Australia

AUSTRALIAN FILM AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURE

Australia is now a multicultural country and no one film, or cycle, can fully capture the country's diversity. This was not always the case, as prior to World War II there was a degree of cultural uniformity in Australia due to its predominantly British heritage. Hence, for much of the last half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, Australia was a culture trying to establish and articulate its distinctive characteristics. The bush and the outback provided the iconography and values for this, and the bush-city dichotomy in the pre-1941 rural comedies and rural melodramas reinforced a mythology based on the virtues of mateship, sport, physical labor, and egalitarianism. Longford's The Woman Suffers (1918) and Franklyn Barrett's The Breaking of the Drought (1920) express this mythology as clearly as Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). Even Australia's most celebrated silent film, Longford's The Sentimental Bloke (1919), traces the regeneration of its larrikin hero from the temptations associated with the streets of Woolloomooloo in Sydney to an orchard in the country. (A "larrikin" is an irreverent male who fails to take himself, or anything else, seriously. He generally prefers the company of his mates and pursues "masculine" interests, such as drinking, gambling and sporting activities. The idea of a career or a longtime romantic relationship is normally anathema to the larrikin.)

Two of Australia's most commercially successful films, The Man from Snowy River (1982) and Crocodile Dundee (1986), provide a romantic version of this mythology by suggesting that the distinctive Australian (male) characteristics were forged in the harsh Australian out-back. By contrast, a new generation of filmmakers, such as Sue Brooks (b. 1953) in Japanese Story (2003) and Cate Shortland in Somersault (2004), provide a different, more problematic, interpretation of this nexus between the Australian landscape and the Australian character.

However, the original inhabitants of the bush, the Aboriginal Australians, have not fared well in the Australian cinema. There were, for example, few Aboriginal Australians featured as major characters in Australian films until the 1970s. The notable exceptions included Charles Chauvel's Uncivilised (1936) and Jedda (1955) and the Ealing production of Bitter Springs (1950), starring Chips Rafferty, which reversed the usual moral stereotypes by presenting white farmers as intruders upon land sacred to the local Aborigines. There was a change in the 1970s and 1980s with films such as Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971), Backroads (Noyce, 1977), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Schepisi, 1978), and, especially, The Fringe Dwellers (Beresford, 1986) and Blackfellas (James Ricketson, 1993). These last two films are notable because of the way they emphasize the communality of Aboriginal life. Other attempts to demythologize prevailing European perceptions of Aboriginality include Nice Coloured Girls (Tracey Moffat, 1987) and Radiance (Rachel Perkins, 1998). However, the mainstream Australian cinema has yet to totally embrace films about, or made by, Aboriginal Australians. Even Noyce's moving drama concerning the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by white officials in the 1930s, in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), was subjected to abuse from conservative elements.

Australia, with its population of little more than twenty million, will always struggle to maintain a feature film industry that can compete in the same marketplace with the Hollywood blockbusters. In the 1970s there was a concerted effort by directors such as Burstall, Hannam, Beresford, Weir, Armstrong, Schepisi, Noyce, and Paul Cox to distinguish their films from the usual Hollywood fare. This trend has been maintained by subsequent

filmmakers such as Jane Campion, with Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993), and Holy Smoke (1999); Baz Luhrmann (b. 1962) with Moulin Rouge (2001), Ray Lawrence with Bliss (1985) and Lantana (2002); John Ruane (b. 1952) with Death in Brunswick (1991) and Dead Letter Office (1998); Scott Hicks (b. 1953) with Shine (1996); David Caesar with Mullet (2001) and Dirty Deeds (2002); Jonathan Teplitzky with Gettin' Square (2003); Clara Law with The Goddess of 1967 (2002); and Cate Shortland with Somersault . These directors have been able to fashion a distinctive place somewhere between the poetic realism of the European art film and the narrative demands of the classical Hollywood cinema, a difficult terrain as commercial failure is always precipitously close.