
about themselves and what the viewer might think of working-class life in
a half-renovated weatherboard bungalow with jet planes coming in to land
at the airport over the back fence. This comical gap in perception between
viewer and character is reinforced by setting up a quizzical point of view
within the film in two scenes. The first is when the property valuer comes to
inspect the house.With great pride Darryl naively points out precisely those
features (a fake chimney to make the house look cosy, toxic lead in the
landfill in the backyard, proximity to the airport) guaranteed to devalue
the property in a market based on ‘location, location, location’. The second
moment is in the High Court in Canberra when the land-grabbing corporation’s
high-powered legal defence team refers to the Kerrigans’ suburban
castle as an ‘eyesore’. If we are invited to laugh at Darryl’s ingenuousness in
the first instance, the second instance invites us to empathise with Darryl’s
indignant response, ‘They don’t get it’.What the defence lawyers ‘don’t get’
is the difference between land to be compulsorily acquired and a home made
of people and love and memories. It is precisely this invitation to laugh at
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
the Kerrigans’ blind spots (their imperturbable knack of turning a negative
into a positive), while empathising with their family values, that produces
an ambivalent position of recognition and self-consciousness for the viewer.
The second comic strategy relies on a fish-out-of-water plotline which
sees Darryl and his bumbling suburban solicitor, Dennis Denuto, take the
‘big end of town’ to court to stop amultinational corporation fromacquiring
Darryl’s prized quarter-acre block, conveniently located next to an international
airport. This turning point in the plot disrupts the cyclical repetition
of contented scenes of suburban life,Kerrigan-style. It also produces another
double-edged position for the viewer, whether to embrace the ‘know nothing’
insularity of the Kerrigans or to side with Laurie Hammill, the kindly,
erudite QC who rescues them from the likely consequences of their ignorance.
The film lets the viewer have it both ways, the innocence of insularity
and the sophistication of experience. The insularity of the Kerrigans is social
as well as geographical. Darryl’s only daughter, Tracey, was the first to complete
a tertiary education, at the local hairdressing college. The furthest any
Kerrigan had travelled, before Trace and Con went to Thailand for their
honeymoon, was Alice Springs. Darryl doesn’t have to go far to find himself
in unfamiliar waters. An appearance before the Administrative Appeals
Tribunal sees him struggling for words, dumbfounded to find that ‘It’s just
commonsense’ doesn’t constitute a legal argument. The same thing happens
when he persuades Dennis to represent him in the Federal Court. Dennis’s
assertion to the judge that ‘It’s the vibe of it’ doesn’t add up to a legal case
for violation of Darryl’s constitutional rights as a landowner. It’s only when
the avuncular QC steps in and saves the day by drawing on the Mabo and
Tasmanian dams decisions of theHighCourt that Darryl’s case iswon.What
is double-edged for the viewer is that, in court, as Dale tells us, Darryl and
Dennis ‘didn’t get it. Often.’ Although the case is won when the suburban
battler joins forces with the educated elite to defeat the bully boys from the
big end of town, the film suppresses any possibility that Darryl and Dennis
could, between them, have the makings of a bush lawyer. In other words, the
film denies the possibility that the ordinary, good-hearted suburban bloke
could come to aworkable understanding of theHighCourt’sMabo decision.
The same could be said for the canny wife of the suburban bloke who asks,
somewhat sceptically, ‘Have you been drinking?’ when Darryl declares, ‘I’m
beginning to understand how the Aborigines feel.’
In 1997, the year of the film’s release, there was a fierce campaign by farmers,
miners, pastoralists, conservative journalists, and the States to extinguish
native title in the lead-up to Howard’s Ten Point Plan to deal with the High
Court’s 1996 Wik decision.19 The question arises, how far was The Castle
prepared to take its audience with the Mabo case in the context of national
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Coming from the City
controversy over native title legislation? The Castle almost politicises suburban
home-ownership when Darryl declares, ‘The country’s gotta stop stealing
other people’s land.’ Almost, but not quite. The irony is that although
Darryl gets his day in court and wins his case on the strength of the Mabo
precedent, Eddie Mabo himself was never recognised by the High Court as
having a native title claim on his traditional land because he was adopted
into theMabo family and was thereby disqualified as an authentic claimant20
(see Chapter 4).
The cruel ironies of the Mabo case cannot be accommodated within the
ingenuous worldview of the Kerrigans. The task of integrating courtroom
scenes into quirky suburban comedy is treated as a generic problem which
The Castle solves by casting Darryl as a fish out of water, an innocent abroad.
Dennis and Darryl literally become the court jesters, while veteran actor Bud
Tingwell as Laurie Hammill takes on the role of Queen’s Counsel, putting
‘common sense’ and sentiment into legal discourse. As a retired expert in
Constitutional Law, Laurie saves the day by articulating to the High Court
the principle that, when it comes to acquiring property ‘on just terms’,
‘competing rights cannot be weighed one against the other’. In the spirit of
wish-fulfilment characteristic of anti-authoritarian comedy, theHighCourt
rules in favour of fragile sentiment over heavy-handed profit. Unlike Eddie
Mabo, the Kerrigans prosper from that day forward. The audience is left
to ponder whatever might have been glossed over in the film’s providential
ending where a happy neighbourhood (Anglocentric but inclusive) gathers
for a party. For the Kerrigans the pressing issues of the day are to do with
aspiration and opportunity. Their view is future-oriented and past differences
are seen as no barrier to an inclusive future. Ethnic differences are
easily accommodated on screen as are class differences, signified by a little
blokey derring-do over a fancy set of Toorak gates. The violent solution to
territorial disputes is canvassed but deflated through humour. As Farouk
says to the corporate henchman, ‘You have friend. I have friend who puts
bomb in car.’He doesn’t of course, but Farouk enjoys playing with the Arab
stereotype, although it’s hard to see the same joke being used in anAustralian
commercial film after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Gender
roles in suburbia are also the target of humour. Darryl’s fleet ofHoldens (the
Camira, the Torana, the Commodore), his motor boat and his greyhounds
occupy outdoor space. Inside, the space belongs more to his industrious
wife, who ‘should open a shop’ with her arts and crafts hobbies. If Darryl
is the patriarch, his rule is benevolent and his foibles are tolerated by his
knowing family.
One way to look at the comedy of suburban manners in The Castle is
to measure the evident fondness the film has for its characters against their
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‘know-nothingness’ when it comes to matters of colonial history, law and
land rights. The film’s happy ending comes at the cost of history. Darryl
Kerrigan has been able to take up Keating’s proposal (in his 1992 Redfern
Park speech) that white settlers imagine what it must have felt like for Aboriginal
Australians to be summarily dispossessed of their land and then
their children.21 What the film is unable to imagine is how the past is still
present for Aboriginal people today, for whom the historical trauma of colonial
dispossession is not over and done with. The Mabo and Wik decisions
may have recognised that there are ‘competing rights’ to the land, but the
issue of acquiring the land ‘on just terms’ has been bypassed by the native
title legislation which favours pastoral, mining and other rights over the
rights of those few Indigenous communities that can meet the stringent
criteria defining those entitled to make land claims. Whether it is legitimate
to ask these political questions of a famously low-budget, immensely
popular screen comedy of the 1990s is another question. If ambivalence,
or having it both ways, is part of the way The Castle positions the viewer,
then it may be useful to think about quirky suburban comedy as a genial
defence of an admittedly flawed Australian way of life.22 This enables us
to have it both ways. The nation’s battler is brought in from the bush to
struggle against adversity in the suburbs. From the security of his own backyard
he can begin to imagine how the Aborigines might be feeling. However,
he is under no threat from native title claims. Rather, the remorseless
advance of themultinational corporation, with its smooth-talking teams of
mobile executives, poses the more immediate threat to his contented way
of life.
WhenDarrylKerrigan takes the boatandthe familyuptoBonnieDoon,to
his bargain-basement weekender with spectacular views of overhead power
lines and a desolate lake, he sees not radiation and environmental degradation
(even if the inedible carp are the only fish biting), but ‘serenity.’When
his amiable QC joins him for a spot of fishing it might appear that the
divide between the battler and the cultural elite has been bridged. But it is
the rapid rise of Darryl’s hapless suburban solicitor, Dennis Denuto, that
underlines the virtue of the suburban ethos of looking to the future rather
than dwelling on the past. With no evident aptitude for the law, Dennis,
at the very end of the film, is shown driving a flash car, operating a flash
photocopier and admiring the brass plate on his new office building, on
the strength of a class action against lead in landfill. These are visual and
verbal jokes, but also material signs of Dennis’s successful adaptation to the
urban culture of upwardly mobile young professionals. The Kerrigans, with
their rapidly multiplying fleet of trucks, represent the working man’s other
dream, a successful father-and-son business.
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In comedy, the future is providential and it includes everyone in its happy
ending. This is a generic convention that can be castigated for its exclusions
or it can be understood as a utopian imagining of an open community based
not on identity but on reconcilable differences. The film acknowledges this
ideal as a wish, by opening and closing with the narrator’s direct address to
camera, emphasising that this is a story, and a bit of a tall one at that. For
the Kerrigans, the High Court decision to recognise their affective ties to
their ‘eyesore’ of a home breaks the circle of repetition which opens the film.
The future after their Mabo decision will be different, as the coda quickly
surmises. If we read this as a tongue-in-cheek allegory for the nation, the
High Court’sMabo decision breaks the circle of denial of the past, thrusting
everyone forward into a more prosperous future. In this view, pragmatic
recognition of ‘howtheAborigines feel about their land’ isgoodfor everyone,
if it allows everyone the opportunity to prosper. Such a view simply cannot
envisage a radical cultural difference which could not be accommodated
within suburbia. In the period between Mabo and Wik, in the aftermath of
Keating’sRedfern Park speech and re-election in 1993,Macintyre argues that
‘many longed for a more homely, less challenging national story’.23 In 1997,
the year after Howard’s election victory and the return of the conservatives
to government after thirteen years, The Castle provided precisely that: a
‘homely, less challenging national story’.
Giving Back the Land in Vacant Possession
As Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, a resurgent politics of memory since
the 1960s has been closely connected with the issue of forgetting in postcommunist
Eastern Europe and the Soviet, in post-apartheid South Africa,
in post-dictatorship Latin America and in the debate about the Stolen
Generations in Australia, ‘raising fundamental questions about human
rights violations, justice, and collective responsibility’.24 The Castle references
Mabo (along with the Tasmanian Dams case) while ‘forgetting’
the injustices of Eddie Mabo’s non-recognition as a legitimate native title
claimant. In this view, the past is over and done with. What matters is the
future. An opposing view argues that the past is not over until collective
responsibility is taken for the injustices of the past and their continuing
effects in the present. The difficulties of guilt and responsibility for the past
are explored in the first explicitly post-Mabo feature film, Vacant Possession,
supported by the Australian Film Commission as a low-budget feature
by an experimental, anarcho-surrealist-insurrectionary-feministfilmmaker,
Margot Nash. In Vacant Possession the present (like the self) is represented
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as amulti-layered archive of scenes and memories fromthe past. As a surreal
mise-en-sc`ene of memories, dreams and flashbacks, what happened in the
past is perceived as an integral part of what’s happening now. The film is
set under the flight path close to Sydney Airport. After years in exile, making
her living as a gambler, Tessa, whose social memory stretches back to
the arrival in Botany Bay of the first fleet of convicts, arrives home on one
of the planes flying in and out of Australia, offloading their human cargo
into the industrial landscape around Botany Bay, forgotten ‘birthplace of a
nation’. Tessa’s young neighbour, Milly (a member of the local Aboriginal
community whose social memory goes back 40 000 years or more), has a
white cat named Captain Cook – not because he’s white, says Milly, but
because he came to stay, even though no one wanted him, and he wouldn’t
go away.Tessa returns toAustralia to claim her inheritance after her mother’s
death. Instead, it is Tessa herself who is reclaimed by the past.
Part of what haunts Tessa is an archive of memories stored in the sand
dunes, in the mangroves, and in the windows, doorways and ceiling of her
mother’s abandoned weatherboard house. The semi-industrial landscape of
one of the city’s older working-class areas is possessed by hidden histories,
familial and national. Tessa’s teenage love affair withMilly’s uncle,Mitch, is
part of what could not be reconciled in family or national histories founded
on the amnesia of terra nullius, the social Darwinism of racial assimilation,
and theWhite Australia policy. The coastal Sydney landscape, imbued with
these histories, differs from the Melbourne quarter-acre block defended
fromcorporate takeover in The Castle.The flat, featureless expanse of cleared
land around Melbourne Airport is laid bare. It is there for everyone to take
in at a glance, at worst a functional ‘eyesore’, at best a noisy but convenient
location. The landscape around Tessa’s mother’s house in Vacant Possession
is a different matter.Not everything can be taken in at a glance. The place, like
memory, reveals itself in image-fragments, from the mysterious mangrove
roots below the waterline, to Mitch’s snake dreaming in the sand dunes, to
Milly’s map of Mabo Australia hanging on her bedroom wall.
The Kerrigans’ home is said to hold their memories, but the suburban
landscape in The Castle seems curiously incapable of inciting a flow of
memory, a chain of associations to reveal the past in the present. Although
Tessa’s home (with its living memories) is finally blown away in a symbolic
storm, clearing a path into the future, the business of reconciling with the
nation’s past is not so readily achieved.WhenTessa wants togive her mother’s
cherished suburban block of land back to Milly’s family as compensation
(for Mitch, for the child Tessa miscarried, for the uncompensated history
between settler and IndigenousAustralians),Milly’s response highlightshow
far Tessa is from understanding why ‘we don’t want your house’. Although
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Tessa turns her face to the future, ‘for the first time’, at the end of the film,
indicating that her work of mourning the past is complete, the outline of
this future is harder to see than the aspirational, suburban one summed up
in Dale Kerrigan’s final voice-over in The Castle. Tessa has much to learn
fromMilly, and also from her own sister, about taking responsibility for the
burden of the past in a series of daily, mundane, nurturing acts, rather than
a cathartic storm of homecoming emotions.25
Strands of Space in Strange Planet
In contrast to The Castle’s integration of theMabo decision into its ethos of
suburban prosperity, the inner-city film locates its upwardly mobile characters
in a corporate landscape that no one seems to have a claim on. This
cityscape, to which no one belongs in a meaningful way and which is therefore
open to all comers, is a useful setting for films contemplating two aspects
of 21st-century experience. The first is the uneventful experience of time as
boredom, of everyday life as duration and repetition rather than change.26
In this sense, a historic event is belated, in so far as constructing something
as an ‘event’ in history occurs afterwards, rather than at the time it happens.
The second is the experience of simultaneous happenings, unfolding
and entwining fortuitously, like strands in space. Both are aspects of urban
experience of time and space in latemodernity, but they are played out quite
differently in films of different genres. Strange Planet (Emma-KateCroghan,
1999) is an urbane Sydney film which looks to the future millennium, constructing
the present in termsof amulti-strand narrative which engageswith
the history of romantic comedy as a genre of social integration.27 Strange
Planet, like The Castle, has a providential ending. Its many strands briefly
entwine at a festive gathering of three newly formed couples around the
breakfast table at a secluded beach house. By contrast, Radiance (Rachel
Perkins, 1998) is a Queensland coastal film. Its provisional ending involves
three sisters burning down the family’s house, secluded in the Queensland
canefields, then heading for the open road.
The location of Strange Planet’s unfolding and entwining stories is provided
by Sydney, filmed as a post-national cityscape rather than a familiar
tourist attraction. The city’s famously abundant sunlight is exploited to
heighten the sensuousness of its suburban streets, while at night its multilane
roads, designer interiors and neon facades are transformed into modern,
abstract surfaces of colour, speed, and movement. In keeping with
the genre’s sophisticated comedy, Sydney is filmed as a seductive, international
cityscape, not unlike the intense visual abstraction of Tokyo in Lost
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in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003). In this city of surfaces, Ewan, Joel and
Neil are partners in a young, upmarket law firm. Their designer apartments
and postmodern offices are as far from Dennis Denuto’s ramshackle suburban
shopfront in The Castle as you can get. The trendy bars and party
venues they frequent match their workplace and homes. The one exception
to designer living for these male professionals is the local pub.When the perfect
marriage, the one-night stand or the dating service land them in trouble,
they retreat to the front bar of the local pub in search of the consolations of
mateship. Judy, Alice and Sally work in the post-industrial service sector, in
radio, a caf´e and a bookshop, respectively. Their shared house in a tree-lined
street has had a make-over, eliminating all traces of the inner-city working
class, long since despatched to the outer suburbs by gentrification. When
their lives hit rock bottom, the women seek comfort in the confectionery
aisles of a Bi-Lo supermarket, or in the intimacy of their bedrooms.
As one month gives way to the next in this tightly structured narrative,
these two sets of characters cross paths in the city, but they don’t meet until
the year has completed its full cycle, bringing them together by chance on
New Year’s Eve at a perfect hideaway, a remote, shabby-chic beach house. At
the beach, Strange Planet pays homage to the genre of romantic comedy, in
both its classic and retro modes, by citing the final conjugal scene from The
Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), and by naming Cary Grant movies as
Sally’s touchstone for understanding the chance meeting of couples ‘fated to
be mated’.Romantic comedy is a fairly neglected genre inAustralian cinema,
perhaps because its convention of subjecting its characters to a steep learning
curve requires them to attain a deeper knowledge of their own erotic desires
in order to be able to recognise their heart’s desire in another. Romantic
comedy’s discourse on fate and erotic attraction demands a sexually sophisticated
city as its setting (New York, London, Sydney). Even the rare screwball
comedy Paperback Hero (Anthony J. Bowman, 1999) which begins
and ends in the Australian outback develops its erotic themes in Sydney.
Increasingly, (from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Mike Newell, 1994 to
Love Actually, Richard Curtis, 2003), contemporary romantic comedy also
demands a multi-strand narrative, weaving together the full range of characters
created by the genre in its classical Hollywood phase, from the wisecracking
divorcees (CaryGrant and Irene Dunne), to the mismatched virgin
and playboy (Doris Day and Rock Hudson), to New Hollywood’s nervous
neurotics (Woody Allen and Diane Keaton), to the new romantics (Meg
Ryan and TomHanks) of Nora Ephron’s comedies.28 With her first and second
features dedicated to the genre, Emma-Kate Croghan declares herself a
post-national filmmaker by takingHollywood, British and French cinema as
her reference points. At the same time, her films have a specific local flavour:
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the student caf´es, film culture and shared houses ofMelbourne in Love and
Other Catastrophes (1996) and the urbane, postmodern physiognomy of
Sydney (the city of the libertarian Push since the 1930s and of Mardi Gras
since the 1970s) in Strange Planet.
Although its six main characters are juggling their respective futures (of
work and love), Strange Planet has a cyclical temporal structure rather than
a forward trajectory. Its action takes place month by month, from one New
Year’s Eve to the next, creating a temporal pattern of repetition and renewal
which promises to bring things full circle. There is a notion of change in this
cyclical temporal structure which is different from the historic event (such
as the High Court decision in The Castle which brings a central conflict to
a climax and resolution). The multi-strand narrative is concerned with the
non-eventful duration of modern lifewhere nothingmuch seems to happen,
but sooner or later things do change. Rather than a central conflict reaching a
crisis point,multi-strand narratives tease out the moments of understanding
which come after the event; for instance, the three male characters are forced
to ponder the enigmatic nature of erotic feelings: after Joel’s wife suddenly
leaves him; after Ewan’s casual affair results in an abortion for Bridget;
after the disaster of Neil’s 98.7 per cent perfect match made by computer.
For the female characters, the moment of understanding of the event is
truly belated.29 For hard-bitten Judy, understanding her cynical affairs with
older, married men comes years after the trauma of her mother’s early death
and her father’s disappearance into drugs and rock’n’roll. For suburbanbred
Alice, a flash of understanding that she has been stuck for too long
in the aftermath of a failed love affair segues into a revitalising encounter
with a punching bag, and time in the therapy chair reviewing the past. For
flighty Sally, it’s a cumulative montage of indiscriminate erotic events, and
a sleepless night, that brings the dawn of understanding. Rather than begin
to imagine how the enigmatic other feels (as Darryl Kerrigan does in The
Castle), the characters in Strange Planet begin to understand where their
own enigmatic feelings are coming from. Invariably this involves coming
to terms with the repetition of the past and letting a new cycle begin. The
final sequence of Strange Planet, where the characters meet fortuitously at
the beach, epitomises the film’s postmodern sense of time as cyclical and
layered, and of space as multi-stranded.
The festive ending at the beach is entirely conventional in terms of the
genre of romantic comedy. The characters, like many before them indebted
to Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, leave behind the cares of the city and
travel to a green space where magical things happen, false identities are
discarded and recognition of one’s true desire is pre-ordained. The film’s
final resonant image of belonging to a providential and festive community
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in a post-national, post-multicultural Australia expands the genre beyond
the conventional marriage of young lovers to right partners. To achieve
this utopian ending Strange Planet transforms the traditional Australian
weekender into a shabby-chic shack with million-dollar views across rolling
green lawn and rippling water, to blue hills silhouetted against an iridescent
morning sky. The final scene of enchanted lovers gathering around the laden
breakfast table to celebrate the New Year is an aspirational image as well as
a providential one. It is a corporate image of modernity as the good life,
globally marketed by the transnational infotainment industry that drives
the new economy in which randomly linked characters seek to prosper, to
love, and to belong to a community based on mutual affection. This is a
sensuous image of the designer lifestyle offered by 21st-century modernity.
What’s interesting finally about Strange Planet is that when the credits roll
and the final lyrics fade, there is silence, followed by the cavernous sound
of waves building and crashing, accompanied by the squawking of seagulls.
This dissonant reprise of the forgotten sound of a childhood holiday, at the
end of an urban-dwelling, post-national comedy, takes us back to nature,
back to the beach. This aural return to an idyllic place of belonging is doubleedged:
it holds out the promise of an affective community, drawn together
on the strength of enigmatic longings, momentarily fulfilled; yet this idyllic
moment of connection occurs in a ‘green space’, a landscape protected
by nostalgia from the aftershock of colonial history and the futureshock
of globalisation. The multiple strands of stories which entwine for a magical
moment at the beach enable Strange Planet to pose a question about
the ‘weightlessness’ of home and belonging in a post-suburban world of
young professionals on the move. This question, arising from late modernity’s
‘shifting locations’ and ‘short-term bonds’, has been articulated by
Margaret Morse: ‘How then, does one manage the investment of sympathy
without deep anchors?’30 This question is at the heart of post-colonial narratives
of home and identity which loosen the moorings of an increasingly
cosmopolitan social imaginary in post-Mabo Australia.
Cutting Through the Canefields in Radiance
In his reading of the unique poetics of land in six preambles to the Constitution
devised since 1998 by Australian writers for the Australian Republican
Movement, Mark McKenna was struck by ‘the depth’ of each writer’s
‘attachment to Australia as country’.31 McKenna suggests that ‘the centrality
of the land’ to these preambles expresses a wish ‘to end the sense of alienation
and exile that is embedded in [non-Aboriginal Australians’] colonial
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experience’.32 This growing sense of settlers belonging to the land is clearly
derived from an acknowledgment of the spiritual tie between Aboriginal
people and the land. However, Radiance (Rachel Perkins, 1998) insists on a
less reverent attitude to the meaning of land and home in the lives of young
Aboriginal women who have few reasons to believe in family values or the
republican’s quest for a renewed sense of national identity. The return home
of three sisters for their mother’s funeral in Radiance tests the possibility
of unanchored, post-Indigenous identity by placing three daughters of an
Aboriginal mother centre stage to sort out the lies and fantasies about their
shared past.
Radiance is a family melodrama, leavened by naturalistic comedy and
a theatrical mise-en-sc`ene which treats the house, the car and the beach as
sets for expressive performances by each of the three ‘sisters’, Nona, Cressy
and Mae. Based on a stage-play by Louis Nowra, Radiance was adapted by
Nowra and Perkins for the screen. They claim their film is about any three
sisters reuniting for their mother’s funeral, where the past is an issue but the
women’s Aboriginal identity is not.33 AsMarcia Langton has insisted, Aboriginality
‘is a social thing’: arising from ‘intercultural dialogue’, either face
to face or mediated by television,music, books or films,Aboriginality ‘is created
fromour histories’.34 Although Radiance grantsAboriginality the status
of an unmarked identity (a status usually confined to white masculinity in
Australian cinema), it is an explicitly post-Mabo film in that it deals with
the original act of dispossession of Indigenous land and identity, signified
by Nona’s desire to return her mother’s ashes to the island of her grandparents.
The island, now a Japanese tourist resort, is revealed in a number of
cutaway shots from the verandah of the mother’s house. Radiance also deals
with assimilation policies as the second act of dispossession: ofNona hidden
from the authorities afterMae and Cressy are taken from their mother, one
educated to become a nurse, the other to become an opera singer. And the
film ends with a dramatic act of reverse dispossession, the burning down of
the mother’s beach house, an unrenovated Queenslander-on-stilts, hidden
between the sea and the canefields. As it turns out, the disputed house, a
‘gift’ from the faithless Harry (who lives with his socially recognised family
in a suburban bungalow), never legally belonged to the mother.
This particular beach house is a far cry from the suburban dream of a
fibroweekender, updated in Strange Planet to match an aspirational lifestyle.
A shack in the canefields, rather than a haven at the beach, the mother’s
house is a piece of evidence in a long history of perfidy. It is also, like
the mother’s house in Vacant Possession, alive with unreconciled memories.
However, unlike the workings of memory to reveal the past in Nash’s film,
Radiance establishes the unreliability of memory in the way that Nona’s
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fiercely defended memory of her father, the Black Prince, is a screen for
unspoken histories, unspeakable traumas. Further, Perkins shows that there
can be no final moment of truth about the past. Each of the daughters
tells a different story. The mother is represented in the film in three ways:
through a glamorous photograph establishing her youthful beauty; through
her empty armchair which conjures discordant memories for Nona, Cressy
and Mae; and through conflicting tales of love, hate and abandonment
recounted by each of the daughters. By performing for each other, individual
identity is released from a false family genealogy as each daughter takes on
an aspect of the mother and the sisters. Nona puts on a kimono and wig
to perform Cressy’s aria as the abandoned woman who loses her child in
Madama Butterfly. Mae dons the mother’s unworn wedding dress and veil,
signifying the blighting of her own sexual hopes by the shame of her mother’s
promiscuity and descent into madness. Cressy discards her tailored grey
outfit in stages, changing into one of Nona’s stretchy sheaths to tell Nona
the truth about the Black Prince and to help Mae burn the house to the
ground.
At the end of Radiance, the three daughters don sunglasses and wigs to
escape the scene of the crime inMae’s high-powered, violet Ford.Until now,
Mae has used her car as a machine to cut through the canefields, burning
rubber and blasting the humid silence with rock music.35 But the roads
always bring her back to the tarnished delusions given formby her mother’s
house. The ignominy of non-recognition of the mother’s ownership of the
house is the final shame which Mae has added to a lifetime of bearing the
hurt and anger of her mother’s ambiguous status under the law.Mae cannot
escape her mother’s house until the sisters’ improvised rites of storytelling
bring the past out into the open.When the house is doused in petrol and left
to burn, the past is no longer hidden, but it remains unforgiven. The shame
of being the daughters of the anonymous men who visited that hidden
house in the canefields is gone forever, but the differences between the
sisters/daughters remain. However, as they depart the scene of their postcolonial
origins, their genealogy is clearer : they are all daughters of bastards.
This leaves the future open to invention. As Nona climbs into the back seat
of the car, she says to Cressy, ‘No way am I calling youMum.’ The open road
stretches out before them. They’ll make it up as they go along. However, the
coastal landscape traversed by this long road already has a history.Unlike the
desert, the coast does not lend itself to the fantasy of terra nullius. The coastal
stretch of open country, farmland, tourist towns, suburbs and city centres is
investedwith local histories,with stories of what it feels like to be at home, to
belong tothese places before and afterMabo.These disparate stories aremore
like a multi-strand narrative than a coherent national history, contingent
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and floating, rather than omnisciently anchored in a unifying truth. It could
well be that modernity’s anchorless mode of belonging, lightly, to a montage
of places, to a bastard of a national history, is what defines a post-national
cinema.
Notes
1 S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith, Australian Cultural History, Cambridge University
Press, 1988. A Bicentennial anthology whose idea of culture as ‘writing, painting,
ballet, music or scholarship’ (p. 3) ties in with ideas of Australia as insular,
second-rate and far removed from the centres of European, British and American
excellence.
2 RobertManne, ‘TheHoward years: a political interpretation’. In RobertManne (ed.),
The Howard Years, Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2004, p. 27.
3 Newspoll, Saulwick & Muller and Hugh Mackay, ‘Public opinion on reconciliation:
snap shot, close focus, long lens’. In Michelle Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation: Essays on
Australian Reconciliation, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000, p. 49.
4 John Cameron, ‘Introduction: articulating Australian senses of place’. In John
Cameron (ed.), Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, Sydney: Longueville Books,
2003, p. 9.
5 Martin Krygier quoted in ibid., p. 8.
6 See SirWilliam Deane, ‘Australia Day message 2000’. InGrattan, Reconciliation, 2000,
pp. 9–11.
7 On Australian cinema and multiple constructions of nationhood as Europeanderived,
diasporic,multicultural-Indigenous, or melting pot, see Tom O’Regan, Australian
National Cinema, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 306–30.
8 Newspoll, p. 33.
9 ibid., p. 34.
10 ibid., p. 37.
11 ibid., p. 38.
12 Onvernacular forms of modernism in fashion, design, architecture aswell as photography
and cinema see Miriam Hansen, ‘The mass production of the senses: classical
cinema as vernacular modernism’, Modernism/Modernity, 6(2) 1999, p. 60.
13 For a discussion of this love-hate relation to the suburbs see Alan Gilbert, ‘The roots
of Australian anti-suburbanism’. In S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (eds), Australian
Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 33–49.
14 ibid., p. 33.
15 Jim Forbes and Peter Spearitt, ‘Rum corps to white-shoe brigade’. In Julianne Schultz
(ed.), Dreams of Land: Griffith Review, Summer 2003–2004, p. 32.
16 Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 35.
17 Goldberg & Smith, Australian Cultural History, p. 4.
18 Linnell Secomb, ‘Interrupting mythic community’, Affective Communities: Cultural
Studies Review, 9(1) 2003, pp. 85–100. Compares historical forgetting in the Olympic
2000 Opening Ceremony withMessianic moments of the past in the present in Kim
Scott’s novel, Benang: From the Heart, 2000.
19 Stuart Macintyre, ‘Frontier conflict’. In The History Wars, Melbourne University
Press, 2003, pp. 149–153. Discusses conservative resistance to land rights and native
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title legislation, and theHindmarsh Island dispute over the status of secret testimony
from Ngarrindjeri women.
20 We discuss the injustices and anomalies of the Mabo case for Eddie Mabo and his
family in Chapter 4.
21 Paul Keating, ‘The Redfern Park speech’. In Michelle Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation,
2000, pp. 60–4.
22 On the question of ambivalence and the class positioning of the critic in relation to
The Castle see Lorraine Mortimer, ‘The Castle, the garbage bin and the high-voltage
tower: home truths in the suburban grotesque’, Meanjin, 57(1) 1998, pp. 116–24.
23 Macintyre, ‘Frontier conflict’, p. 128.
24 AndreasHuyssen, ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’. In Arjun Appadurai (ed.),
Globalization, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 63.
25 For a more extensive analysis of the house, history and family in Vacant Possession
and Radiance see Felicity Collins, ‘Bringing the ancestors home: dislocating white
masculinity’. In D. Verhoeven (ed.), Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature
Films, Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 1999, pp. 107–16.
26 Patrice Petro, ‘After shock/between boredom and history’. In P. Petro (ed.), Fugitive
Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995,
pp. 275–6. See Chapter 5.
27 On Strange Planet as part of a brief cycle of romantic comedies see Felicity Collins,
‘Brazen brides, grotesque daughters, treacherous mothers: women’s funny business
in Australian cinema from Sweetie to Holy Smoke’. In Lisa French (ed.),Womenvision:
Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003,
pp. 167–82.
28 On the genre’s four main phases and key conventions see Steve Neale, ‘The big
romance or something wild? Romantic comedy today’, Screen, 33(3) 1992, pp. 284–
99.
29 See Chapters 5 and 6 on Jean Laplanche’s understanding of the temporal structure
of belatedness or afterwardness.
30 MargaretMorse, ‘Home: smell, taste, posture, gleam’. In Hamid Naficy (ed.), Home,
Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, New York and London:
Routledge, 1999, pp. 68–9.
31 Mark McKenna, ‘Poetics of place’, Dreams of Land: Griffith Review, ed. Julianne
Schultz, Summer 2003–2004, p. 188.
32 ibid., p. 192.
33 Louis Nowra and Rachel Perkins, ‘“Let the turtle live!” a discussion on adapting
“Radiance” for the screen’, Metro, 135, 2003, pp. 34–41.
34 Marcia Langton, “Well, I Heard It On The Radio And I Saw It On The Television”: An
Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking
by and about Aboriginal People and Things, Sydney: Australian Film Commission,
1993, p. 31.
35 On Mae’s car see Catherine Simpson, ‘Notes on the significance of Home and the
Past in Radiance’, Metro, 120, 1999, pp. 28–31.
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Trauma, Grief and
Coming of Age

8
Lost, Stolen and Found
in Rabbit-Proof Fence
The feature film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) was prompted
by and responds to Bringing them Home (1997), the controversial national
inquiry into the thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their
families by Australian state authorities from 1900 to 1970, an inquiry that
changed the face of Australia’s self-understanding.1 While not the first film
to dealwith this subject, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a ‘breakthrough film’. It earned
more than AUS$1.2 million in its first week of screening, reversing the historical
lack of interest by Australian audiences in films about Aboriginal
people.2 More than this, it became the film of the Stolen Generations, providing
a set of powerful images that captured the popular imagination of
both young and older Australians.
Set in outback Australia in 1931, the film takes its name from the wire
fence that once ran from the south coast ofWestern Australia through to the
north, acting as a barrier to rabbit hordes migrating fromthe east to thewest.
For the three Aboriginal girls at the centre of this true story –Molly (Everlyn
Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sainsbury) andGracie (LauraMonaghan) – the fence
is a lifeline. After escaping from the isolatedMoore River Native Settlement
where they were taken to be trained as domestic servants, the girls use the
rabbit-proof fence to navigate their way across more than 2000 kilometres of
some of the world’s harshest terrain to their home in Jigalong, a small government
outpost located at the far north end of the fence. By bringing this
story of the girls’ epic journey to light, the film, like its namesake, is a vehicle
for retracing the past – that is, a means for recovering what director Phillip
Noyce calls ‘stolen histories’: the experiences of Indigenous Australians that,
until recently, non-Indigenous Australia largely refused to recognise. As we
show in this chapter, the film does this partly by drawing on narrative techniques
and visual devices from Hollywood genres to create a compelling
adventure story. This film about returning home also performs some backtracking
of its own by reworking a number of key elements of the lost child
mythology from classic Australian films such as The Back of Beyond (John
Heyer, 1954),Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
(Peter Weir, 1975). And finally, as we discuss in the last section of this
chapter, the film’s rhetorical elements of testimony and witnessing are best
understood in terms of international screen studies debates about memory,
history, trauma and film.
From Hollywood to Jigalong
It is a long time sinceAustralian directorNoyce made a film outsideAmerica,
where he is best known for directingHollywood action blockbusters such as
Clear and Present Danger (1994) and Patriot Games (1992). So what exactly
attracted Noyce at this point in his career to make the low-budget film
Rabbit-Proof Fence? Noyce claims he was initially attracted to what he calls
the film’s ‘universal elements’ as a story of escape.3 This revelation takes
on deeper significance when we learn that Noyce’s decision to produce and
direct Rabbit-Proof Fence was precipitated by a personal crisis. As he tells it,
he was in New York working with the actor Harrison Ford on the storyline
of the proposed adaptation of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears.
Ford was uncertain about being involved. Every other day Noyce would
go up town to Ford’s apartment on Central Park West and present him
with new improved versions of the storyline. After ten days, Ford was still
unhappy and wanted to change the ending completely. So Noyce called the
head of Paramount studios who told him he should make all the changes
Ford requested because the film already had a release date and time was
running out. At that point Noyce claims he exploded. Or, as he puts it in
one interview:
I suddenly thought, I’m not really making a film, I’m making sausages and I felt
like a sausage maker . . . Almost on the spur of the moment I decided ‘Fuck this,
I’ve spent enough time as a migrant worker in this Hollywood system. It’s time to
make something for myself and something that I’m more connected to.’4
Noyce’s decision to make this film about a young girl’s determination to
return home after being forcibly taken from her Aboriginal mother and
community is also then his own act of ‘returning home’. Indeed, the film
provided an opportunity for Noyce to overcome the peculiar alienation of
the expatriate: the experience of feeling like an outsider in a host country –
‘a migrant worker in Hollywood’ – and, at the same time, an outsider at
home. As Noyce puts it, ‘About four years ago . . . I had reached the stage
where I thought I would no longer be able to return to Australia and make
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Lost, Stolen and Found
films, because every time I came back to Australia I felt more and more of
an outsider, cut off from the issues, from Australian preoccupations.’5
Surveying popular and critical reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence, we find
that most Australian critics welcomed Noyce’s decision to return home
and reconnect, as he suggests, with Australian issues. The film is consistently
praised for being both profoundly moving and politically astute.
Many critics also comment on the film’s timeliness – ‘long overdue’, as
one critic wrote.6 The film is based on a non-fiction book written byMolly
Craig’s daughter, Doris Pilkington-Garimara, and many of the reviews and
commentaries address the film’s claim to historical truth.7 For critic Evan
Williams, for example, ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence has been made with such transparent
humanity and idealism it scarcely seems to matter whether the story
is true or not’.8 For others, however, it matters a great deal. Upon its release
in 2002, Rabbit-Proof Fence became a target in the neo-conservative anti-
Stolen Generations campaign and the history wars debate (see Chapter 1). In
a scathing commentary in theDaily Telegraph, one of the campaign’s leading
players, columnist Piers Akerman, attacked the film’s depiction of historical
events and figures, claiming they were misleading to audiences.9 He also
used a sustained assault on the film’s depiction of this episode in Australian
history to take several swipes at the public intellectual Robert Manne, who
a week earlier had published a feature article on the Stolen Generations in
the SydneyMorning Herald in which he describes Rabbit-Proof Fence as ‘the
first important feature film on the subject’.10
Akerman’s attack on Rabbit-Proof Fence and its admirers rehearses the
arguments and rhetorical stance of the wider ongoing campaign against
Bringing ThemHome.AsManne notes, Bringing ThemHome,which is based
on the testimonies of more than 500 witnesses, had a profound impact on
national identity. In the days following the report’s tabling in parliament,
politicians openly wept as they acknowledged the report’s findings that a
minimum of 10 per cent and perhaps as many as 30 per cent of all Aboriginal
children born between 1900 and 1970 were forcibly removed or ‘stolen’,
as Indigenous people put it, from their mothers and communities.11 Public
response followed suit, mediated by a national media that by and large
accepted both the findings and the emotional tone of the report. It was an
intense moment of national shame and collective remorse that crystallised
around the question of a national apology to Indigenous Australians. In
fierce opposition to this general mood of shame and call for an apology,
neo-conservative politicians, academics and journalists began a series of
public attacks on the report, claiming, among other things, that it damaged
Australia’s ‘good name’. ForManne, retired Liberal politician Peter Howson
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
goes as far as to suggest that the report’s findings about the racist and genocidal
dimensions of the state-sanctioned policies of removal are an act of
treachery.12 Akerman’s commentary takes a similar view, directly disputing
as racist and genocidal the way the film represents the policies and administrative
practices ofWestern Australia’s then Chief Protector of Aborigines,
A. O. Neville. Here and elsewhere, Akerman argues that Aboriginal protectors
like Neville did not ‘steal’ children from their families but rather
‘rescued’ them from hostile tribal Aborigines who refused to recognise children
of mixed descent. Noyce’s public refutation of Akerman’s claims refers
to a wealth of historical and anthropological evidence to the contrary.13
But there is something else at stake in Akerman’s attack on Rabbit-Proof
Fence. His commentary also displays an age-old cultural prejudice that
emerged as a peculiar by-product of the anti-Bringing Them Home campaign,
namely the Platonic suspicion of the image. Campaigners against
the report argue that the document is fundamentally flawed because it is
based on the testimonies of witnesses, which are, in their view, ‘distorted
memories’ of the past, instead of what they call ‘official’ history: government
documents, statistics, legislation, and the like.14 In his analysis of the
campaign, Manne explains that despite the fact that left-wing intellectuals
and historians have provided a great deal of ‘official history’ to support
witnesses’ claims, neo-conservatives have continued to pursue this line of
thinking, culminating in a national conference on the subject titled ‘Truth
and Sentimentality’ and organised by the right-wing journal Quadrant.15
Here, participants argued in one way or another that they were dealing with
historical truth based on empirical evidence while the left or new intelligentsia,
which includes at least one of the authors of Bringing Them Home,
infect the public spheres of politics and mediawith a dangerous sentimentality
about the so-called ‘Aboriginal problem’ which, they claim, encourages
an anti-Australian ethos.16
Returning to Akerman’s commentary we find a similar line of thought
when he dismisses the film’s contribution to national culture and history
on the grounds of an effect Ross Gibson calls ‘international contamination’
(discussed in Chapter 5).17 For Akerman, Rabbit-Proof Fence cannot be
regarded as ‘one of Australia’s best films’ because it is culturally inauthentic,
or, to use his words, ‘a Tinseltown version of an Australian story’.18 Here,
Akerman accuses the filmmakers of taking licence in their representation of
historical reality, suggesting that the film fails as a work of history because
its primary aim is to elicit emotion. ‘The film Rabbit-Proof Fence’, he writes,
‘is not about facts; it’s about sentiments’.19 In other words, while Noyce
sees Rabbit-Proof Fence as a form of escape from ‘the sausage factory’ that
he believes the Hollywood studio system is, Akerman perceives the film as
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Lost, Stolen and Found
nothing more than an imported sausage: a distasteful, overblown product
that is positively ‘un-Australian’ in its appeal to the emotions.
It is interesting to note that while Noyce’s response to Akerman in the
Sunday Telegraph pays careful attention to questions of historical accuracy,
it sidesteps Akerman’s attack on the melodramatic style of the film and
the question of cultural contamination. Elsewhere, however, Noyce is more
than happy to defend the film’s Hollywood elements, especially its appeal
to the senses. At a Q and A session following a screening in Newcastle,
Noyce told the audience that from the very start his aim had been to make
‘a mainstream film’.20 He did not, he said, want to make ‘an art-house film
seen only by the converted’. On the contrary, as he admits in an interview
with JaneMills: ‘Hollywood knows how to reach audiences. I’ve learned the
lessons in marketing and casting that Hollywood teaches. Now I have to use
these skills to sell an Indigenous story to the mainstream. It’s not overtly
political but covertly. Hollywood can do this and do this well.’21
The marketing of Rabbit-Proof Fence indicates that Noyce has learnt
Hollywood lessons well, for it was the most widely publicised Australian
film in recent years. In the weeks leading up to the film’s national release,
Noyce and others involved in the project, including scriptwriter Christine
Olsen, author of Doris Garimara Pilkington, as well as the surviving reallife
subjects of the film,MollyKelly (n´eeCraig) and DaisyBurungu, appeared
on numerous current affairs and talk shows on both commercial and state
television networks.At the same time, promos comprised of visually striking
images of the young girls crossing the desert, accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s
highly percussive score were broadcast at regular intervals in prime-time
television. Noyce also applied his lessons in star-making. Print and screen
media ran special features on the film’s new and ‘old’ stars, making the film’s
release a notable media event. The popular magazine for teenage girls, Dolly,
for example, ran a four-page spread on thirteen-year-old newcomer Everlyn
Sampi, who plays Molly. We also saw a spate of features on the revival of
David Gulpilil’s career, enabled by his supporting role in Rabbit-Proof Fence
as the tracker, Moodoo, as well as his then forthcoming lead role in The
Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002). Judging from the questions asked at the Q and
A in Newcastle, many people who went to see Rabbit-Proof Fence had also
first seen Darlene Johnson’s documentary on the making of the film, Follow
the Rabbit-Proof Fence, produced by the Nine network. More intimate and
frank than most behind-the-scenes promotional films, this film documents
Noyce’s search for three young girls to play the lead roles (more on this
documentary below).
In addition to theHollywood-style promotional campaign, the film itself
bears testimony to Noyce’s mastery of Hollywood genres, in particular
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
the action film. The narrative structure of Rabbit-Proof Fence is the chase
film, a structure that dates back to silent American classics such as Buster
Keaton’s The General, through to classicalWesterns such as John Ford’s The
Searchers. The first third of this chase film shows the three girls being taken
away from their home in northern Western Australia to the Moore River
Native Settlement, south of Perth, while the remaining two-thirds show
their escape and the subsequent chase to recapture them as they make their
way north. The first section of the film also allows for the introduction of
A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), theWestern Australian Chief Protector of
Aborigines from 1915 to 1936, who has complete power over all Aboriginal
people in the state, includingMolly, Gracie and Daisy.When Neville learns
that the girls have escaped from Moore River, he organises the full-fledged
search that sets off classic chase elements, including physical tests and narrow
escapes as the pursuers close in on the girls only to lose them again. The film’s
cinematographer, Chris Doyle, aptly describes the film as ‘a road movie on
foot’.22
The chase element of the film also allows for the development of an
unspoken relationship between Molly and Moodoo (David Gulpilil), the
black tracker Neville sends to recapture the girls. Knowing she will be followedbyMoodoo,
Molly cleverly devises anumberof strategies tocover their
tracks and thus evade capture. As the chase intensifies, Moodoo develops
a deep admiration for Molly’s cleverness and her determination to return
home. For viewers, this helps to generate a greater level of anticipation,
as well as a more intense form of identification with the characters, thus
contributing to the film’s overall entertainment value. The fictionalisation
of the relationship between Molly and her adversary is also typical of the
many small departures the film makes from the non-fiction book version
of the story based on Molly and Daisy’s oral histories, that is, techniques of
dramatisation. Overall, however, the film is at pains to remain faithful to
this specific story of Aboriginal child removal. AsNoyce explains: ‘Christine
[Olsen, scriptwriter and co-producer] and I felt that there was an acceptable
point towards whichwe could push the story of themovie and that there was
this fence we couldn’t cross, even though it would make it a more dramatic
journey and more conventional film.’23
The self-imposed restraint on the part of the filmmakers regarding the
historical facts of the story results in an interesting mix of the political history
genre, maternal melodrama and the romance-quest. This is not a smooth
hybrid form. Rather, it might be best described as a grafting of one genre onto
another, with the joints being especially noticeable in the film’s somewhat
clunky cutting back and forth between the girls’ journey home and scenes
of Neville at work. In the 1930s, Neville was an influential figure in national
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Lost, Stolen and Found
debates and conferences about Aboriginal affairs.24 Along with Cecil Cook,
Chief Protector in the Northern Territory, he was one of the nation’s most
enthusiastic proponents of eugenicist strategies for ‘breeding out the colour’,
such as the removal of ‘half-caste’ children from their families, as well as
the prohibition of marriages between ‘half-castes’ and ‘full-bloods’ and the
active encouragement of marriages between ‘half-caste’ women and European
men. In 1937, he led a Commonwealth meeting on this issue, asking:
‘Arewe going to have a population of 1 million blacks in theCommonwealth
or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually
forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?’25 The film dramatises
this aspect ofNeville’s thinking in his delivery of a lecture on his policies
of child removal to a group of women from a local ladies benevolent society.
The scene contributes nothing to the plot; indeed, as Noyce suggests, scenes
like this one distract from the drama of the journey. Rather, the function of
this particular scene is to showthe political, legal and administrative context
for the girls’ situation, fulfilling the film’s political aim of communicating
the findings of Bringing ThemHome, including the racist, genocidal thinking
that underpinned policies of Aboriginal child removal.
It should be noted, however, that while this visible tension between realistic
historical detail on the one hand and a highly conventional plot on
the other takes a specific form in Rabbit-Proof Fence, it is by no means
unique to this film. Nor is it, as Akerman suggests, foreign to Australian
cinema. On the contrary, this visible tension is characteristic of a subgenre
of Australian action-adventure films known as lost in the bush or lost children
films. So already we can see how Rabbit-Proof Fence looks outward to
global cinema through its use of elements from Hollywood genres while at
the same time backtracking across well-worn ground in Australian national
cinema.
The Lost Child Found
The lost child is a recurrent theme in theAustralian cultural tradition.Narratives
of lost children date as far back as the colonial period, where this figure
characterised the hardship of life in the bush fornewsettlers.AsPeter Pierce’s
comprehensive study of the subgenre shows, by the end of the 19th century
the regular newspaper reports and stock illustrations of lost children that
had well and truly captured the popular imagination had become the basis
of literary works by many well-known Australian writers, including Henry
Kingsley, Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Ethel Pedley,
as well as visual renderings of the theme by well-known artists such as the
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Heidelberg school painter Frederick McCubbin.26 In cinema, lost children
narratives date back to the 1930s with Charles Chauvel’s mythic Uncivilized
(1936). They are also prevalent in the so-called New Australian cinema
with features such as Walkabout (1971), Lost in the Bush (Peter Dodds,
1970), Barney (David Waddington, 1976), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),
and Manganninie (John Honey, 1980), as well as contemporary cinema in
The Missing (1998) and One Night the Moon (2001). Rabbit-Proof Fence
backtracks over and reworks many of the elements of this cultural tradition.
In her survey of Australian action-adventure films, Susan Dermody
argues that lost in the bush or lost children films are in the romancequest
mode: ‘a formthat organises meaning in stories as diverse as Homer’s
Ulysses, the biblical story ofMoses, nearly every fairytale, and Shakespearean
romances, such as TheWinter’s Tale.’27What is interesting about Dermody’s
study of the Australian action film in terms of the conventions of the
romance-quest is that she emphasises two main elements: first, the quest
is fulfilled through a series of physical challenges in unfamiliar territory, and
second, the motivation of the hero is idealist rather than comic-tragic or
satiric and pessimistic.28 Moreover, Dermody argues that these films depict
their respective searches or struggles to fulfil an ideal against a background
of real anxieties.29
Working with Dermody’s somewhat idiosyncratic, we could say ‘Australianised’,
definition of the romance-quest, we can ask what exactly is the
real, or social, anxiety behind the Australian tradition of lost children films.
In a recent in-depth study, Pierce convincingly argues that the recurring
motif of the lost child in Australian painting, literature and film amounts
to ‘a peculiarly Australian anxiety’, namely European settler anxiety about
belonging.30 Pierce shows how on one level these stories and images function
as warnings of the very real dangers posed by life in the bush and
the outback. But they also have a much deeper cultural significance. For
Pierce, the image of the forlorn lost child that haunts both popular culture
and canonical works by Australian writers and artists stands for an older
generation of European settlers: ‘Symbolically, the lost child represents the
anxieties of European settlers because of their ties with home which they
have cut in coming to Australia . . . The child stands for the apprehension of
adults about having to settle in a place where they might never be at peace.’31
As Pierce observes, one of the best known images of the lost child is the
stock 19th-century magazine illustration of a group of two or three children
entwined in an exhausted sleep at the foot of a tree.32 Originating from true
stories, such as the famous colonial story of the three Duff children lost in
the bush in the Wimmera area of Victoria in 1864, this image is routinely
rehearsed in melodramatic narratives of the lost child, for example Picnic at
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Hanging Rock, where it sparks an uncanny remembrance, contributing to
the film’s blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality.
In Rabbit-Proof Fence this highly recognisable composition of lost children
appears early in the chase whenMolly,Gracie and Daisy collapse in a huddle
after an exhausting day of being on the runwith little water and no food. But
while Rabbit-Proof Fence invokes iconic images of the lost child in the melodramatic
mode, it also inverts their meaning in quite significant ways. As
mentionedabove, the image of the exhausted, sleeping lost children has come
to symbolise the European settler’s vulnerability in a hostile and indifferent
landscape, hence reinforcing long-standing settler anxieties about belonging.
Here, the image of the three young Aboriginal girls overwhelmed by
the unfamiliar landscape serves an entirely different purpose by helping to
establish a major theme of the story:Molly is compelled to return home not
only because she desperately wants to be reunited with her mother but also
because the land in and around theMoore River settlement is, quite literally,
making her ill.
This idea of Molly being out of sorts with the landscape is visually
expressed in the film’s striking use of colour and camera angles. Speaking
of his technique, cinematographer Chris Doyle explains: ‘I was looking
for something that suggested the torment, the cruelty of the journey, the
loneliness, the isolation and the expanse.’33Working against the rich palette
and lighting techniques of the pastoral tradition in Australian period films
such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, the girls’ journey across unfamiliar territory
is dominated by the use of desaturated colour. As Doyle suggests, this
bleaching effect highlights the bleakness of the journey. It also stands in
stark contrast to the oasis-like qualities of the scenes at home in Jigalong.
This new post-Mabo approach to the Australian landscape is central to the
film’s radical inversion of the meaning of lost child films. Here, the image
of a hostile, indifferent landscape actively allows for an Indigenous notion
of ‘country’, that is, the idea that Aboriginal people belong to a particular
area of land, have customary obligations to that land and are physically and
emotionally affected when they are taken from their ‘country’.
In addition to redefining the meaning of land in lost child stories, Rabbit-
Proof Fence opens the way for a post-Mabo interpretation of the peculiar
affect of the lost child story. More than just a symbol of ties cut, as Pierce
suggests, lost child narratives are shot through with a peculiar sense of loss
generated by their dramatisation of the impossibility of returning home.
In many narratives this loss is played out through Aboriginal characters. As
Pierce notes, historically, lost children stories are one of the few subgenres in
Australian literature andfilmthat acknowledge relations betweenAboriginal
and non-Aboriginal Australians, for many involve a black tracker who is
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often summoned ‘too late’.34 This idea of too lateness is foregrounded in
the musical One Night theMoon. Based on the experiences of a well-known
black tracker, Sergeant Alex Riley, the film tells the story of a racist fatherwho
flatly refuses to allow an Aboriginal tracker onto his land to help search for
his lost daughter.35When the search party fails to find the child, the tracker is
summoned by the mother. The tracker quickly locates the child, but by then
it is too late, for the girl is dead. For Pierce, the role of Aboriginal people in
lost children narratives fromthe colonial period constitutes a terrible irony:
‘Often they [lost children] were saved by Aboriginal men who had been
dispossessed of this same land.’36 He goes on to suggest that the tracker is
potentially ‘a most potent image of reconciliation between black and white
Australia’.37
There is little evidence to assess the effect of colonial images of Aboriginal
rescues of lost children as images of reconciliation, and they were, according
to Pierce, soon forgotten.38 What interests us more about the role of
the Aboriginal tracker in this narrative tradition is the analogy between the
ill-fated lost child of the bush and the fate of Aboriginal people, reinforcing
the colonial notion of Aboriginal people as the ‘dying race’. According
to Pierce, the first lost child story in Australian literature was a poem by
Charles Thompson titled ‘Blacktown’ (1826), which reflects on the fate of
Aboriginal ‘possessors’ after they abandoned anAboriginal settlement established
for them by GovernorMacquarie.39 This popular colonial/colonising
image ofAboriginal people’s tragic failure to integrate into modern life is the
basis of Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955), a story reworked in TraceyMoffatt’s
post-colonial experimental filmNight Cries (1990). This image is also reproduced
in Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg’s film about two British children – the
Girl (Jenny Agutter) and the Boy (Lucas Roeg), as they are known – who
are abandoned by their father in the outback only to be rescued by a young
Aborigine (David Gulpilil).
Made in 1971, Walkabout is known for its stunning images of the Australian
landscape or what SusanDermody describes as its ‘shocking beauty’.40
In an interview in which he discusses the making of the film, Roeg admits
he was attracted to the project because it provided the opportunity to
work somewhere ‘that had hardly been surveyed’, ‘a big, empty backcloth’,
a place where it is possible to project the kinds of primal fantasies
explored in this film.41 More problematically, Roeg extends this conception
of the Australian landscape as a blank canvas, a landscape that ‘hasn’t
been tampered with’, to its Indigenous inhabitants.42 Reminiscing on his
selection of the then unknown, inexperienced Gulpilil to play the role of
Aboriginal boy, Roeg describes Gulpilil as ‘not stained by anything, except
life’.43 This Rousseauesque idea of Gulpilil the actor concurs with the film’s
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representation of the Aboriginal boy as a ‘noble savage’.44 It also emphasises
the provocative ending in which the Aboriginal boy directs the children to
an abandoned settlement on the fringe of a mining settlement, only to take
his own life by hanging himself from a tree. The film suggests that the boy
is overwhelmed by grief after witnessing a buffalo culling. His grief is later
exacerbated by the Girl’s rejection of his ‘marriage proposal’ communicated
through a spectacular and highly primitivised dance sequence. His death is
emblematic of the girl’s refusal to submit to her primal urges, to stay lost in
the bush. This idea of Aboriginality is further emphasised in the epilogue
where the girl is shown some years later in her ultra-modern urban kitchen
daydreaming of idyllic moments shared with the Aboriginal boy. As others,
including Pierce and Dermody, suggest, the Aboriginal boy is the true lost
child of this film. For in the logic of this narrative, there is no place for
Aboriginal people in modernity other than as the subject of a European
romantic longing for an ideal primitive past.
Rabbit-Proof Fence succeeds not only in avoiding the kind of primitivism
at work inWalkabout but in countering its image of Aboriginal people as the
lost children by telling a story of Aboriginal survival and resistance. Despite
Neville’s efforts to have Molly and the others recaptured, she and Daisy
finally return home. ‘She will not submit’, as Neville puts it. The triumph
of their return is encapsulated in the image of Molly emerging from the
desert carrying her younger sister in her arms. In this way, again, Rabbit-
Proof Fence invokes the lost child films of the past while at the same time
bringing something new to the genre.Unlike the tragic ending ofWalkabout,
where the Aboriginal boy rescues the girl and boy only to take his own
life in despair, Rabbit-Proof Fence offers a powerful image of Aboriginal
survival of colonial violence and subjugation. In doing so, it inverts two
centuries of the representation of Aboriginal people as a doomed or dying
race, a group of people who have no place in modernity. More specifically,
it reorients the peculiar sense of loss and belatedness associated with the
lost child narrative away from settler anxieties of belonging to the post-
Mabo issue of how the nation can best face up to the shame of the Stolen
Generations.
According to Pierce, stories of lost children have always served as a
form of ‘communal remembrance’, uniting communities in their collective
mourning.45 One of the most famous cinematic representations of the
lost child is a dramatic re-enactment of a true story in John Heyer’s awardwinning
documentary The Back of Beyond (1955), a poetic exploration of
life in the outback seen by large cinema audiences here and overseas. In this
re-enactment, two young blonde-haired, fair-skinned sisters set off from
their homestead into the blinding heat of the desert to seek help after their
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mother unexpectedly dies. The most poignant moment in this depiction of
their story is when the girls cross their own tracks. At this point, the older
girl, like us, realises that they have been travelling in circles. Not wanting to
panic her younger sister, the older girl keeps on walking. Their tiny figures
trace a line across the desert dunes before they disappear into the distance.
The image of Molly emerging from the desert carrying her sister Daisy is a
mirror reversal of the former image. As such, it recovers – in both senses of
theword – a trace of cinematic history for contemporary audiences.And just
as in the past stories of lost children, such as Heyer’s, encouraged collective
public memory, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a powerful invitation to all Australians
to remember publicly the Stolen Generations, to ‘bring them home’.
Returning Home
On 13 January 2004, Molly Kelly died in her sleep at Jigalong. The Age
report on her death named Kelly as ‘the heroine of the film Rabbit-Proof
Fence’, validating the important role the film played in bringing the largely
‘hidden’ story of Kelly’s epic journey to public attention.Here,Molly’s journey
is described as one that ‘ranks as one of the most remarkable feats of
endurance, cleverness and courage in Australian history’.46 In this way, we
can say that the film has achieved the director/producer’s aim of ‘recovering
stolen histories’. But in an important way the report also draws attention to
what is not recoverable, or what we would call the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of
this remarkable story. In the first paragraph we learn that despite allMolly’s
incredible strengths, including her cleverness and outstanding ability to
endure physical pain and deprivation, indeed despite the film’s phenomenal
success both at home and internationally, which has made Molly Kelly a
national heroine, ‘she died with one regret: she was never re-united with
the daughter taken from her 60 years ago’. It is precisely this aspect ofMolly
Kelly’s life that brings us to the traumatic dimensions of Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Sofarwe have shownhowRabbit-ProofFence grafts the political-historical
drama genre onto the romance-quest to create a compelling story that
invokes and at the same time reworks many of the themes, conventions
and melodramatic aspects of the Australian cultural tradition of the lost
child or lost in the bush narratives. This mix of historical realism and the
romance-quest works exceptionally well in the final act where it is integrated
with Indigenous aspects of the narrative. On the precipice of death
from starvation and physical exhaustion, Molly, the heroine, summons the
strength to pull herself back and make the final leg of the journey home
to her mother and community. The film suggests that this strength derives
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from the mother’s and grandmother’s traditional ‘singing’, the two women
camped on the outskirts of their country beside the fence. The heroine is
also awakened and revitalised by the sound of a bird call – her traditional
totem. This call opens her eyes to the sight of her country on the horizon, or
‘Home’, as she sighs to herself. To the sounds of soaringmusic,Molly lifts her
exhausted younger sister in her arms and carries her towards home. Meanwhile,
we cut to Neville’s office where he receives news that his patrol officer
has reached Jigalong. Neville replies, instructing the officer to recapture the
girls. But the patrol officer is spooked.Heading out into the bush in the dead
of night, he isunnervedby thewomen’s singing.Whenhe encountersMaude,
a face-off ensues and he quickly retreats. This leaves the women free to greet
the returning girls. Seeing their mother and grandmother in the distance, the
girls begin to run, puffing and giggling; they cannot contain their joy. In this
moment of reunification, all the women sob loudly.Molly’s joy is tainted by
her concern for the lostGracie. ‘I lost one’, she confesses, referring toGracie’s
recapture by patrol officers. On one level, this image of the reunification of
three generations of Aboriginal women offers a satisfying resolution to the
story, effectively assuaging social anxieties about past race relations, in particular
the issue of the Stolen Generations. Certainly, if the film ended on
this moment of triumph we could all have left the theatre assured that,
as with most romance-quests, the hero’s return resolves all the problems
raised in the course of the story. But this is not where the film ends.
In a vein similar to Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1991), Rabbit-Proof
Fence ends with an epilogue: a flash-forward to the real-life subjects of the
film, shot in the documentary mode. Here, the real-life Molly’s narration
resumes in Aboriginal language, subtitled in English. It serves to remind us
that all along this has beenMolly’s story, a story which began the film in the
Aboriginal tradition of contact narratives: ‘This is a true story of me and
my sisters . . . My mother told me about how the white men first came to
Jigalong . . .’ Now, over a sequence of aerial shots of the vast expansiveness of
the Australian outback, Molly’s voice returns to control the story’s ending:
‘We walked for nine weeks, a long way, all the way home. Then we went
straightaway and hid in the desert. I got married. I had two baby girls . . .’ As
a recount of events following her return home, the epilogue reinforces the
film’s claim to historical truth: the existence of the real-life subjects validates
the authenticity of the story. But more than this, as with ‘Schindler’s Jews’,
who appear at the end of Schindler’s List, Molly speaks as a survivor of the
specific historical trauma the film refers to – the Stolen Generations. In
this way, the film is much more than a historical drama or romance-quest
narrative or even a maternal melodrama. It is an instance of trauma cinema
in which spectators are addressed as witnesses.
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The growing interest in film studies in trauma cinema directly relates
to the emergence of trauma theory as a new paradigm in the humanities
for thinking about memory and history. Based on Freud’s notion of psychic
trauma, this new body of theory concerns itselfwith the processes of remembering
and transmitting memory of catastrophic, overwhelming events, in
particular political historical events, such as theHolocaust, race crimes, rape
in war. A traumatic memory is distinguished from other modes of memory
by its peculiar temporality: a memory that unexpectedly emerges only some
time after the traumatising event or episode in the form of a flashback
or nightmare. For this reason, trauma theory is crucial to the post-WWII
politics of victimhood and blame, which involves the recognition of the
delayed memories of victims of catastrophic events. One of the key questions
for trauma theorists is how trauma is signified. For Cathy Caruth, a
leading figure in trauma theory, traumatic memory is understood by a kind
of hermeneutics that focuses on gaps and absences.47 By this she means
that instead of using methods of cultural analysis that dig deep into the
minds of survivors in the hope of uncovering buried memories, we need to
apply Freud’s concepts of traumatic latency and belatedness to think about
the ways in which traumatic experience emerges as an unconscious delayed
response. For Caruth, literature is a privileged site for such responses. In her
close analysis of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism she shows that while individual
authors or collective producers may not be aware that their narratives
are delayed responses to trauma, the texts themselves always bear signs of
the trauma in their gaps and absences.48 The role of the cultural critic is
to use trauma theory to identify such instances. For screen theorists, this
means analysing how trauma is transmitted in the relations between a text
and its spectators – that is, identifying instances when cinema enables the
transmission of traumatic events in indirect ways, through what is not said
and shown.
To consider howcinema might do this involvesmoving beyond questions
of representation, beyond film as a way of representing specific traumatic
events and episodes, as in genres such as the war movie or political historical
dramas.49 As we have seen, this application of trauma is riddled with
the problems of referentiality: problems of historical accuracy, competing
interpretations of events and claims to truth. In a critical move designed to
take us beyond these problems of referentiality, film critic Thomas Elsaesser
rethinks trauma cinema as instances in film where the notion of referral
is put into crisis, prompting spectators to consider, without foreclosing,
the problem of cinematic referral to the past.50 This can occur in nonrealist
films, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959), where techniques
such as non-linearity, fragmentation, non-synchronous sound and
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repetition mimic the delayed, fragmented nature of traumatic memory. It
can also occur in isolated instances in realist narratives, which JanetWalker
describes as ‘intrusive moments’: flashbacks, sudden changes in camera
angles, fragmentation.51 These new critical approaches to trauma and cinema
are helpful for thinking through the different critical interpretations of
the taking-the-children-away scene in Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Approaching the film as a political-historical drama – which it is –
the neo-conservative Akerman took offence at this particular scene from
Rabbit-Proof Fence, claiming that because it departs from Pilkington’s written
account of the event it ‘misleads’ viewers about the historical truth of
the story.52 In response, Noyce argues that the scene is a ‘typical’ representation.
In her comments on the scene, JaneMills takes a different approach.
For her, the problem lies not with questions of representation and historical
accuracy but with processes of identification.53 She argues that the scene
is not as effective as it might have been because it occurs too early in the
film. She writes that because we have not yet had time to identify with the
girls we cannot feel the full effect of the event.54 Mills is right to suggest that
in terms of classical narrative structure the scene comes too early. It begins
as a typical ration-day at the small isolated government outpost. Molly’s
mother, Maude (Ningali Lawford), is there to collect her ration of flour.
She jokes with the European government officer, while the girls chat with
other European men, employed by the government to maintain the fence.
Suddenly the mood changes. A car approaches and as Maude realises that
the driver is here to take the girls away she begins to scream out to the
girls, telling them to run. We would argue, however, that it is precisely the
scene’s too-soonness, its intrusive quality that allows for something other
than character identification.
As Mills suggests, this scene marks a different visual and aural register:
life at Jigalong is suddenly all movement and commotion. The hand-held
mobile camerawork creates a skewed perspective on events. A lot of the
scene is shot from an extremely low angle, positioning us as spectators at
the centre of the physical struggle between the officer, Maude and Molly.
The soundtrack is also sped up in a cacophony of harsh, percussive sounds
combined with the girls’ piercing screams. These skewed, low-angle, mobile
shots are juxtaposed in a series of rapid edits with extreme close-ups of
Daisy and Gracie’s stunned faces as they watch through the car windows,
the action circlingthemand us.Thefilmthen cuts back toawide-shot, the car
receding into the distance to the sound of the girls’ grandmother wailing.
In this way, the scene allows for two kinds of spectatorship. The sudden
intrusion of non-realist techniques draws us into the action of the scene,
involving us in the violence of the separation. But the scene then quickly
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repositions us at a distance. In the logic of identification, it may haveworked
better for us to have stayed with the girls. By repositioning us back with
the mothers, to one side, the film insists that we witness the aftermath of
the trauma: the mother collapsed under the weight of shock and grief, the
old woman hitting her head with a sharp stone in a traditional grieving
ritual. In its intrusiveness, the scene takes us out of the historical time of
the film’s narrative, transporting us into the now. As a cultural response
to Bringing Them Home, the film rehearses recognisable public symbols
and images of the Stolen Generations, effectively making the film another
forum for the ‘public hearing’ of the trauma of child separation.55 Darlene
Johnson’s remarkable documentary, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, supports
this interpretation of the scene as public hearing or re-enactment.56 Here,we
discover just how difficult it was for the actors to perform this scene, which
is in effect a re-enactment of a trauma that continues to affect all of the
Aboriginal participants in the film in more or less direct ways. For Everlyn
Sampi, who playsMolly, performing this scene was especially traumatising,
for she found herself re-enacting her real-life mother’s experience. For this
reason alone, Johnson’s documentary is crucial viewing.
Traumatic intrusion in Rabbit-Proof Fence is not, however, limited to
these direct scenes of taking the children away. Returning to the epilogue
mentioned earlier, we find what is for us the most shocking revelation of the
film. In her account of what followed her return home,Molly Kelly explains
how she was forced to repeat the horrendous trek from Moore River to
Jigalong:
We went straightaway and hid in the desert. I got married. I had two baby girls.
Then they took me and my two girls back to that place – Moore River. And I
walked all the way . . . back to Jigalong again, carrying Annabelle, the little one.
When she was three, that Mr Neville took her away. I’ve never seen her again.
In the space of a few seconds the comforting effect of the triumphal journey
home is completely undercut as we try to comprehend the full meaning of
Molly’s recapture, her second undertaking of this incredible trek, only to
have her youngest child forcibly removed from her by the same man who
removed her from her mother – a child whom we know from the media
report of Molly’s death mentioned earlier was never ‘found’, that is, never
reunited with Molly.
On a visual level, Molly’s narration bridges the film’s slippage from narrative
film, through a series of landscape shots, to the final documentary
sequence in which the real-life subjects Molly Kelly and Daisy Burungu
seemingly emerge out of the desert, indeed, out of the past into the present.
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What we see are two strong, proud older Indigenous women, striding out
across their country, their home. They are two ‘found’ members of the
Stolen Generations, with Molly once again leading the way. As we review
this footage now in the wake of news of Molly Kelly’s death, we reflect on
Noyce’s stated aim of wanting to use film to recover ‘stolen histories’.What
we know is that the thousands of untold, ‘buried’ stories of Aboriginal child
removal cannot be fully recovered for the public record.We cannot use film
to magically reconstruct lost or, to use Caruth’s term, unclaimed experience
in the same way that film designers and set builders reconstructed the
rabbit-proof fence. This film has, however, allowed for a better understanding
of the truly traumatic nature of the forced removal ofAboriginal children
from their families, that is, child separation as an event that is repeated in
various forms of loss, like a nightmare, long after the original injury. A
willingness by audiences to be witnesses to this public testimony of child
separation is evident in the film’s success. As a film that was prompted by
and quickly responded to a large public outcry about the findings of Bringing
ThemHome, the film’s success also confirms that, as in the past, present-day
Australians are perhaps more willing to acknowledge and take responsibility
for the trauma of child separation than other shameful episodes in our
colonial history, suggesting that at some level of the Australian social imaginary
‘the Aborigine’ may still be seen as the ‘lost child’. If this is so, then
the image of Molly emerging from the desert, both as a child and later as a
grown woman, is an iconic image of Aboriginal survival that shatters that
particularmyth by demanding recognition of Aboriginal people as being at
home in their country.
Notes
1 SeeHuman Rights and Equal OpportunityCommission, Bringing ThemHome: Report
on the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children from their families, Canberra, 1997. Robert Manne argues that ‘No inquiry
in recent Australian history has had a more overwhelming reception nor, at least in
the short term, a more culturally transforming impact.’ He shows how within a short
period of Bringing Them Home being tabled in parliament in 1997, the issue of the
Stolen Generations and the associated question of a national apology ‘moved from
the margin to the centre of Australian self-understanding and contemporary political
debate’: ‘In denial: the stolen generations and the right’, Quarterly Essay, no. 1, 2001,
pp. 5–6.
2 Rabbit-Proof Fence opened nationwide on 21 February 2002 on a hundred screens. It
grossed AU$1.2 million in its first week, increasing to approximately AUS$7.5 million
by the end of the year, making it the second highest grossing film in Australia in
2002. (It was pipped by well-known comedianMickMolloy’s Crackerjack, released in
November 2002 on 203 screens, which earned AUS$7.7 million.) It has also performed
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reasonably well internationally: New Zealand (NZ$1.3 million); UK (£1.6 million),
USA (US$4.3 million). It has been picked up by distributors in Germany, France and
Mexico. Source: Inside Film, April 2003, p. 59.
3 ibid., p. 128.
4 Hunter Cordaiy, ‘The truth of the matter: an interview with Phillip Noyce’, Metro,
131–42, pp. 128–9.
5 ibid., p. 128.
6 Becker Entertainment, Rabbit-Proof Fence Media Kit, p. 11.
7 Doris Pilkington-Garimara, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Brisbane: University of
Queensland Press, 1996.
8 EvanWilliams, Australian, 23 February 2002.
9 Piers Akerman, ‘Artistic licence spoils this saga’, Sunday Telegraph, 3 March 2002,
p. 89.
10 Robert Manne, ‘The colour of prejudice’, Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition,
23–4 February 2002, Spectrum, pp. 4–7.
11 ibid., pp. 24–8.
12 ibid., pp. 51–7.
13 Phillip Noyce, ‘Rabbit-proof defence’, Sunday Telegraph, 10 March 2002, p. 99.
14 On Ron Brunton’s accusation of ‘false memories’, see Manne, ‘The colour of prejudice’,
pp. 31–42.
15 On the Quadrant weekend seminar ‘Truth and Sentimentality’, see ibid., pp. 86–93.
16 ibid.
17 Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of
Australia, Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.
18 Akerman, p. 89.
19 ibid., p. 89.
20 Q&A Session, Tower Cinema (Greater Union), 30 March 2002.
21 Mills, ‘Truth and the rabbit-proof fence’, Real Time, 48, April–May 2002, p. 15.
22 Becker Entertainment, Rabbit-Proof Fence Media Kit, p. 17.
23 Cordaiy, ‘The truth of the matter’, p. 130.
24 See Bringing Them Home, p. 30.
25 Extracts from Neville’s writing and interviews are reprinted in Bringing ThemHome,
1997.
26 See Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
27 Susan Dermody, ‘Action and adventure’. In Scott Murray (ed.), The New Australian
Cinema, Melbourne: Nelson, 1980, p. 81.
28 ibid., p. 82
29 ibid.
30 Pierce, p. xii.
31 ibid.
32 For detailed analysis of 19th-century representations of the lost child, including
illustrated magazines, see Pierce, The Country of Lost Children, pp. 3–94.
33 Becker Entertainment, p. 17.
34 Pierce, The Country of Lost Children, p. xii.
35 The idea for this fictional film was prompted by an SBS documentary, Black Tracker
(Michael Riley, 1997) about Sergeant Alexander (Alex) Riley.
36 Pierce, The Country of Lost Children, p. xii.
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Lost, Stolen and Found
37 ibid., pp. xii–xiii.
38 ibid., p. xiii.
39 ibid., p. 3.
40 Dermody, ‘Action and adventure’, p. 83.
41 Richard Combs, ‘Not god’s sunflowers: Nicholas Roeg on Walkabout’. In Raffaele
Caputo and Geoff Burton (eds), Second Take: Australian Filmmakers Talk, Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 165.
42 ibid., p. 170.
43 ibid., p. 168.
44 On representations of Aboriginality in film, see Marcia Langton, ‘Well, I heard it on
the radio and I saw it on the television’: an essay for the Australian Film Commission
on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things,
Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.
45 Pierce, The Country of Lost Children, p. xii.
46 Tony Squires, ‘Remarkable life by “the fence” ends forMolly , 87’, The Age, 15 January
2004.
47 Cathy Caruth, ‘Unclaimed experience: trauma and the possibility of history’, Yale
French Studies, 79, Literature and the Ethical Question, 1991, pp. 181–92.
48 ibid., p. 182.
49 Susannah Radstone, Introduction, ‘Special debate: trauma and screen studies: opening
the debate’, Screen, 42(2) 2001, pp. 188–93.
50 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Postmodernism as mourning work’, Screen, 42(2) 2001, p. 194.
51 Janet Walker, ‘Trauma cinema: false memories and true experience’, Screen, 42(2)
2001, p. 194.
52 Akerman, ‘Artistic licence spoils this saga’, p. 89.
53 Jane Mills, ‘Truth and the rabbit-proof fence’, Real Time, 48, April–May 2002, p. 15.
54 ibid.
55 Here, we are thinking of resonances between the close-ups of the children’s and
mother’s hands flattened against the impenetrable barrier of the glass window and
the nationwide Sorry Day’s ‘sea of hands’ that uses the Aboriginal rock painting
motif of the hand to symbolise the nation’s apology, an image of reaching out to
bring stolen children home, literally and metaphorically.
56 Johnson’s documentary is included as a special feature on the collector’s edition
Rabbit-Proof Fence DVD, distributed by Magna Pacific and Becker Entertainment.
151
9
Escaping History and Shame
in Looking for Alibrandi, Head
On and Beneath Clouds
Australian film critics often claim that one new film or another marks the
coming of age of the Australian film industry. In the 1980s, Gallipoli (Peter
Weir, 1981) achieved this by telling the story of the Allies’ World War I
invasion ofTurkey fromanAustralian perspective. In the 1990s, the termwas
no longer applied to nationalist narratives but to ‘outward-looking’ genre
films, such as the thriller Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) and the musical
Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), as discussed inChapter 2. In addition,
each era of the Australian cinema has its share of coming-of-age narratives.
In a reappraisal of the genre, Raffaele Caputo argues that the comingof-
age film serves as a ‘mirror’ of the nation’s development.1 Stories of
personal maturity are often set against the background of a major turning
point in a nation’s past: theVietnamWar inAmericanGraffiti (George Lucas,
1973),WorldWar II in Summer of 42 (RobertMulligan, 1971) and Racing the
Moon (Richard Benjamin, 1984). The subgenre routinely uses first-person
narration – an adult looking back at a key turning point in his or her adolescence,
a socialising moment in which he or she crosses the threshold into the
world of adulthood. As Caputo and others have argued, this characteristic
nostalgic view leads to a depiction of the past as a more innocent and secure
place than the present, even when set against a background of large-scale
historical turning points.
This tendency in the coming-of-age film to depict the past as an innocent
and secure place is part of what Charles Acland identifies as ‘the adult
gaze’ – the coming-of-age film’s attribution of adult values and significance
to events involving adolescents.2 Take Stand By Me (Rob Rainer, 1986), for
example.Using a retrospective first-person narration, the film tells the story
of a young adolescent, Gordie, who is having difficulties coming to terms
with the death of his brother. The film focuses on a group adventure in
which Gordie and his mates set out to find the dead body of a missing boy.
As the adult narrator tells it, this adventure marks a profound turning point
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Escaping History and Shame
in his life, for the shocking sight of the immobile body releases a newfound
inner strength, allowing Gordie not only to accept his brother’s death but to
courageously challenge a group of older local boys who were also interested
in claiming the body. Gordie’s friends recognise him as the hero of the day.
But for the narrator, this struggle over the dead body, this coming to grips
with death, represents his coming of age, the moment when he crosses the
threshold into the adult world, putting him at a distance from his boyhood
friends.
Several problems arise when stories about teen experience are told from
the perspective of an adult. In her work on the teen genre, Lesley Speed convincingly
argues that the nostalgic adult perspective serves to contain adolescent
experience.3 Drawing on Lawrence Grossberg’s sociological studies
of contemporary youth culture, Speed shows how the nostalgic comingof-
age film contains ‘the mobility and immediacy’ of youth experience.4
In modern consumer societies adolescence marks a period of transition
in which teenagers discover powers of mobility that allow them to inhabit
spaces in between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere:
shopping malls, cars, dances, sporting events, and so on. It is also a period
in which experience is paramount, leading to the popular notion of living
for the moment. Speed interprets the coming-of-age film’s quest to contain
this mobility and immediacy as an adult desire for ‘moral and ideological
certainty’.5 Caputo makes a similar case in his analysis of late 1980s to early
1990sAustralian coming-of-age films. Caputo recalls that inAustralia ‘in the
1980s the notion of coming-of-age had its use, politically, with the sparks
of an economic turn-a-round (or was it a sporting triumph?), as both a
description of the nation’s character, and a promise of better things to come
for the whole nation’.6 For Caputo, this promise of better things to come
for all rests on Australia’s development as a multicultural society. In his
analysis of a group of multicultural coming-of-age films, Caputo interprets
the development of characters such asMarthe and Ermanno in Devil in the
Flesh (Scott Murray, 1989), ‘away from Anglo-Celtic notions of puritanism
and patriarchy to a more European equality, openness and warmth’ as a
mirror reflection of social changes that have taken place in Australia since
the early 1960s.7 In other words, in the uncertain times of the 1980s, nostalgic
coming-of-age films including Devil in the Flesh, as well as Australia’s
most highly acclaimed coming-of-age film, The Year My Voice Broke (John
Duigan, 1987), may have been of little interest to younger audiences but
nevertheless serve a useful purpose by reassuring baby-boomer audiences
that the nation’s future is in good hands.8
However, if we turn to coming-of-age films in Australia in the 1990s,
especially those centred on youth experience, we find a very different story
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about where we are as a nation. Here, nostalgia is displaced by an emphasis
on the immediacy of the moment. And yet, as we show in the following
analyses, this group of films invites us to consider the relation between the
past and the present. In Looking for Alibrandi (Kate Woods, 2000), Head
On (Ana Kokkinos, 1998) and Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen, 2002) stories of
coming of age reveal a picture of young Australians as the inheritors of a
nation divided on issues of race relations, land politics, national security,
and how best to deal with shameful episodes from our colonial past. These
films are very different in style and content. What they have in common,
however, is the expression of a form of teen mobility fuelled by the desire
to ‘escape history’. Our aim is to show that while this desire should not be
taken as equivalent to the forms of denial of history and amnesia discussed
in previous chapters, it is symptomatic of the specific difficulties of coming
of age in post-MaboAustralia.We also want to showhowthis desire, which is
articulated differently across various social divisions and identity categories
such as gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality and location, can lead to a new way
of thinking about the politics of shame.
‘You Can’t Let the Past Run Your Life’:
Looking For Alibrandi
Looking For Alibrandi is directed by KateWoods, one of a new generation of
Australian film directors who move easily between the film and television
industries. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Melena
Marchetta, who also wrote the screenplay. The award-winning novel was
first published by Penguin in 1992 and is an all-time favourite book for
thousands of Australian teenagers. On the book’s impact on teenagers of
the 1990s, director Woods is quoted in media releases as saying that when
actors were auditioning for parts in the film they all lined up forMarchetta
to sign their copies of Looking for Alibrandi.9 She also says they wanted to
meet the writer because everyone could identify with the book so much. It
is, she says, ‘universally loved’, as indicated by its success here in Australia,
as well as in Denmark, Italy, Germany, Spain, Norway and Canada. But
as the director insists, the story is distinctly Australian. For Woods, it was
important that the film bring out this Australianness without recourse to
what she describes as ‘the overly self-conscious or parodying approach of
contemporary Australian cinema’, that is, so-called quirky films such as
Muriel’s Wedding (P. J. Hogan, 1994) and The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997). She
also aimed for a certain visual quality that she describes as ‘authentic urban’:
‘I wanted to have an urban Australia, but I wanted working urban Australia.
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Escaping History and Shame
I really didn’t want pretty picture postcards.’10 This aim is achieved by the
film’s use of locations and non-professional actors. It is shot in over forty
locations in inner western and eastern Sydney, with many scenes involving
non-professional ‘locals’, such as the use of hundreds of secondary school
students in the interschool speech day scene at the Sydney Opera House,
as well as the inclusion of many members of Marchetta’s family in scenes
depicting community and family celebrations.
With its emphasis on questions of identity and belonging, Looking for
Alibrandi is a multicultural narrative in a vein similar to classic films of the
early 1990s, such as The Heartbreak Kid (Michael Jenkins, 1993) and Strictly
Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992). The main character and narrator, Josie
Alibrandi, is an Italo-Australian teenage girl. She is one of a small minority
of scholarship girls or ‘wogs on handout’ as her nemesis, the very richAnglo-
Celtic Carly, calls them, at an exclusive Catholic girls’ school in Sydney’s
eastern suburbs. As with all multicultural narratives, the story foregrounds
questions of cultural difference, beginning with Josie’s confession of her
desire to escape from her life in the Italian community of inner western
Sydney – ‘Little Italy’, as she calls it. As the illegitimate daughter of the
once socially shunned Christina Alibrandi and granddaughter of the very
traditional and highly superstitious grandmother, Cartia, Josie desperately
aspires to make a future for herself in the world of the wealthy Anglocentric
middle classes of eastern Sydney.
The first third of the film depicts Josie as a feisty, independent girl trapped
between two opposing forces. On one side of the city, Josie is subjected to the
repressive gaze of the close-knit Italo-Australian community.Her experience
of the constrictions of tradition is beautifully realised in a fantasy sequence
depicting the community as a well-organised spy-ring. On the other side of
town, at school, the forms of racial prejudice that reduce her to ‘an ethnic’
limit Josie’s potential. As with manymulticultural narratives, issues of racial
and ethnic conflict are raised in the staging of an intercultural romance.
There are two Anglo boys of interest to Josie: John Barton and Jacob Coote.
John is the idealised image of Josie’s fantasies of escape into the middle to
upper-class Anglo world.He comes from a long line of wealthy conservative
politicians. In a scene that must invoke vivid memories for any spectator
who attended a single-sex school, John and a group of other boys arrive at
Josie’s school for an interschool debate.Leading the others, Johnis luminous:
blonde-haired, fine-featured, confident and yet at the same time graceful.
For Josie, John is one of those chosen few who knows exactly who he is
and where he belongs.What Josie fails to see is that beneath John’s outward
confidence and good manners lies a deep sense of despair, for he is equally
burdened by the constrictions of family traditions and expectations.
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Meanwhile, Josie also crosses paths with the rough-mannered but nevertheless
charming Jacob Coote. At the interschool speech day, Josie gives a
predictably safe, well-written ‘aspirational’ speech about individual success
and social responsibility. But it is Jacob’s speech that captures the teenage
audience’s imagination. Jacob is the captain of the local state school, Cook
High, and speaks as a member of a globalised youth culture. Using explicit
references to media culture and mass violence, he expresses his disgust at
the world his generation has inherited in direct, humorous and colloquial
terms. This direct, down-to-earth intelligence catches Josie’s attention. But
on her first date with Jacob, this working-class ‘Anglo’ proves to be none too
subtle on the issue of cultural difference, causing Josie to stomp off from
what she describes as ‘the shortest date in history’.
Wewould be mistaken, however, to see this film only in terms ofmulticulturalism.
On one level, the opposition between John and Jacob reproduces
the stereotypical class distinction that characterises Australian cultural traditions
of Anglo-Celtic masculinity: the serious, intellectual, gentrified John
versus the self-mocking, lovable working man Jacob. But their differences
turn out to be more complex than this. Jacob has a warm and loving relationship
with his widowed father, while John is burdened by the weight
of tradition and family expectations. This attention to family relations in
the boys’ back-stories is just one of the many ways that the film allows for
teen identification across cultural borders such as gender and class. As the
story unfolds, we see that Josie’s quest to discover who she is and where she
belongs is also shaped by factors other than cultural difference. The film
realistically depicts the Higher School Certificate as a make or break event
in her life. And as with Jacob, Josie has to deal with a wide range of challenges
that situate her as a member of an increasingly globalised youth culture.
Throughout, Josie struggles with the gap between media projections of
teenage experience and her lived reality. In an early scene, she rescues herself
from a teacher’s reprimand by providing a cutting, on-the-spot critique of
the ways in which girls’ magazines can be patronising and demeaning. The
impact of these projected images of youth culture on teen self-image is also
realised in fantasy sequences. In one instance, Josie imagines the exclusive
world of a model’s photo-shoot, starring ‘the perfect’ Carly. On another
occasion she projects herself as ‘the star’ of a media conference: here she is
married to her ‘crush’ John Barton, who is now the youngest ever conservative
PrimeMinister of Australia while Josie is leader of the opposition. This
depiction of Josie as a strong-willed, media-savvy girl takes the appeal of
Looking for Alibrandi beyond the terms of national cinema, situating the film
in an international post-feminist, post-multicultural subgenre of comingof-
age films that feature articulate, independent and at times extremely
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stroppy ‘kick-ass’ girls: Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000), 10 Things I Hate
About You (Gil Junger, 1999), Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chanda,
2002), Real Women Have Curves (Patricia Cardoso, 2002). And as with all
of these films, Looking for Alibrandi also draws on aspects of American teen
film and television, especially in its use of music.11
ButwhileLooking forAlibrandi is both international and outward-looking
in its approach to issues of teen identity and culture, it is also very much
a film of its time. Its foregrounding of questions of personal history and
shame resonates strongly with a wider post-Mabo politics of shame. As
the story goes, Josie’s lack of knowledge about her paternity is an obstacle
to her development of a sense of self, a sense of belonging. Indeed, her
family’s shame about Josie’s illegitimacy is one of the main reasons she desperately
wants to escape from the family and community. In the repressive
traditional world of ‘Little Italy’ Josie will always be a marginalised, shamed
subject, not knowing who her father is. That is, until the day that Michael
Andretti, formerneighbour of the Alibrandis, returns tothe community.The
film’s brilliant casting allows for a powerful shock of recognition when the
dark-haired, olive-skinned Josie opens the door to greet Michael Andretti,
instantly recognising the family resemblance. Her father’s face is a mirrorimage
of her own. For Josie, this shock of recognition is traumatic. Her
initial response to the truth of his identity is to refuse to acknowledge him.
She doesn’t want to be an Andretti, her father’s daughter. But as one might
expect, the uncovering of this secret of her origin leads to the revelation of
others. Putting two and two together, Josie learns that her mother is not
who she appears to be, that is, an Alibrandi. Rather, she is the child of her
grandmother’s extramarital lover: an attractiveAnglo bushman by the name
of Sandford. In a highly pitched emotional scene played in both English and
Italian, Josie confronts her grandmother with her suspicion. Josie’s courage
in challenging herNonna, exposing the false basis of her religious and moral
traditions, aswell as her superstitious beliefs in curses, frees three generations
of women from the ‘chains of the past’, allowing them to move forward
as a family and as proud, independent women.
As with many second-generation multicultural narratives, Looking for
Alibrandi eschews the nostalgia and melancholic longing for the past that
characterises first-generationmulticultural narratives in favour of an unsentimental
view.12 It also manages to sidestep the problematic binary structure
of good Ethnic/bad Anglo or what Tom O’Regan calls ‘othering the
Australian’ in films such as They’re A Weird Mob (Michael Powell, 1966)
and Strictly Ballroom.13 Instead, this film about ‘Josephine Andretti who
was never an Alibrandi who should have been a Sandford and may never
be a Coote’ speaks in a direct and honest way about the burden of history
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to a generation of teenagers who have inherited a nation divided on the
issue of how best to deal with shameful episodes from the past. Hence this
is not a mirror reflection of the nation’s coming of age but of the traumas
preventing maturity. In the end, Looking For Alibrandi conforms to the
multicultural narrative’s tradition of a final scene of intercultural, intergenerational
integration. Here, Jacob Coote joins Josie’s family and their
Italian neighbours in the work and festivities of ‘Tomato Day’, an annual
community activity. But despite this celebration of plurality, things are not
entirely resolved. Josie is not sure if she has a future with Jacob Coote. Her
father is here today, but may well return to Adelaide. Her mother seems to
have forgiven her grandmother, but we cannot be sure. What is of interest,
however, is that Josie’s coming of age, which as we have seen involves facing
her past and accepting the complex nature of her identity, forces the older
generations to reveal and take responsibility for their secrets. In this way,
Josie is an enabling figure, which is something new in this genre. Unlike the
classic teen films in which the adult gaze prevails and the primary function
is to reassure, Josie is insistent in her childlike refusal to follow her family’s
traditions, to become a subject of shame as her mother was made to be. In
doing so, her courage opens a way forward for all, showing how the flexibility
associated with the mobility and immediacy of youth allows for the
possibility of facing shameful episodes from our past without recourse to
either guilt or denial.
‘He Ran to Escape History. That’s His Story’: Head On
Like Looking for Alibrandi, Head On is a coming-of age film that allows us
to consider the mobility and immediacy of contemporary teen experience.
But unlike Alibrandi’s sweet, effervescent approach to these aspects of teen
experience, Head On is a high-velocity assault on the senses. Techniques
such as hand-held camera, tight, claustrophobic framing and rapid editing
emphasise the visceral nature of the experiences the film depicts: sex, drugtaking,
music, dancing and violence. This kinetic style divided Australian
critics. Many of the older, mainstream critics found the film’s aesthetic
unrelenting, concluding that it was a bleak and depressing piece. Other
critics, however, were dazzled by the film’s energy, claiming it marked a
coming of age of the film industry. Paul Fischer wrote, ‘It would be true
to say that with first-time director Ana Kokkinos’ audacious work [Head
On] Australian cinema has come of age’,14 while FILMINK describes Head
On as ‘a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart of Australian cinema’.15
The film also went on to become a mainstream breakthrough, which is
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quite astounding considering its ‘R’ rating and non-mainstream subject:
a queer/ethnic coming-of-age story. It was perhaps this success that contributed
to the film’s support by AFI voters. At the 1998 AFI awards Head
On won five awards, including Best Film for its highly respected, experienced
producer, Jane Scott, and Best Achievement in Directing for relative
newcomer Ana Kokkinos. The film has also gone on to win numerous international
awards in both mainstream and Gay and Queer film festivals. Yet
despite this acclaim thefilmis somewhat of a misfit in the canon ofAustralian
cinema, often overlooked in favour of quirky films such The Castle and The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliot, 1994) on film
courses and other lists.16 There has also been surprisingly little academic
writing on it, leading us to conclude that it is in many ways not only a
film about a troubled teen but is itself the troubled teen of 1990s Australian
cinema.
This description ofHeadOnas a troubled teen is indebted to Chris Berry’s
critique, one of the few academic reviews of the film.17 Berry argues that
Head On has been too easily pigeonholed as either an ‘ethnic’ or a ‘gay’ film.
It is, he says, both of these things. But he also insists that its breakthrough in
mainstream Australian cinemas suggests there is something else going on.
For Berry, this something else relates to its coming-of-age narrative. Just as
we suggested that Looking for Alibrandi draws on techniques and popular
themes in the contemporary American teen film, in particular the kick-ass
girl films, Berry argues that Head On has a lot in common with a new crop
of American coming-of-age films such as The Opposite of Sex (Don Roos,
1998), Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998) and The Ice Storm(Ang Lee, 1997). In
these films teenagers ‘struggle to cope with self-absorbed parents’.18 Like the
teens in The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), the young protagonists
in this new crop of films are the children of baby-boomers, that is, the
sons and daughters of the generation of teens depicted in classic nostalgic
teen films such as American Graffiti or Stand By Me. In earlier American
teen films, such as Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), teen rebels
are misunderstood, troubled youth crying out to be understood, indeed
pleading to be rescued by their parents and other adults. By the 1980s young
disgruntled protagonists, like those in The Breakfast Club, no longer plead
with adults but forthrightlydemandtheir attention: ‘Don’tYouForgetAbout
Me’. In the 1990s, however, troubled teens are long past believing that the
baby-boomer generation has any workable solutions to offer, let alone the
ability to rescue teens. Ari, as Berry suggests, belongs to this latter group of
rebels.
The kind of alienation expressed by Ari in Head On and, more importantly,
embodied in the film’s aesthetic of speed, takes us beyond the available
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terms of identity politics. Unlike Josie, who desperately wants to discover
who she is and where she belongs, Ari knows he is a Greek Australian who
likes to have sex with men. His dilemma takes the formof a double bind: he
simultaneously belongs to and is rejected by his patriarchal Greek community.
As a result, Ari lives a double life. And as the film shows in its numerous
scenes of Ari’s self-destructive behaviour, this duplicity is tearing him apart.
He lashes out at people he despises.He lashes out at people he loves. And he
pushes his body to its physical limits in an all-night drug, sex and alcohol
binge.
The film also registers other, global forces that impact onAri’s experience.
The film’s aesthetic speaks suggestively to the speed of changes in perception
and experience of time and space that cultural theoristAndreasHuyssen
describes as ‘an ever-shrinking present’.19 The great paradox of our globalised
era is that while the world is expanding through the opening up of
borders, such as those of nation-states and trade zones, on another level
we experience the world as one of ever-narrowing horizons through issues
such as border protection. Temporal experience has also been transformed.
The distance between the past and the present is increasingly diminished
throughmultiple forms of ‘musealization’: that is, ‘an expansive historicism
of our contemporary culture, a cultural present gripped with an unprecedented
obsession with the past’ (discussed in Chapter 1).20 At the same
time, Huyssen and others make a convincing case for significant ‘entropy’
of our sense of future possibilities. But in this description of global anxieties
about the speed of change and ever-shrinking horizons of time and space,
Huyssen takes care to note that such anxieties are also always experienced in
local registers, that is, tied to histories of specific nations and states.21 Head
On is a simultaneous articulation of these two registers – global and local.
As Berry notes in his article, Ari is a child of global mobility. In a series of
flashbacks we see Ari with his young radical parents. In one episode, they
are demonstrating against the military dictatorship of Greece in the 1970s.
Another episode evokes post-WWII immigrant arrival scenes. The film’s
inclusion of these flashbacks does not, however, invite a nostalgic view of
the past. Rather, we are invited to see Ari’s parents through his eyes, recognising
a certain despair and disappointment that leads the unemployed Ari
and, surely, so many others of his generation to distrust political rhetoric,
to scoff at politicians’ promises of ‘better things to come for all’. Or as Ari
says, ‘They tell you that God is dead, but, man, they still want you to have a
purpose.’
So if, as we suggest, Ari represents a new kind of troubled teen, then it
is one that is neither convinced nor consoled by the rhetoric of identity
politics. Asked whether he is proud to be Greek, Ari responds: ‘Proud to be
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Greek? I had nothing to dowith it!’ Similarly, the discourse of Gay Liberation
is of little relevance to him. For as Berry points out, Ari’s relationship with
Toula/Johnny (Paul Capsis) ‘has shown Ari what it means to be publicly
visible as amanwhohas sexwith othermenand continues tolive in theGreek
community’.22 For this teen there are only two possible options to escape the
constrictions of his double bind, the ‘ever-shrinking present’. At first, Ari
dreams of returning to Greece, fleeing the country, just as his parents once
fled the repressive regime of their homeland. ButAri’s mother quickly points
out to him the futility of this dream. Better than most, Ari’s mother knows
from her own experience as a low-paid migrant factory worker that there
is no ‘space’ outside the globalised economy that we can magically escape
to. Ari’s only other option is to ‘escape history’. Unlike Josie in Looking for
Alibrandi, who escapes the repressive forces of tradition by exposing secret
episodes of shame from the past, Ari chooses to hide his ‘shame’ – living as a
self-appointed abject outcast in a permanent state of disconnection or, as it
is put by Christos Tsiolkas in his novel Loaded (on which the film is based),
in a permanent state of ‘fast forward’:
Fast forward past birth, early childhood, school . . . Fast forward to an old man,
a drunk putting his hands between my legs. I enjoy it . . . Press play. Peter and
me share a bong . . . Fast forward past movies. Sneaking into Caligula . . . Fast
Forward through more instructions. This is how you fuck, this is how you drink,
this is how you take drugs . . . I aint ever going to connect. Stop tape. Press Play . . .
He ran to escape history. That’s his story. Press Stop. Tape is terminated.23
Head On is a powerful mimetic realisation of Ari’s desire to live in fastforward
mode. In its high-velocity account of twenty-four hours inAri’s life,
it bears testimony to the incredible speed of change that Australia has experienced
at both a global and national level in the past ten years or more: the
new post-Mabo politics of race including the PaulineHanson phenomenon,
the rapid switch in focus from Keating’s ‘big picture’, to Howard’s narrowed
horizons, the ever-improving economy that has led to an ever-expanding
gap between richand poor, and so on. Thefilmis also an interesting indicator
of the different levels of where we’re at as a nation in terms of queer issues.
On one level the film’s mainstream breakthrough in its theatrical release
indicates a considerable interest in queer issues. At the same time, the film
is in itself a vivid display of what Fran Martin describes as the centrality of
shame to forms of gay and queer identification (more on this below).24 In
reviews ofHead On,much has been made of the final visually striking image
and its audacious voice-over. Here, Ari rallies against a world he refuses
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to take in, a world that he speeds through in fast-forward mode. In a Jean
Genet-like gesture of homosexual abjection he cries:
I’m a whore, a dog, and a cunt.
My father’s insults make me strong.
I accept them all.
I’m sliding toward the sewer, I’m not struggling.
I can smell the shit, but I’m still breathing.
I’m gonna live my life.
I’m not going to make a difference
I’m not going to change a thing
No one is going to remember me when I’m dead
I’m a sailor and whore,
and I will be until the end of the world.
As a coming-of-agemomentthis is awonderfully perverse image.Ari’swords
are both powerful and expansive. He is not a ‘rebel without a cause’ but
rather the embodiment of anti-rebellion, a lived form of a powerful refusal
to engage, to be subjugated. But as Ari dances in circles on an empty wharf
at Port Melbourne there is also something alarming about this image. Ari’s
words express his determination to escape time, space and the socialising
forces of history by immersing himself in the speed and immediacy of the
present, exposing the wounds of his shaming in a form of homosexual
abjection. As such, the film itself refuses to submit to the genre’s tendency
to look back, to reassure its audience, to satisfy the patriarchal, heterosexist
fantasy of familial unity. The question is, however, what does Ari’s decision
to disengage say about the nation’s maturity and possibilities for moving
forward in such a way that we might recognise the injurious wounds of
shame inflicted on Ari and others excluded from the social imaginary.
Before It’s Too Late: Beneath Clouds
Beneath Clouds is also underscored by a strong desire to escape history. But
unlike other coming-of-age films discussed in this chapter, it is not set in
urbanAustralia. Rather, the film’s story takes place on the back roads of rural
NewSouthWales, somewhere betweenMoree and Sydney. The director, Ivan
Sen, is currently the Australian film industry’s wunderkind: amulti-talented
graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School who writes,
directs and composes film scores. The quality of his work was recognised at
the 2002 AFI awards, where he pipped Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence)
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for the award of Best Achievement in Directing for Beneath Clouds. To date,
all Sen’s Australian films are set in rural Australia and feature young black
protagonists. All reports indicate, however, that the director ‘bristles’ when
his films are labelled ‘Aboriginal’.25 This is not because Sen has a problem
identifying as an Indigenous Australian. Rather, as with many contemporary
Aboriginal artists, including filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, Sen fears the
problems that may arise when his work is pigeonholed this way. These
problems include Australian audiences’ historical lack of interest in stories
about Aboriginal people and their culture, the assumption that because his
films feature Aboriginal characters theywill beworthy, ‘message’-type films,
and, most problematically, perhaps, that Sen ‘speaks’ as a representative of
all Aboriginal people.
Beneath Clouds is none of the above. This may be a generational thing.
His films are about young people and address a younger, globalised audience
of Australians that Marcia Langton argues have grown up with a different
set of images of Aboriginality from previous generations. As Langton sees
it, this younger generation of Australians is empowered by their access to
a global world, ‘at once cosmopolitan and networked’.26 As such, they are,
she writes,
able to relate to the Aboriginal world in a less troubled way than their parents and
they are almost oblivious toAustralia’s blinding colonial legacy of white supremacy
and race hatred. Their images of the Aboriginal world are not the images of
monochromatic misery that their parents see, but a heady mix of politics, sport
and culture.27
They are a generation of younger viewers many of whom see Aboriginal art
as the most significant marker of Australian modernity. They welcomed the
strong Aboriginal presence in the opening and closing ceremonies of the
2000 Olympics, cheered Cathy Freeman in her historic Olympic win, were
loyal viewers of the BushMechanics (ABC-TV) series and TheMary G. Show
(SBS TV), and so on. But this viewing experience does not, as Langton
argues, necessarily make younger Australians more tolerant of forms of
Aboriginal disadvantage. They are, she thinks, ‘less niggardly than their
parents’ generation . . . true advocates of the “fair go”, because their sense of
fairness tells them that everyone should take responsibility for their own fate
to the extent that they can’.28 Beneath Clouds takes a similar line on questions
of individual responsibility. Unlike most narrative films about Aboriginal
people, this is not straightforward social realism. Rather, it is a highly stylised
film in the art-house tradition that explores complex and difficult questions
about Aboriginal diversity and difference.
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Beneath Clouds tells the story of Lena, a young, fair-skinned Aboriginal
girl who leaves her home in what appears to be a small, deprived rural
town in search of her long-gone Irish father. Throughout, Lena’s Aboriginality
is ambiguous. She is perceived by most people she meets on her
journey as white. In a study of assimilation experience that combines critical
and subjective perspectives, Ian Anderson explains how in the postwar
assimilationist era, children of mixed descent, like Lena, were categorised as
‘mixed blood’, ‘urban’, ‘non-traditional’ or ‘hybrid’ Aborigines.29 Moreover,
the ‘hybrid’ Aborigine was ‘constructed as ambiguous’, perceived therefore
as belonging to neither race.30 This perceived lack of racial background in
turn led to a construction of the ‘hybrid’ Aborigine as ‘belonging nowhere’
and, most significantly, ‘having no history’.31 Although this story is set in the
present, Lena bears the history of this imposed construction of the ‘hybrid
Aborigine’ on Aboriginal people of mixed descent as an internalised shame.
She wears her in-betweenness on/in her skin, on her perpetually unsmiling
face. Unlike Josie in Looking for Alibrandi who is searching for her identity,
Lena’s story is one of a retreat from Aboriginality, or more specifically, an
attempt to escape from an imposed shamed subjectivity that leaves her in a
state that Anderson describes as grieving for a lost history, ‘a grieving over a
tremendous loss which is in itself then denied as being yours’.32 In this state,
Lena sets out to find a history that can include her.
Lena’s desire to escape her in-betweenness is expressed as a deep ambivalence
towards formsof contemporaryAboriginalandrural experience examined
in documentaries such as Cunnamulla (Dennis O’Rourke, 2001). Her
decision to leave home in search of her Irish father follows two events in her
life: news of her young girlfriend’s pregnancy to a local boy and her brother’s
arrest by the police for petty theft. It is her mother’s reaction to her brother’s
arrest, however, that is the real catalyst for her flight. In a fairly wooden,
social realist moment, we are introduced to Lena’s mother and stepfather as
stereotypical alcoholics: uncaring and abusive. The mother’s lack of concern
about her young son’s arrest casts her as the abandoning mother. In her lack
of regard for her child’s future the mother is made to bear the full weight
of the social problems that destabilise many Aboriginal communities: alcoholism,
domestic abuse, child neglect. Lena leaves her home and her mother
in the belief that reunification with her Anglo-Celtic father will provide her
with the sense of belonging and pride that she longs for.
Along the way, Lena crosses paths with Vaughn, who is also Aboriginal.
Vaughn is on the run, having just escaped from a juvenile detention centre.
Like Lena, he is searching for a lost parent, in this case his dying mother.
But Vaughn is deeply ambivalent in his feelings for his mother. He resents
that she hasn’t been to visit him in years, yet he still desperately wants to
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return home before she dies. However, unlike Lena who actively retreats
from her Aboriginality, Vaughn is very much determined by his Aboriginality,
and proudly so. Being a dark-skinned Aborigine, Vaughn’s identity
is constructed in and through a different set of historical racialising images,
in particular the stereotype of the angry young black delinquent. In scene
after scene, Lena is either warmly welcomed or at worst politely ignored by
European Australians, while Vaughn is at best regarded with suspicion and
in the worst cases verbally and physically attacked. Only one episode – a
lift from a quietly spoken grazier – offers Vaughn any respite from racial
prejudice.
But this is not just a story about race and identity. It is also about experience
of place and historical memory. As a road movie, Beneath Clouds
is structurally and stylistically very different from Head On, which, as we
argued earlier, mimics the speed of changes in urban experience of time and
space. Here, a sparse visual style combined with minimalist performances
by the two leading first-time actors serves to express a certain melancholy in
contemporary youth experience: a state of boredom that easily gives way to
depression and despair. This is achieved through the film’s structural opposition
of mobility and stasis. Long exterior sequences of Lena andVaughn on
foot on the back roads of country New SouthWales with cars speeding past
them at 120 kilometres an hour are juxtaposed with claustrophobic interior
scenes in the various cars that stop to pick them up along the way. In this
way, Beneath Clouds is a new take on the car icon in Australian cinema. In
her analysis of 1970s and 1980s Australian cinema,MeaghanMorris argues
that that the car offers ‘a utopian space to escape or “reconstitute” sexual
and family relations’: ‘In a country with huge distances and isolated centres
of sparse population, cars promise a rabid freedom, a manic subjectivity.
They offer danger and safety, violence and protection, sociability and privacy,
liberation and confinement, power and imprisonment, mobility and
stasis.’33 But as the film shows, for Indigenous Australians these oppositions
apply in different ways. In this sense, Beneath Clouds has lot in common
with Backroads (Phillip Noyce, 1977).
Backroads was directed byNoyce in collaborationwithAboriginal activist
Gary Foley. It was made on a lowbudget at the height of the Aboriginal Land
Rights movement. Although it had an extremely limited theatrical release
it has gone on to be recognised as one of the most interesting films of its
time.34 It tells the story of a dead-end journey on the back roads of New
South Wales by Gary (a young rural Aborigine) and Jack (a red-necked
Anglo bloke) in a stolen beat-up car. Along the way, a French tourist, one of
Gary’s male relatives, and Anna, a directionless young woman, join them.
Stephen Muecke rightly argues that the significance of the film lies not in
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the journey itself – they never do make it to Sydney – but in what he calls
‘intervals between events’, which allow for ‘the release of new possibilities’.35
These intervals are, Muecke suggests, moments of exchange: ‘In the intervals
the characters gain and lose identities, transferring and transforming
cultural understandings.’36 Invoking Bachelard’s phenomenology of space,
Muecke suggests that a poetic logic of interval in this film allows for a new
perception of landscape that takes us beyond the old imperial view of land
‘as something to be possessed and built on towards understanding it as the
cultural transformation of country. Moving images, including those framed
by car windows, give us the possibility of seeing landscape as variable rather
than fixed, as in landscape paintings. In the intervals between sites stories
can emerge.’37
In this regard, Beneath Clouds backtracks across the route taken in Backroads,
both literally and in its poetic of space. Both films begin on the
back roads and highways of western New South Wales. As with the non-
Aboriginal characters in Backroads, Lena begins her journey with a fixed
idea of the relationship between identity, landscape and history. She desperately
wants to belong to her father’s homeland, Ireland, fetishising images
of misty rolling hills she carries with her in a photo album. Vaughn opens
her eyes to the beauty of her/their own country. And more than this, he
teaches her how to read the landscape as ‘country’, in the Aboriginal sense of
this term, that is, in terms of sacred and cultural knowledge. Here, however,
exchange of knowledge, exchanges of ways of knowing, is not cross-cultural,
as it is in Backroads. Rather it is an intra-cultural exchange staged as crosscultural:
a series of exchanges and plays in/with identities between Lena,
posing as white, and Vaughn, who thinks Lena is white (or does he?). As
moments of what Laleen Jayamanne calls ‘cross-cultural mimesis’, the intervals
in Beneath Clouds allow for even more possibilities of transforming
identity positions than Backroads.38
The most significant of these intervals occurs on a roadside on the outskirts
of Vaughn’s home town. As they turn a corner the two teenagers are
confronted by a looming ridge in the mountain ranges of this area. ‘Pretty,
hey’, says Vaughn. Lena nods. ‘My pop’, Vaughn continues, ‘used to tell me
about that place. The farmers chased all the blackfellas up there a long time
ago. They just shot them and pushed them off.’ The film cuts to a wide-shot
of a European-looking family pulled over to one side of the road, oblivious
to the ridge towering above them, their heads buried in a road map. Vaughn
continues: ‘Now, no one gives a shit. Suppose they’ve got their own shit to
worry about.’ Lena’s gaze is fixed on the ridge, recognising, as if for the first
time, the history embedded in the land. As she stares up, Vaughn’s thoughts
unexpectedly turn to his mother in a strange non sequitur: ‘No wonder she
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Escaping History and Shame
left me. Shemust have known howI was going to turn out – fuckin’ criminal
for a son.’ Lena turns her gaze away from the ridge towards him. But there
are no words of comfort, simply an admission of her own. ‘My dad left me,
you know. Mum blames me. Says he wanted his life and all that.’ Vaughn
responds with puzzlement. ‘Never knew any whitefella before. Not like you,
anyway.’
This moment of shared histories of violence and abandonment, colonial
and other, is interrupted by the screech of a car. In the front seat is a group of
youngAboriginalmen,Vaughn’s ‘cuzes’, as he refers tothem.Lenareluctantly
accepts a lift, squeezing into the back seat between Vaughn and an older
Aboriginal woman. The car circles around the bend to the other side of the
ridge, which now fills the frame of the car window. The two women raise
their lowered eyes to watch this moving, slowly de-forming image only to
then lower them again, as if in remembrance of the dead. The cuzes in the
front seat are playing at being ‘Black Gangstas’, one toying with a seriously
large gun. In the back seat, Lena feels the old woman’s gaze upon her and
turns to face her: ‘Where are your people from, girl?’ she asks. Shamed by
the woman’s recognition of her Aboriginality, Lena turns towards Vaughn
to gauge his reaction.He turns away, looking confused. Perhaps he is feeling
betrayed. Or he may be disappointed that Lena is not a ‘whitefella’ and
therefore not the first and only white person to befriend him. But the ‘truth’
ofLena’s identity is not of primary concernhere. Rather, what is of the utmost
importance is her answer. For Lena to continue to hide her Aboriginality,
that is, to play with the possibility of not being Aboriginal, at this point
would be not only to deny the history she has learned to recognise in the
land but also to take responsibility for a history that is not her own. That
is, to take responsibility for, or at the very least be implicated in, a history
of violence against Aboriginal people, including the injuries of shame that
have produced her feelings of being without history, belonging nowhere.
As a coming-of-age film, Beneath Clouds might have ended, as many do,
with ‘a return home’. But this is not an option for either Vaughn or Lena.
Escaping from a violent conflict with police that occurs after the interval
described above, the two teenagers race to Vaughn’s mother’s house. It is,
however, too late. The only sign of Vaughn’s mother is a pool of blood
on her bed, and an abandoned oxygen mask. Lena reaches out to comfort
Vaughn. But he forcefully rejects her advance. With the sounds of police
sirens approaching closer, Lena quickly assesses her choices. She can stay
behind and repeat her mother’s history, watching Vaughn be hunted down
by police, aswith Gary in Backroads or Jimmie in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
(Fred Schepisi, 1978), ‘going down’ herself, perhaps. Alternatively, she
can leap onto a train headed for Sydney. Lena chooses the latter, refusing to
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
submit to a certain macho suicidal tendency that historically characterises
stories of Aboriginal resistance. Her decision to leave Vaughn is thus unpredictable
and uncompromising in its anti-heroic stance. ‘Harsh’, as a teenager
might say. But Lena is determined in her decision tomove forward no matter
how uncertain her future may be, to escape a history of violence, colonial
and other.
Subjects of Shame
Each of these three coming-of-age stories expresses a desire to escape history.
Whatwe have also seen is that at the base of this desire is a self-understanding
as a subject of shame: ‘the bastard’, ‘the wog’, ‘the queer’, ‘the half-caste’, ‘the
black’. These subjects are historical in the sense that they are the unrecognised
subjects and/or the actively excluded subjects of Australian Federation
and its cornerstone the White Australia policy. The Australian character
cannot be foreign, female, queer or black.While each of the teen characters
explores different tactics for dealing with these historically imposed forms
of shame, collectively their stories bear testimony to what FranMartin calls
the fundamental injury of the shamed, or what we call in the context of
this study post-Mabo trauma. In her culturally sensitive analysis of the politics
of shame in Taiwanese tongzhi (Queer) cultural production, Martin
considers options for self-representation for subjects of shame, in particular,
ways that might allow us to ‘linger . . . on the “negative” elements
of shame, pain, depression and alienation’.39 In doing so, Martin draws
our attention to crucial cultural differences between North American and
Taiwanese identity politics. Engaging Wendy Brown’s work on a politics of
recognition in North America that involves self-exposure as the injured, or
what Brown calls modes of ‘social injury or marking’, Martin makes a convincing
case for how this mode of identification can be productive in the
Taiwanese context.Martin makes a crucial point about how it is possible for
a political demand for recognition to be premised on reparation rather than
revenge and ressentiment. That is, she distinguishes between self-exposure of
a foundational injury of shame (whose purpose is to revenge or overthrow
the perpetrator) and a self-exposure that aims to heal both the injured
and the witness.40 This reparation is possible because in the act of making
his or her injury visible – ‘acts of public hearing’ – the subject of shame
assumes that the hostile spectator is capable of love.41 This plea for empathy
thus constitutes a different form of social recognition, one premised on
ideas of love and empathy. This distinction is suggestive for our analysis
of the ways in which Australian coming-of-age films in the post-Mabo era
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Escaping History and Shame
open up a new way for thinking about the politics of shame, one that takes
us beyond legalistic and moral understandings of shame.42
As we have discussed in previous chapters, Howard and his government
actively resist public discussion of shame. They also actively defend the
Australian character, advocating pride in the past. But what Martin shows
in her analysis of tongzhi cultural production, and what we see here in this
group of very different coming-of-age stories, is that in many instances the
exposure of the pain and injury of shame can be enabling. Just as Martin
suggests the reparative impulse can repair both the tongxingliaandthe hostile
collective spectator, each of these coming-of-age films resists the nostalgic
tendency in the coming-of-age story to reassure its audience and insists that
they acknowledge the injuries of historical forms of shame as they are lived
in the present. And surely this is something cinema is good at – the creation
of an intimate sphere in which it is possible to expose the vicissitudes of
pain and shame, a place where such pleas for empathy can be recognised as
demands for reparation of historical trauma.
Notes
1 Raffaele Caputo, ‘Coming of age: notes toward a re-appraisal’, Cinema Papers, 94,
1993, p. 13.
2 Charles Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of ‘Youth in Crisis’,
Boulder CO:Waterview Press, 1995, pp. 118–22.
3 Lesley Speed, ‘Tuesday’s gone: the nostalgic teen film’, Journal of Popular Film and
Television, 26(1) 1998, p. 25.
4 ibid., pp. 27–8.
5 ibid., p. 25.
6 Caputo, ‘Coming of Age’, p. 16.
7 ibid.
8 On the teen film’s purpose to reassure adults, see John Lewis, The Road to Romance
and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 1992,
p. 151. For an interesting commentary on the Australian teen film and its audiences,
seeMark Freeman ‘The Australian Teen Film’, 2001, ∼freeman/articles/ozteenfilm.hyml>
9 Kate Woods, quoted in Special Features, ‘Biographies’, Looking For Alibrandi, DVD,
distributed by Roadshow Entertainment.
10 ibid., 2002.
11 In the DVD audio commentary, producer Robyn Kershaw says that in the postproduction
stage the production team made a decision to replace the original ‘retro’
music with contemporary Australian, independent music. This served to do two
things. It contributed to the film’s aim of situating the story in contemporaryworking,
urban Sydney. We would also add that it contributes to the film’s strong sense of
immediacy and its anti-sentimental view.
12 For an introduction to multiculturalism and the arts in Australia, see Sneja Gunew
and Fazel Rizvi (eds), Culture, Difference and the Arts, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994.
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
13 TomO’Regan, Australian National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1996,
pp. 250–6.
14 Paul Fischer, ‘The World of Film in Australia: Urban Cinefile’, urbancinefile.com.au>
15 As quoted in VHS videotape cover notes, distributed by Village Roadshow.
16 This observation is indebted to discussions with Jodi Brooks. It is also based on
personal experience of problems encountered when teaching this film.When Therese
Davis used thefilmas a set text in an undergraduateAustralianCultural Studies course
at the University of Newcastle complaints by self-identified Christian students led to
an unprecedented boycott by a small number of students, as well as formal written
complaints to the Vice Chancellor.
17 Chris Berry, ‘The importance of being Ari’, Metro, 118, pp. 34–7.
18 ibid., p. 36.
19 AndreasHuyssen, ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’. In Arjun Appadurai (ed.),
Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2001, p. 68.
20 ibid., p. 70.
21 ibid., p. 63.
22 Berry, ‘The importance of being Ari’, p. 37.
23 Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded, Sydney and New York: Vintage, 1995, pp. 146–50.
24 Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film
and Public Culture, Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
25 See Stephanie Bunbury, ‘Beyond black and white’, Age, 19 May 2002, republished
; Daniel
Browning, ‘Ivan Sen interview’, Message Stick, ABC Radio, published 24 May 2002,
.
26 Marcia Langton, ‘Correspondence:whitefella jump up’, Quarterly Essay, no. 12, 2003,
p. 80.
27 ibid., p. 80.
28 ibid., pp. 80–1.
29 Ian Anderson, ‘Black bit, white bit’. In Michele Grossman (coordinating ed.),
Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, Melbourne
University Press, 2003, p. 46.
30 N. J. B. Plomley, 1977, as cited in ibid., p. 46.
31 Anderson, ‘Black bit, white bit’, p. 46.
32 ibid., p. 47.
33 MeaghanMorris, ‘Fate and the family sedan’. In Senses of Cinema, 19, 2002, p. 9. This
essay was originally published in East-West Film Journal, (4)1, 1989, pp. 113–34.
34 Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol. 1, Sydney:
Currency Press, 1987, p. 188.
35 Stephen Muecke, ‘Backroads: from identity to interval’, Senses of Cinema, 17, 2001,
p. 3.
36 ibid., p. 3.
37 ibid., p. 6.
38 See Laleen Jayamanne,TowardCinemaand ItsDouble:Cross-culturalMimesis,Bloomington
and Indianapolis IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 2001. On the transformational
qualities of mimesis, also see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular
History of the Senses, New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
39 Martin, Situating Sexualities, p. 244.
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Escaping History and Shame
40 ibid., pp. 246–8.
41 ibid., p. 246.
42 As Manne explains, while the idea of collective guilt makes no sense because legally
guilt for a wrongdoing is always a matter of individual responsibility, it is possible
for the peoples of a nation to share feelings of shame about episodes from the past
just as they share feelings of pride. See Robert Manne, The Way We Live Now: The
Controversies of the Nineties, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1998, pp. 12–14.
171
10
Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story
and Dreaming in Motion
Throughout this book we have proposed that the post-Mabo era in Australian
cinema can be read through the metaphor of backtracking. This
intermittent activity of reviewing, mulling over and renewing icons, landscapes,
characters and stories defines contemporaryAustralian national cinema.
In our conclusion we want to propose that, in the post-Mabo context,
this brooding passion for raking over the national repertoire of icons serves
as a vernacular mode of collective mourning, a process involving both griefwork
and testimony. If this is the case, then Australian national cinema,
since theMabo decision, has been an occasional participant in creating and
corroborating national recognition of terra nullius as the nation’s troubling,
founding myth. This raises the question of whether a national cinema is in
the business of confirming the nation’s consoling myths or contesting the
nation’s historical memories. As Ross Gibson says at the end of his book
on the badlands of central Queensland, ‘Myths help us live with contradictions,
whereas histories help us analyse persistent contradictions so that
we might avoid being lulled and ruled by the myths that we use to console
and enable ourselves.’1 Gibson’s eloquent piece of literary backtracking
ends with an exemplary call to mourn the failures and losses of the past
in order to overcome the denial of the violence that founded the nation.
In this view, mourning is a way to achieve national maturity by ‘recognising
the issues that we wish we could deny, ignore or forget’.2 In various
ways, the two kinds of film projects discussed in this chapter explore the
badlands of our social imaginary, asking us to bear witness to traumatic
traces of a history we can no longer deny, ignore or forget. To give up
the consoling and enabling myth of terra nullius is to displace white settler
Australia as the core of national identity and national history. For Australian
national cinema, thinking beyond the founding myth is a perplexing task,
one which requires backtracking over familiar ground, whether that be the
desert, the bush, the suburbs or the beach, in order to reconcile current
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Sustaining Grief
knowledge about the past with present experience of the history wars,
and to imagine a more accommodating sense of national identity for the
future.
In the cycle of films discussed in Chapter 1, the shift in identity occasioned
by theMabo decision ismadeexplicit. These films are clearly partof the resurgent
‘memory industry’3 which has become so prolific inWestern societies
since the early 1980s, exemplifying a paradigmshift from modernity’s focus
on ‘present futures’ to postmodernity’s preoccupation with ‘present pasts’.4
In this concluding chapter we will look at two kinds of film projects, each
recognisable as part of Australian national cinema’s engagement with history,
memory and identity. The films belonging to these two projects are less
explicit than The Tracker or Rabbit-Proof Fence in their post-Mabo historical
consciousness, but their preoccupation with ‘present pasts’ is intimately
tied to the work of memory and mourning. This work, of backtracking
through consoling myths about the colonial past, is seen as a prerequisite
for mature nationhood by many post-Mabo pundits engaged in the history
wars described in Chapter 1.
The first project belongs to the art-house circuit of international films,
often launched at the Cannes Film Festival before being released to local
audiences. The most recent Australian film to succeed at Cannes is Japanese
Story (Sue Brooks, 2003). The film’s marketing team used the premiere
at Cannes to launch an international campaign before returning home to
scoop the pool with eight wins at the 2003 AFI Awards. Set in the Pilbara
iron ore region, the film reprises the sweeping landscape tradition of the
1970s period film along with the contemporary off-road, cross-cultural
movie imbued with the sensibility of the post-Mabo period. The second
project is a package of five short films supported by Film Australia and the
Indigenous Unit of the Australian Film Commission, Dreaming in Motion
(2003).Unlike the high-profile cycle of feature films around the Indigenous–
settler theme released in 2000–02, Dreaming in Motion brings together a
mosaic of Indigenous Australian perspectives on the present. The films
range in genre from the road movie to the urban comedy. The ethic and
aesthetic of this kind of project is indebted to the 1970s independent cinema.
Thomas Elsaesser, writing about New German Cinema, defines this
kind of filmmaking in terms of erfahrung. This term is broader than its
English translation as ‘experience’. It implies a direct relation between the
filmmakers and their audiences, both of whom ‘rediscovered the cinema as a
new public space, promising very personal experiences, but which through
discussions and debates could be verbalised or rationalised in a political
discourse’.5
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Grief-work, Erfahrung and Amae
Part of what was politicised in New German Cinema of the 1960s and
1970s was the historical amnesia which had prevented postwar Germany
from acknowledging and mourning the nation’s role in perpetrating the
Holocaust. In this chapter we approach Japanese Story and Dreaming in
Motion as two recent projects which bring grief-work into the public sphere
ofAustralian cinema as away of overcoming historical amnesia.6 Grief-work
in filmmaking extends the debate about the post-Mabo state of Australian
nationhood by exploiting cinema’s capacity for affective experience. It is this
capacity for affect (defined as feeling or emotion, often leading to action)
that makes grief-work a possibility in a cinema of erfahrung.
In order to understand the connection between history and affect in
Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion, we want to establish how a cinema
of erfahrung asks the spectator to bear witness to the traumatic presence of
the past by approaching film itself as a kind of grief-work. Inher research into
grief-work as a contemporary cultural phenomenon, Kathleen Woodward
takes up Freud’s well-known distinction between mourning and melancholia.
Citing Barthes’ Camera Lucida as an example of literary grief-work,
Woodward distinguishes grief-work fromboth mourning and melancholia.
She does this in order to defend a non-pathological (and politically useful)
will to sustain mourning by lingering over images of the dead, ‘a response
to loss that situates itself between mourning and melancholia’.7 Woodward
rejects Freud’s insistence that mourning must either come to a healthy end
or become pathologically melancholic: rather than ‘sever the bonds of love’
(the healthy outcome of mourning) or maintain the ‘open wound’ (the
melancholic option), grief-work enables us to respond to loss in creative
ways that sustain memory rather than deny the pain of loss.8
Woodward defines grief-work as a constellation of cultural texts which
‘sanction a discourse of grief’ by shifting the emphasis of mourning from
‘a gradual giving up of those lost’ to ‘remembering them in a sustainable
grief’.9 If the issue of historical amnesia has defined modernity since the
Holocaust, then Japanese Story might be considered an international film
which explores sustainable grief as an aspect of surviving the aftershock
of Mabo. In this sense the numbness or amnesia of aftershock can only
be overcome through the ongoing process of afterwardness, or deferred
revision of the past, discussed in Chapter 5. In this respect the grief-work
undertaken in Japanese Story is a departure from the long-standing trope
of male melancholia as the key characteristic of the Australian outback
film.
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Sustaining Grief
In her second essay on the cultural uses of grief, Woodward turns from
Freud and Barthes to Klein and Kristeva: ‘In Studies onHysteria Freud articulated
a theory of affect which resonates with the dominant tradition in
Western culture of the emotions as negative: the emotions are associated
withwoman– andwith death – and they are something to be gotten rid of.’10
Here, Woodward draws on Klein’s theory of mourning as a process of selfintegration
which depends on fully experiencing the ‘emphatic emotions –
including hatred, guilt, distrust, elation, revenge, anxiety, despair, triumph,
jealousy, sorrow, and fear’.11 Rather than get rid of the emotions, Kleinian
analysis ‘affirmsthe value of a rich if volatile emotional life’ achieved through
mourning.12 In contrast with Freud’s hysteric, Woodward sees the prototypical
analysand (post-Holocaust) as the numbed woman: for Klein (and
Kristeva)13 it is the absence of grief, the ‘lack of affect’ which is pathological
(and historical).14 In Woodward’s view, grief-work responds to Kristeva’s
contention that, since the Holocaust, ‘to live in our grief . . . is our emotional
testament to and heritage of our time’.15 Japanese Story is centrally
concerned with the ‘numbed’ figure of the modern career woman whose
journey charts a Kleinian passage of the emotions whereby ‘triumph yields
to guilt, and guilt to love, which accompanies the desire for reparation’.16
Although there is considerable distance between Japanese Story and
Dreaming in Motion, each of these projects is committed to remembering
the past in sustainable grief. Dreaming in Motion testifies not only to communal
suffering but also to the desire of Indigenous Australians to be seen
and heard in national cinema on their own terms. This entails overcoming
what has been censored in the melancholic cinema of settler Australia, a
cinema noted for the longevity of its white, fraternal gaze. If the issue of
unacknowledged loss and suffering defines Indigenous experience in the
aftershock of colonialism, then the five short films which comprise Dreaming
inMotion bear witness to a post-colonial politics of overcoming shamed
subjectivity, discussed in Chapter 9. The films made under the banner of
Dreaming in Motion might be considered forms of traumatic cinema in
that they ask the spectator to acknowledge the shame and injury inflicted
on Aboriginal subjectivity in the aftershock of 200 years of colonisation. As
post-colonial grief-works, these five short films demand that the spectator be
prepared to extend a type of tolerance called amae (the word was coined by
Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi).17 This involves, in Chris Berry’s words,
‘a kind of attention to the needs of those perceived as having suffered, as
having an unresolved grievance that demands indulgence’.18 Berry makes
the point that, although making space for amae is frowned upon as narcissistic
regression in Freudian psychoanalysis, in Japan ‘amae is seen as a
positive quality’.19 Australian films are not noted for their capacity to indulge
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
the emotions associated with historical grievance, traumatic experience and
loss. Japanese Story and Dreaming inMotion ask the viewer to participate in
a new kind of spectatorship based on the social acknowledgment of cinema
as a space where the experience of suffering can be indulged, performed and
recognised.
Guilt, Grief and Reparation in Japanese Story
Building on its international debut at Cannes, Japanese Story (Sue Brooks,
2003) uses three forms of backtracking to build an audience locally and to
sell in overseas territories.20 The first backtrack reprises the desert landscape
as a timeless template of national character. The story is set in the spectacular
Pilbara region of Western Australia, its vast natural scale matched by
the gargantuan mechanical scale of the iron ore mining industry, courtesy
of BHP-Billiton. The second backtrack involves a journey to the desert:
two miniature urban figures arrive at an unexpected moment of intimacy
in the vast, ‘unmapped’ outback. The third backtrack entails Toni Collette’s
return to screen in a quintessentialAustralian role, a role honed into national
recognition through a series of iconic, laconic performances of Australian
masculinity by the likes of Chips Rafferty, Ray Barrett, Bill Hunter, Bryan
Brown, Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe. Together, these three backtracking
movements in Japanese Story expand a restricted national palette of
laconic emotions to include guilt, grief and the desire for reparation.
Japanese Story had its origins in a proposal from Film Australia’s Sharon
Connolly to scriptwriterAlisonTilson in the mid-1990s, a period dominated
by One Nation’s populist stance against Asian immigration and debates
about whether the Prime Minister should apologise to the Stolen Generations
and those who continue to suffer as a result of colonisation. Connolly
was interested in commissioning a film that would explore the crosscultural
tensions ignited by a relationship between an Australian woman
and a Japanese man. Film Australia commissioned two script drafts before
its charter changed, preventing it from further investment in feature films.
Inspired by Connolly’s vision of a Japanese man driving alone through the
Australian desert, Tilson (together with producer Sue Maslin and director
Sue Brooks) scripted a cross-cultural roadmovie, based loosely on romantic
comedy’s battle of the sexes, involving an Australian geologist, Sandy (Toni
Collette), and a Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima).
The backdrop to this encounter was relocated, before the shoot, from the
Whyalla industrial area of South Australia (where Tilson grew up) to the
more remote Pilbara iron ore region inWestern Australia.
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Sustaining Grief
Although Collette’s performance as Sandy, the Perth-based geologist,
opens the American cut by the film’s distributor (Samuel Goldwyn), the
Australian cut of the film begins with Gotaro Tsunashima as the somewhat
enigmatic Hiromitsu, alone in the desert, neither tourist nor businessman,
though he goes through the motions as both. The film’s post-Mabo consciousness
is marked by Hiromitsu’s sampling of Australian music on CD,
with Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’ playing in the hire car asHiromitsu photographs
his own estranged presence in the emptiness of the Australian outback. The
narrative then shifts to Sandy in Perth (at work, at home, at her mother’s
place) before she is throwntogetherwithHiromitsu atPortHedland regional
airport. Their initial encounter turns into a wry comedy of cross-cultural
misunderstanding as they make their way, somewhat haphazardly, by fourwheel
drive into iron ore country.Here the film takes on a documentary tone
as Sandy and Hiromitsu experience a Lilliputian shift in scale at the BHPBilliton
mine. It is this shift in scale, this diminution of mundane worries
(as much as an unscheduled night bogged in the desert) which takes Sandy
and Hiromitsu out of themselves and leads to mutual recognition and
an idyllic cessation of conflict as they embark on a serendipitous detour
together, ‘off the map’.
In the first act of Japanese Story, broadly recognisable cultural differences
are mapped onto (slightly bent takes on) gender and sexuality, producing
low-key comic moments typical of the misrecognitions of romantic comedy.
Broad differences are played out on the road as Sandy and Hiromitsu
warily assess each other according to gender as well as cultural stereotypes.
In the second act, cultural differences become a point of reciprocal exchange
between Sandy and Hiromitsu, rather than sources of mutual misreading.
In due course, the ironies of gender are put aside in favour of the more
subtle tensions of sexuality and desire. As initial prejudices give way to
sexual intimacy, Sandy dons Hiromitsu’s black trousers in a slightly surreal
expression of the enigma of antagonistic desire central to romantic
comedy.
Although the first two acts of the film are structured by a familiar plot
device of mutual antagonism followed by sexual rapprochement, a disturbing
undercurrent of buried feeling makes itself felt early in the film through
Sandy’s emotional obtuseness towards her colleagues, her sexual partners
and her best friend. The film establishes early, through her mother’s collection
of obituaries, that Sandy is habitually carelesswith her own feelings and
insensitive to how others see her.When she is forced to go on the road with
Hiromitsu, she glimpses herself through his eyes, and feelswhat it’s like to be
in his clothes. This recognition leads to a stolen moment, a breathing space,
desired by both characters, from family, work, and self. Together, Sandy and
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
Hiromitsu find a waterhole, a rocky oasis, somewhere out there, beyond the
iron ore mines, off the map. And there the idyll comes to a shocking end.
By taking its characters on a final detour, off the map, the film loosens the
cultural moorings of identity for amoment of freedom before shock releases
a deluge of affect for Sandy, and for the tolerant spectator willing to indulge
Collette’s sustained performance of shock, loss and grief.
Breaking with the melancholic, defeated endings typical of Australian
landscape cinema, Japanese Story uses the third act to deliver a sudden
shock, contravening narrative expectations set up in the first two acts of the
film. The dramatic turning point is based on a deeply embedded, culturally
specific foreboding, to which Hiromitsu, as an outsider to Australian bush
lore, is not privy. This turning point hangs on a single moment of horrified
recognition when Sandy, and the knowing spectator, realise that Hiromitsu
is about to dive into the waterhole. Generations of Australian childhoods
are captured in the suspended moment of impending catastrophe. For the
audience that grew up on dire warnings of holiday drownings, shark attacks,
snake bites, tourists perishing in the desert, and children lost in the bush,
Hiromitsu’s dive embodiesthe dangers lurking everywhere in the foreignness
of the Australian landscape.
Japanese Story invokes this cultural habit of dread in order to break with
the early comic tone established in the first act and to extend the film’s
initial premise of cultural and gender difference. Against expectations, the
resolution to cultural difference is worked out in terms of guilt, grief and
reparation, rather than sexual intimacy. The fatal snag beneath the serene
surface of the waterhole suggests that whatever lurks below the surface of
Sandy’s becalmed life cannot be appeased by an idyllic moment of escape to
the desert. The strength of Japanese Story lies in its belief that the audience
will change gears and let go of the love story to arrive with Sandy at a
deeper, though no less intimate, form of self-recognition through the eyes
of another. It is here that the film speaks most forcefully to contemporary
Australia, suggesting, through Sandy’s hidebound character, that a profound
shock, a sudden moment of realisation, can break through habitual barriers
of cultural insularity and emotional numbness.
Japanese Story delivers much more than we have come to expect from
Australian films in the way it resolves its premise by opening up a space for
amae. Ifwe followBerry’s argument that in Japan (among other places) there
is a positive acceptance of the social need to indulge the public performance
of grief, then the title, Japanese Story, takes on an unexpected meaning.21 In
this sense the film’s Japanese story is to be found in the sustained attention to
the problem of how to turn Sandy’s grief and guilt into an act of reparation.
This process of taking on responsibility for the dead is performed through
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Sustaining Grief
the slow accretion of finely observed details. A distinctive view of life is
expressed in the film’s shifting of gears back and forth between the closely
observed minutiae of Sandy and Hiromitsu’s encounter with each other’s
difference, and the aftermath of a sudden, devastating moment of clarity
about our common fate, writ large. This contingent view of life is evident in
earlier films by the Gecko creative team (Brooks,Maslin and Tilson).22 It is
manifest in their acute observation of the accidental details which make up
a life, and the sudden rupture of the everyday by fate or accident. It is this
moment of rupture which carries the denouement of the film into relatively
unexplored territory in Australian landscape cinema.
While Japanese Story was in development during the late 1990s, a road trip
into the Australian outback became the leitmotiv of two other feature films
involving a romance between Australian and Japanese characters in lead
roles, Heaven’s Burning (Craig Lahiff, 1997) and The Goddess of 1967 (Clara
Law, 2001). Unlike these two post-national films, Japanese Story reprises an
unmarked, Anglo-Celtic rather than cosmopolitan ormulticultural concept
of Australianness. The film emphasises the difficulties of cultural translation
in terms of national differences (even in the iron ore industry where doing
businesswith Japan is part of the daily routine). This emphasis harks back to
a core sense of Australianness honed into the landscape and the body from
one generation (of films, of screen actors) to the next.
In Japanese Story the territory of grief and guilt is connected directly
to the landscape and the body in a way that suggests culturally imbued
habits are enigmatic but not untranslatable. Rather, cultural difference can
be translated and understood through the body. Sandy, as her mother’s
daughter, andHiromitsu, as the son of a powerful off-screen father, embody
certain culturally recognisable emotions and gestures inculcated from one
generation to the next. The task of the final act of the film is to show how
Sandy’s embodiment of grief opens up the possibility of reparation between
antagonistic cultures, beyond the sexual and linguistic exchanges of the first
two acts of the film.23 This attempt at translation takes place in the context
of an inward-looking, post-Mabo sense of Australian nationhood.
The landscape tradition has, over several decades, distilled a repertoire of
national gestures, embodied and honed by icons of Australian masculinity.
The longevity of the outback landscape in Australian cinema has perpetuated
the idea that the national character, forged in the bush, will be defeated
by the desert. There’s a certain melancholy at the heart of this tradition,
yet in Japanese Story grief breaks through the toughened emotional exterior
of settler Australians. For perhaps the first time in landscape cinema, this
melancholic settler is embodied as female by the emotionally inarticulate
Sandy.By contrast,HiromitsuandandhiswifeYukiko, throughthe emphatic
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
formality and precision of their gestures, seem capable of expressing with
great self-possession and cultural ease a subtle, ethical response to the emotions
aroused by betrayal, guilt and loss.
Ultimately, the film insists that cultural difference can be translated and
understood in ways that go deeper than the exchange of business cards
or even the erotic encounter of bodies. As the film draws to a close, an
exchange of objects takes place between Sandy and her mother, and Sandy
and Yukiko, suggesting an ethical alternative to the business economy and
the sexual economy explored earlier in the film. The reciprocity between
Sandy and Yukiko is grounded in Sandy’s identity as her mother’s daughter,
affirmed at a moment in the film when Sandy needs to make a new move.
Sandy’s returnhomefromthe desert takes her toa raremomentof cultural
translation near the end of the film during a formal reception with Yukiko
and her Japanese attendants. Resting on the arm of a chair, Sandy takes on
the embodied composure, presence and stillness we have come to associate
first with Hiromitsu and then with Yukiko. There’s something in the way
that Collette’s performance of grief reaches this moment of composure, by
taking on cultural difference, that is deeply tied to the post-Mabo era. This
era demands that Eurocentric Australians do the work of mourning entailed
in giving up a form of emotional insularity which turns a blind eye to our
history and place in the Asia-Pacific region.
This national habit of insularity is registered in Collette’s lean, taut body,
her laconic distance, and unadorned face. Collette’s bony embodiment of
Sandy contrastswith the full-bodiedMuriel, the female grotesque ofMuriel’s
Wedding (Paul J.Hogan, 1994), who launchedCollette’s career and made her
an icon of early 1990s quirky comedies. Since then, Collette’s international
career, and her various nominations for supporting roles, have put some
distance between her screen persona and Muriel. Thus it is intriguing to
see Collette return, a decade later, to the Australian screen in a reprise of an
awkward, laconic masculinitywhose lineage stretches fromChips Rafferty to
Russell Crowe. Some may object that Collette in fact reprises the resourceful
and independent bush woman, renowned in Australian film and literature
since the 1920s. An argument could be made for that position. However, a
post-Mabo reading might prefer to align Sandy (and Collette’s face in the
film)with Ross Gibson’s description of ‘the generic Central Queensland face
that takes shape in every generation of settler-descendants’.24
A landscape unto itself, this face can still be seen today in pubs and diners, in the
cabs of trucks. The mouth is a serrated horizon-line. Furrows mark a neck and
jaw-line champed to the rigours of adversity. Eyes are tarped with forebearance.
When one encounters the face in bus stations and roadhouses, it is usually not
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Sustaining Grief
reading or talking. It is persisting, wasting no vigour, wisely, and keeping to itself
whatever it knows.25
In this face Gibson sees ‘a regional “affliction” . . . Or . . . history’.26 It is
this historically afflicted character that is feminised in Collette’s face, eyes
widened, lips filled out, yet stripped to the bone, honed to an abiding grief
which the film, in its final movement back to Perth, wishes the spectator to
indulge.
Without setting aside the film’s interest in the cross-cultural encounters
opened up by late modernity’s global flows of people and capital, it is the
post-Mabo ‘opening of the heart’ to grief which we take to be the unexpected,
unpredictable move that connects Japanese Story to the recent set of
backtracking movements we have seen in the revival of the desert landscape
tradition in a series of films fromTracker and Rabbit-Proof Fence toOneNight
the Moon. Although Japanese Story does not directly confront the abiding
issue of white–settler misrecognition of Indigenous land rights based on
terra nullius, the film does connect grief and guilt to the landscape tradition
and its investment in a laconic, masculine national identity. This connection
has become more overt in Australian films of the post-Mabo era and need
not be mistaken for a reprise of earlier forms of national insularity. Rather
it is an invitation to the audience to indulge the public performance of grief
and guilt in a national cinema that tends to shy away from the emphatic
emotions.
In Japanese Story guilt (in the positive sense of taking responsibility and
expressing remorse) is worked through in astute detail in the last third of the
film (a part which has left some critics cold precisely because of its sustained
indulgence of grief rather than catharsis). One way of thinking about this
section of the film might be to revisit the Kleinian notion of mourning as
a work of reparation that moves the subject from numbness to affect, from
guilt to love. Sandy begins this journey of reparation not through the affair
with Hiromitsu, but through taking on the full weight of responsibility for
his body. The film makes us feel this deadweight, literally, as Sandy struggles
to lift his body into the back of the four-wheel drive. When she reaches a
town and finds that the coolroom is the only morgue, she has no words for
what has happened. Back in Perth others take over the arrangements, telling
Sandy to take a break – she’s done a good job. However, her work of bearing
witness to Hiromitsu’s death is not done until she formally admits her guilt
and remorse to Hiromitsu’s wife, Yukiko, adopting a modicum of Yukiko’s
composure (and a few halting phrases in Japanese) to do so. This scene takes
place between the two women as Hiromitsu’s body is being loaded onto the
plane. The film avoids a transcendent ending by making its final setting the
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
departure lounge at the airport. Sandy has to struggle against protocol and
against pragmatic arrangements in order to create a moment when she can
step forward, take responsibility and express remorse. The film shows how
easy it would be not to take that step.
Sandy’s inchoate struggle to meet her social obligation to show remorse
and accept guilt resonateswith the post-Mabo politics of reconciliation.How
does a nation reconcile with its colonial past, with its exclusionary White
Australia policy as the very basis of nationhood atFederation in 1901? Gibson
argues that a mature citizenship ‘attains composure’ through a process of
mourning, through ‘processes of realisation’ which enable participation ‘in
the complex dynamics of social and historical obligation’.27 Sandy breaks a
pattern in Australian cinema, overcoming the tradition of tight-lipped resistance
to the indulgence of those painful emotions which must accompany
full acknowledgment, through sustained grief, of the injustices endured by
Indigenous Australians.
Departing from Trauma: Dreaming in Motion
Each of the five films in Dreaming in Motion attests to a traumatic colonial
history of which the films themselves are a symptom.28 As a package,
Dreaming inMotion contributes to a tentative, post-colonial imaginary
whose traumatic past, in Felman’s words, has ‘not yet settled into collective
remembrance’.29 Introducing an anthology of essays on trauma and
testimony, Cathy Caruth defines trauma (in its literal, belated and latent
aspects) as a symptom of history: ‘The traumatized . . . become themselves
the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.’30 She adds: ‘To
listen to the crisis of a trauma . . . is to not only listen for the event, but to
hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it.’31 It is precisely this
sense of departing from crisis (rather than moving on from the past) that
defines these films as post-colonial grief-work. As spectators of Dreaming in
Motion (2003), we participate in the desire to depart from a traumatic history.
Listening to the filmmakers’ attempts to depart fromtraumatic events,
we look at images that evoke crisis. The stimulation of involuntary memory
by these images has the potential to startle the spectator, to reveal the
lived experience behind the traumatic testimony found in television documentaries
such as Black Chicks Talking (Leah Purcell, 2002). The kinds of
images and stories offered to the film spectator by Dreaming in Motion are
different in affect from the stories offered to the television viewer by Purcell.
Rather than a spirited assertion of pride in Aboriginal identity, Dreaming in
Motion ismore interested in exploring and overcoming the shame and injury
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Sustaining Grief
attached to Indigenous identity by the violence of colonialism (discussed in
Chapter 9).
Shit Skin (writer/director Nicholas Boseley) deals directly with the traumatic
experience of the Stolen Generations. It is a return home film which
takes the formof aninterrupted road trip to CentralAustralia, undertaken by
a grandmother,Nina,with her grandson, Luke, in the driver’s seat. Alternating
between Nina and Luke, Shit Skin deftly evokes the long-termimpact of
historical trauma on a family over four generations. The repetitive nature of
traumatic experience becomes evident in flashbacks, delayed in time only to
be unleashed by sensory experience in the present.Nina’s involuntary memories
of a ruptured childhood are provoked not only by photographs and
household objects but also by the scent and touch and taste of place. Deliberately
understating the melodramatic potential of Nina’s belated return
home (sixty-two years after being taken away) the film enables a laconic
revisiting of the past, at the same time drawing Nina and Luke forward into
a more reconciled future. The pain of return impacts on Nina through the
senses, transforming the meaning of both time and place. The scent of a twig
from a tree and the splash on her face of fresh water released from its hiding
place under the gravelly desert recalls Nina to her childhood self, awakening
a sense of belonging which she tries to deny to her grandson, Luke: ‘I’mglad
they took me away. These people, they can’t let go, they’re hopeless.’When
Nina and Luke address each other with rough affection as ‘half-caste’ and
‘shit skin’ at the end of the film, there is a sense that their shared return to
the original place of loss allows memory to settle into a less traumatised,
more connected sense of belonging, of being able (as Jimmy Little sings over
the closing titles) to ‘bring yourself home’. Shit Skin quietly, yet insistently,
evokes the pain of return, and also its necessity, no matter how belated.
The presence of the past, and the necessity of return, are also structural
themes in BlackTalk(writer/directorWayne Blair).Thefilmtakes the formof
a conversation between Scott andTim, two cousins waiting to go into church
as various relatives and friends arrive for a funeral. Seated under a tree, the
cousins share childhood memories and a skylarking sense of humour, aswell
as feelings of loss and shame. Their affectionate banter turns serious when
Scott, who remained behind with his community, asks city-boy Tim where
he will find his soul once his assimilated, consumer lifestyle has finished
sucking it out of him. Tim’s ambivalence towards home resolves itself into
grief as the two cousins enter the small country church for the funeral. As
Tim walks up the aisle alone to view the body in the coffin, we realise with
a shock that this is Scott’s funeral and that the conversation outside the
church took place between the living and the dead: that Tim has returned
home for a final conversation with Scott.We learn that despite his material
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
success Tim knows he’s been in the wrong place, but we are left to guess at
the reasons for Scott’s untimely death. Perhaps there is no right place to be
in terms of country, kinship and culture at this moment in post-colonial
history. The film ends with an overwhelming sense that the past is never
dead, but (like Scott) still present and waiting for recognition.
In Flat (writer/director Beck Cole), the routine, everyday present where
‘nothing happens’ is brought into view, literally, through the viewfinder
of a digital camera given to fifteen-year-old Marnie by her unreliable dad,
glimpsed briefly through the video lens at the local TAB. Marnie, like Cole
herself, uses her camera to telling effect. Flat invites us to contemplate the
difference between the unblinking gaze of the film image as Cole’s camera
framesMarnie on a swing against a brick wall, and the softer, more intimate
video image asMarnie uses her camera to pick out an oldwoman sitting on a
chair or a neighbourwrapping beer bottles in newspaper before puttingthem
in the garbage bin. This slice-of-life film shares feminism’s preoccupation
with female self-image and identity, asMarnie lies on her bed and turns the
camera on her own face and body. However, the final, more telling image
is of a sign painted on the wall of the pawn shop: ‘loved goods go cheap’.
This mute comment on Marnie’s circumscribed world is recorded as the
last image on the video cassette before she embraces the inevitable loss –
pawning the video camera to cover her father’s losses at the TAB. A quality
of stoicism, evident inMarnie’s laconic exchanges with her little sister and a
casual boyfriend, pervades the film, pointing to an austere ethic of survival
as the bedrock of daily life. A glimpse of the desert landscape captured on
video through the buswindowis the only indicator of a time and place whose
vast scale is lost to modernity, a loss of vision and connection signified by
the ubiquity and disposability of film and video images.
A pervasive sense of loss is undercut in all the films by a sense of humour
so dry you can hear the grass crackle underfoot. The final two films in
the package bring this crackling humour to the fore, confronting modernity’s
conundrum of sex, gender and race with shrewd wit. Turn Around
(writer/director Samantha Saunders) is a gentle romantic comedy which
plays with the genre’s central device of recognition/misrecognition between
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ partners. A feminist twist gives the controlling moves to
the woman, who educates the man into recognising her in her own right.
A road trip takes the would-be lovers on three detours. Each stopover educates
the man into essential knowledge of the woman’s qualities (respect
for elders and culture; sensual affinity with nature; cool control of the pool
table). These qualities, which value everyday encounters (a cup of tea with
a respected uncle is an understated highlight), provide a strong contrast
with the glossy-magazine appeal of his fantasy woman. When she drives
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Sustaining Grief
off, leaving him to pursue his fantasy (or not, as the case may be) he has
to make his own way home. In an act of comic recognition he returns to
wash her car, acknowledging her wheels as the vehicle of his education into
sexual equality. Turn Around replaces romantic comedy’s upper-class settings
(of city nightclubs, designer apartments and ocean liners) with country
pubs, weatherboard houses and a Ford with radiator problems. This
‘trading down’ of the genre’s glamorous middle-class settings extends our
expectations of the reach of romantic comedy, at the same time enlarging
the frame through which Aboriginal experience becomes recognisable
in cinema.
The four films above undermine the entrenched portrayal of Aboriginal
characters in cinema as objects of an ignorant, investigative or sympathetic
white gaze. Non-Indigenous characters are sidelined in favour of
the experiences and perceptions of Aboriginal characters. The final film,
Mimi (writer/directorWarwick Thornton), breaks this pattern by engaging
directly with the whiter-than-white world of the cosmopolitan investor in
Aboriginal art. Mimi begins as a send-up of yuppie aspiration and consumerism,
then quickly turns into an acutely observed comedy-horror
film by combining the scene-stealing comic talents of Sophie Lee, Aaron
Pederson and David Gulpilil. Their star turns, however, are upstaged by
the wickedly animated Mimi, who wreaks havoc before being lured into
a stainless steel fridge and unceremoniously dumped in a waterhole by
Gulpilil, who declares, ‘Whitefellas aren’t ready for you yet,Mimi.’ Nothing
is what it appears to be in this film, which delights in improvised mimesis.
A plastic-wrapped chook from the supermarket becomes a magpie goose
with a feather stuck in its breast. A red cocktail dress and cosmetic cream
become a makeshift traditional costume for ceremonially smoking Mimi
out of the hall cupboard. A ‘real Aborigine’ is revealed as an errant grandson,
more interested in chasing white girls than learning his grandfather’s
culture. An Australian collector of Aboriginal art knows so little about
where she lives that she dials 911 in an emergency, imitating the terrorised
blondes dialling 911 in scary Americanmovies.Mimi takes pleasure in using
comic-horror conventions to joke about authenticity, upsetting expectations
and undoing pretensions in an original display of visual and verbal
wit. Although the delightful spirit-world Mimi is returned to the outback
waterhole, there is a sense in which the film imagines something beyond
the return home, or the occasional reconciled moment between past and
present, or even the stoic survival of everyday life as suitable endings for
Indigenous stories. Mimi proposes a spirited quick-wittedness as an inventive,
ethical response to the dilemmas posed by black and white encounters
within modernity. The distance between Sophie Lee’s personal watercooler
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Australian Cinema after Mabo
and David Gulpilil’s outback waterhole is imaginatively traversed in this
film, with Aaron Pederson mediating a playful space for unpredictable conversations
between Indigenous tradition andAustralian modernity. The past
is present inMimi in ways that enable the film’s characters (and the spectator)
to engage in imaginative acts of problem-solving, suggesting that there
may be ways in which the time after Mabo and the time after colonialism
(for Indigenous and settler peoples alike) are currently being experienced as
mimetic spaces for inventing the future, creatively sustained by a keen sense
of departing from (but not forgetting) a traumatic colonial history.
Notes
1 Ross Gibson, SevenVersions of anAustralianBadland,Brisbane:University of Queensland
Press, 2002.
2 ibid., p. 179.
3 AndreasHuyssen, ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’. In Arjun Appadurai (ed.),
Globalization, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001, p. 69.
4 ibid., pp. 57–8.
5 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History, Macmillan, 1989.
6 This section draws on an earlier account of Woodward’s concept of ‘grief-work’ in
Felicity Collins, ‘Death and the face of the mother in the auto/biographical films of
Rivka Hartman, Jeni Thornley andWilliam Yang’, Metro, 126, 2001, pp. 48–54.
7 Kathleen Woodward, ‘Freud and Barthes: theorizing mourning, sustaining grief ’,
Discourse, (13)1, 1990–91, pp. 97–9.
8 ibid., p. 101.
9 ibid.
10 Kathleen Woodward, ‘Grief-work in contemporary American cultural criticism’,
Discourse, (15)2, 1992–93, p. 94.
11 ibid., p. 97.
12 ibid.
13 See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, transl. Leon S. Roudiez,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
14 Woodward, ‘Grief-work’, pp. 98–9.
15 ibid., p. 99.
16 ibid., p. 97.
17 Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1971,
cited in Chris Berry, ‘Where is the love? The paradox of performing loneliness
in Ts’ai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour’. In Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros
(eds), Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Sydney: Power, 1999,
pp. 163–4.
18 Berry, ‘Where is the love?’, pp. 162–3.
19 ibid., p. 164.
20 This section draws on a review by FelicityCollins of Japanese Story published in Senses
of Cinema, 29, 2003.
21 ibid., p. 165.
22 See An Ordinary Woman (Sue Brooks, 1989) and The Road to Nhill (Sue Brooks,
1996).
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Sustaining Grief
23 Minor characters in Japanese Story and Heaven’s Burning register an unforgiving
memory of wartime enmity with Japan, despite economic and cultural acceptance
of Japanese investment and tourism in postwar Australia.
24 Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, p. 93.
25 ibid., pp. 93–4.
26 ibid., p. 94.
27 ibid., pp. 160–1.
28 This section draws on a review by Felicity Collins of Dreaming in Motion published
in Senses of Cinema, 27, 2003.
29 Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching’. In Cathy
Caruth,Trauma: Explorations inMemory,Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press,
1995, p. 16.
30 ibid., p. 5.
31 ibid., p. 10.
187
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199
Index
Aboriginal racial stereotypes, 3
Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 42
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert, 77, 116, 159
After the Deluge, 35
‘aftershock’, 75, 78, 81–6
‘afterwardness’, 78, 87–90, 91–2, 174
Akerman, Piers, 6, 63, 135–7, 147
Alberti, Manuela, 76, 91–2
American Graffiti, 152, 159
Anderson, Ian, 164
Armstrong, Gillian
High Tide, 97
The Last Days of Chez Nous, 35, 77
My Brilliant Career, 75
Oscar and Lucinda, 77, 83
Armstrong, Kerry, 34
Australian film genre, 25–7
Australian Film Industry awards, 27, 30, 33,
34, 162
Australian history, politicisation, 5–6, 13, 16,
27
Australian Rules, 42, 52
Anglo-Celtic social imaginary in, 43–5
aural images, 41
depiction of race, 45–8
identity in, 54
landscape in, 76
The Awful Truth, 124
Ayres, Tony, 41, 114
The Back of Beyond, 90, 133, 143
Backroads, 165, 167
‘backtracking’, 3, 172
Black and White, 11
The Bank, 96, 97, 114
Barney, 140
Barrett, Ray, 77
Bayet-Charlton, Fabienne, 95
Beckett, Jeremy, 67
Bend It Like Beckham, 157
Beneath Clouds, 154, 162
as ‘coming-of-age’ film, 167–8
landscape in, 76
politics of shame in, 168–9
race and identity in, 163–5
as road film, 165–7
Benjamin,Walter, 8, 10, 66, 78
Beresford, Bruce, 35
Berlant, Lauren, 61
Berry, Chris, 159–60, 175
Bilcock, Jill, 31
Black and White, 10–14, 76
Black Chicks Talking (television program),
17–18, 182
Aboriginal identity in, 17, 18
colonialism in, 18
‘recognition’ in, 18
Black Talk, 183
black trackers, 3, 141
Blainey, Geoffrey, 6
Blair,Wayne, 183
Blake, Rachael, 34
Blurred, 114
Boseley, Nicholas, 183
Bovell, Andrew, 34
Bowman, Anthony J., 124
Brady, Tait, 34
The Breakfast Club, 159
Bringing Them Home (report), 7, 20, 42, 57,
80, 117, 133, 135, 136, 139, 149, 150, 193
neo-conservative response, 135–6
see also Stolen Generations
Broadbent, Jim, 30, 37
Broken English, 10
Brooks, Sue, 173, 176
Buffalo 66, 159
Burungu, Daisy, 137, 148
Caesar, David, 97, 114
Cameron, John, 113
Campion, Jane, 42, 77, 83, 86–7
Caputo, Raffaele, 153
Caruth, Cathy, 146, 182
200
Index
The Castle, 115, 117–18, 119–21
Mabo decision in, 117, 118–19, 121
populist sentiment, 32
quirkiness, 154, 159
urban landscape in, 122
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 77, 167
Chapman, Jan, 34, 35
Chauvel, Charles, 82, 140, 142
Cimino, Michael, 30
Clarry, Evan, 114
Cole, Beck, 184
Collette, Toni, 176, 177, 180–1
comedy genre, 77
coming-of-age films, 152–4
commercial-industrial strategy, 24, 26
Connolly, Robert, 96, 114
Connolly, Sharon, 176
Cook, Cecil, 139
Coppola, Francis Ford, 30
Coppola, Sofia, 123
Cowan, Tom, 89
Cox, Deb, 35
Crackerjack, 114
Crocodile Dundee, 30, 77, 97
Croghan, Emma-Kate, 115, 123, 124
Crowe, Russell, 22, 24, 25, 37
Heaven’s Burning, 77, 84
L.A. Confidential, 23
Master and Commander, 23
Romper Stomper, 23
cultural-interventionist strategy, 24, 26, 55
Cunnamulla, 95, 97, 104–8, 164
de Heer, Rolf, 3, 14, 76, 94
Dermody, Susan, 9, 42, 75, 140, 143
see also social imaginary theory
Devil in the Flesh, 153
The Dish
AFI awards, 33
Australian ‘flavour’, 36–8
colonial nostalgia, 49
commercial-industrial strategy, 24, 27–9,
31–3
modernity in, 54, 55
Dixson, Miriam, 36, 41, 44
documentary films, 59–60
Doyle, Chris, 138, 141
Dreaming in Motion, 173, 175, 182
Duigan, John, 153
Duncan, Cathy, 98, 108–9
Elfick, David, 96
Elizabeth, 80
Elliott, Stephan, 77, 116
Elsaesser, Thomas, 29, 146, 173
erfahrung, 43, 52, 54, 56, 173, 174
Estens, Dick, 98, 108, 109
Faiman, Peter, 77
The Farm, 96, 97
Fat Pizza, 114
Fenech, Paul, 114
film-funding policy, 7, 8, 55–6
see also Howard Government, film and
television policy
Flannery, Tim, 6, 95
Flat, 184
Foley, Gary, 165
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (television
program), 137, 148
Ford, Harrison, 134
Four Weddings and a Funeral, 124
Free Trade Agreement (Australia–US), 56
friendship, depiction, 15–17
Frontline (television series), 32
Gabriel, Peter, 137
Gallipoli, 77, 80, 152
Garner, Helen, 35
The General, 138
genre, use in Australian film, 12–13, 15
Ghandi, Leela, 15
Gibson, Ross, 75, 172, 180
Girlfight, 157
The Goddess of 1967, 179
Goldman, Paul, 41, 76
Graham, Trevor, 60, 61, 62, 64
Grech, John, 106, 108
Greer, Germaine, 6, 91, 95
grief-work in filmmaking, 174, 175
see also individual film titles
Gulpilil, David, 37, 137
AFI award, 22, 24
Crocodile Dundee, 3, 23
Dead Heart, 3
as iconic figure, 25
Mimi, 185
One Night the Moon, 3
Rabbit-Proof Fence, 23
The Tracker, 3, 14, 23
Until the End of the World, 3
Walkabout, 23, 142
Hall, Ken G., 96
Hannam, Ken, 75
Hansen, Miriam, 9
201
Index
Haslem, Denise, 64
Head On
AFI awards, 159
as ‘coming-of-age’ film, 154, 158,
160–2
politics of shame in, 168–9
as teen movie, 159–160
The Heartbreak Kid, 155
Heartland (television series), 95, 98
‘afterwardness’ in, 100
identity in, 97
social imaginary in, 99–104
terra nullius in, 103
Heaven’s Burning, 77, 83–5, 179
Heaven’s Gate, 30
Heyer, John, 90, 133, 143
High Tide, 97
Hiroshima Mon Amour, 146
historical recreation, 10
‘history wars’, see Australian history,
politicisation
Hogan, Paul J., 77, 116, 154, 180
Holy Smoke, 77, 83, 86–7, 91
Howard, John, 6, 13
refusal to apologise, 80, 176
‘relaxed and comfortable’ ethos, 37, 56
response to Mabo, 16, 80
and ‘the battler’, 95, 107
Howard government, 5
attack on ‘cultural elites’, 26, 43
film and television policy, 55
see also film-funding policy
Howson, Peter, 6, 135
Hughes, John, 42, 60, 159
Hunter, Bill, 85
Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 53, 160
The Ice Storm, 159
Ikin, Bridget, 24, 42, 55
Indigenous–settler relations, depiction, 7
Jacka, Elizabeth, 9, 42, 75
see also social imaginary theory
Japanese Story, 173
‘backtracking’ in, 176
grief-work in, 174, 178–9, 181–2
landscape in, 179–80
post-Mabo consciousness, 177–8
Jedda, 82, 88, 142
Jenkins, Michael, 155
Johnson, Darlene, 23, 137
Johnson, Stephen, 76
Journey Among Women, 89
Kapur, Shekhar, 80
Keating, Annita, 63
Keating, Paul, 36
land rights legislation, 16
Redfern Park speech, 5, 37, 80, 120
Kelly, Molly, 137, 144, 145, 148
Khadem, Mojgan, 76, 89
Kidman, Nicole, 30
Knight, Andrew, 35
Kokkinos, Ana, 154, 159
Kotcheff, Ted, 97
Kudoh, Youki, 84
Lahiff, Craig
Black and White, 10, 12, 76
Heaven’s Burning, 77, 179
Land Bilong Islanders, 62, 67
Lander, Ned, 10
landscape, depiction, 14, 75–6, 77
coastal, 115
‘the country’, 94–9
urban, 114–15, 123
Lang, Samantha, 114
Langton, Marcia, 99, 163
Lantana
AFI awards, 33
Australian ‘flavour’, 36–8
commercial-industrial strategy, 24, 27–9,
152
as crime thriller, 33–6
urban landscape in, 54
The Last Days of Chez Nous, 35, 77, 83, 85–6
Law, Clara, 179
Lawrence, Ray, 24, 34
Lee, Sophie, 86, 185
Leguizano, John, 30
Longford, Raymond, 77
Looking for Alibrandi, 154–5, 156–8, 159
as multicultural narrative, 155–6
politics of shame in, 168–9
Lost in the Bush, 140
Lost in Translation, 123
Love Actually, 124
Love and Other Catastrophes, 125
Luhrmann, Baz, 24, 29, 77, 116, 155
Mabo, Bonita, 60, 63, 68
Mabo case, 3–5, 7, 59, 78
neo-conservative response, 16, 118
status of Indigenous culture and law in,
68–9
see also terra nullius doctrine
Mabo, Eddie, 62, 64, 67, 119
202
Index
Mabo – Life of an Island Man, 59
as ‘intimate history’, 60–2
as tragedy, 62–5
‘trauma of non-recognition’ in, 65–70
Mad Max trilogy, 75, 77
Mailman, Deborah, 17, 18
Maloney, Paul, 114
Malouf, David, 41, 49
Manganninie, 140
Manne, Robert, 6, 135, 136
Marchetta, Melena, 154
Martin, Adrian, 30
Martin, Fran, 168–9
Maslin, Sue, 176
Matrix trilogy, 28
McGregor, Ewan, 30
Message from Moree, 95, 97, 98,
108–10
Miller, George, 75
Mills, Jane, 147
Mimi, 185
The Missing, 76, 77, 87, 91–2, 140
Moffatt, Tracey, 82, 142, 163
Monk, Roger, 50
The Monkey’s Mask, 114
Morris, Meaghan, 165
Moulin Rouge, 29–30, 33, 36–8
Moynihan, J., 67
Muecke, Stephen, 165
Mullet, 97, 114
Murdoch, Rupert, 30
Muriel’s Wedding, 77, 116, 154, 180
My Brilliant Career, 75
Nash, Margot, 115, 121
national identity, depiction, 7
Neville, A.O., 136, 138, 148
Ngoombujarra, David, 10, 13
Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy, 82, 142
No Worries, 96, 97
Nowra, Louis, 10, 83, 127
Noyce, Phillip, 35, 134–5
Backroads, 165
Clear and Present Danger, 134
Patriot Games, 134
Rabbit-Proof Fence, 3, 76, 133, 136–8, 147,
149
The Sum of All Fears, 134
Olsen, Christine, 137
One from the Heart, 30
One Nation (political party), 48, 50, 95, 106,
113, 176
One Night the Moon, 3, 76, 140, 142
One Red Blood, 23
The Opposite of Sex, 159
O’Rourke, Dennis, 95, 98, 104–6, 107
Oscar and Lucinda, 77, 78–81, 83
Paperback Hero, 124
Pederson, Aaron, 185
Perkins, Rachel, 3, 76, 115, 123, 127
Petro, Patrice, 81
Phelps, Peter, 34
Picnic at Hanging Rock, 75, 133, 140,
141
Pierce, Peter, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143
Pilkington-Garimara, Doris, 135, 147
place, role in Australian identity, 112–14
Powell, Michael, 157
Purcell, Leah, 17–18, 182
purgatorial narrative, 77
Rabbit-Proof Fence, 3, 133–4
as action film, 137–8
critical responses, 135–7, 147–9
as hybrid genre film, 138–9
landscape in, 76, 181
as ‘lost child’ film, 139–44
marketing, 137
post-Mabo consciousness, 173
as trauma cinema, 144–5
Racing the Moon, 152
Radiance, 115, 123, 126–9
Radstone, Susannah, 87
Real Women Have Curves, 157
Rebel Without a Cause, 159
reconciliation, 4
Risk, 114
Roach, Archie, 14
road movie genre, 25–6
Robbins, Glenn, 34
Roeg, Nicholas, 23, 133, 142–3
Rymer, Judy, 95
Sampi, Everlyn, 137
SBS Independent, 24, 42, 55–6
Schepisi, Fred, 35, 77
Schindler’s List, 5, 145
Scott, Jane, 159
SeaChange (television series), 97
The Searchers, 138
Sellars, Peter, 42
Sen, Ivan, 76, 154, 162
The Sentimental Bloke, 77
Serenades, 76, 77, 87, 88–90
203
Index
Sharp, Nonie, 65, 68
Sheehan, Paul, 30
Shit Skin, 183
‘shock of recognition’, 8, 78
Sitch, Rob, 24, 115, 154
social imaginary, 9, 36, 41
see also Dermody, Susan
see also Jacka, Elizabeth
Sons of Matthew, 82
Speed, Lesley, 153
Spielberg, Steven, 5
The Squatter’s Daughter, 96
Stand by Me, 152, 159
Stolen Generations, 6–10, 133, 145, 183
see also Bringing Them Home (report)
Strange Planet, 115, 123, 124–6
Strehlow, T.G.H., 13
Strictly Ballroom, 29, 77, 116, 155, 157
Stuart case, 10–13
Saunders, Samantha, 184
Summer of 42, 152
Sunday Too Far Away, 75, 77
10 Things I Hate About You, 157
terra nullius doctrine, 3–4, 7, 66, 112, 172
see also Mabo case
They’re a Weird Mob, 157
Thornton,Warwick, 185
Tilson, Alison, 176
Tingwell, Bud, 119
The Tracker, 14–17
‘afterwardness’ in, 94
the black tracker in, 3
landscape in, 76, 181
post-Mabo consciousness, 173
‘recognition’ in, 14–15
trauma cinema, 11, 145, 182
Tsunashima, Gotaro, 177
Turn Around, 184
Uncivilized, 140
Unfinished Business (television series), 42
cultural-interventionist strategy, 43
Vacant Possession, 115, 121–3
Vellis, Alexsi, 114
Wake in Fright, 97
Walkabout, 88, 133, 140, 142–3
Walker, Janet, 11
Walker, Mandy, 35
Walking on Water, 48–52
aural images, 41
coastal landscape in, 114
cultural-interventionist strategy, 42
identity in, 52
urban landscape in, 54
Weir, Peter, 35
Gallipoli, 77, 80
Picnic at Hanging Rock, 75, 133, 140
White, Alan, 114
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
29
Williams, Evan, 64, 135
Windschuttle, Keith, 13, 17
The Wog Boy, 114
Women of the Sun, 99
Woods, Kate, 96, 154–5
Woodward, Kathleen, 174–5
Working Dog, 32
The Year My Voice Broke, 153
Yolngu Boy, 55, 57, 75, 76, 77, 87, 88–90, 91,
196, 199
204