Return to Oz: A History of Australian Cinema (1969-1989)

Part Two: 1969-1989

1. Engines of Change

Continued from Part One

Few explanations for the almost unprecedented resuscitation of Australian cinema between 1969 and 1975 are immediately satisfying. Perhaps the most important changes were the most difficult to quantify, but it is easy to see that 1968 was one of the most important years in contemporary Australian history. A popular referendum gave equal citizenship to indigenous Australians after decades of excision from the communal dialogue. Demonstrations over a visit by Lyndon Johnson, and against Australia's follow-the-leader involvement in Vietnam, illustrated the rise of a new, protest-based counterculture, and a popular objection to the idea of the United States take Britain's place in dictating Australian international policy soon expanded into a new thirst for self-definition. The same year also saw the foundation of the Australian Council for the Arts, a federal panel for sponsoring cultural projects, after a sustained demand for aid in combating the apathy generally dubbed the "cultural cringe" that disdained home-grown art and entertainment.

Such events indicated a new attitude to issues long caught in stagnancy during the highly conservative government of Sir Robert Menzies, which had lasted from 1949 to 1965. The wave of political and cultural agitation rolling worldwide in this era coincided neatly with this reinvigoration, and a powerful nexus arose that fused renewed intellectual and artistic energy, and embraced both old and new versions of the national character. In any event, the close government interest in cinema Raymond Longford had pushed for in the 1920s to so little effect now became institution.

National and state-sponsored bodies to develop, fund, and teach the craft of cinema were instituted first under the influence of Prime Minister John Gorton, heir to but not mimic of Menzies' hegemony, and then the decisively energetic Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Trickles of finance now dispersed to anyone who showed half an ounce of talent and dedication to making movies. Institutions associated with the revival included the Australian Film Development Corporation, formed in 1970, and its reformed successor the Australian cinema, formed in 1970, and its reformed successor the Australian Film Commission, and the Australian Film and Television School, opened in 1973.

What all this boiled down to was that aspiring filmmakers now had access to finance and facilities long withheld to them, and they also had a new, potentially attentive audience. The result: over a 130 features were produced in the 1970s, nearly as many as in the entire period prior to that vital decade. Of course, this was hardly necessarily indicative of quality, and a large amount of dross accompanied the popular and well-regarded films. What is undeniable is that what had been a barely relevant and almost deceased film culture had resurged in the likeness of a genuine industry, and Australian cinema abruptly blossomed anew.

2. New Wave to The Last Wave

The revitalization was clearly in action as early as 1969, even if the scene wasn't entirely populated by new faces and ideas: Lee Robinson, for instance, was able to direct his final feature, The Intruders, in that year, although he would later produce and write several more films of the coming avalanche. Ken G. Hall was expressing his cynicism over the revival as late as 1977, when he published his memoirs. The ripple effect of Michael Powell's They're a Weird Mob's success at first stimulated some familiar reflexes, as co-productions with American and British companies saw imported stars and directors working in Australia again. The expanded confidence and ambition of some figures working in television, coupled with the unimpressive quality of programming, now saw film as a worthy alternative cause.

Reg Goldsworthy (1920-1981), a former radio actor and then TV soap star, formed Goldsworthy Productions, to work in collaboration with an American company, Commonwealth United Corporation, to produce a handful of bland thrillers, including It Takes All Kinds (1969), starring American actors Robert Lansing and Vera Miles, Color Me Dead (1970), with Tom Tryon, and That Lady from Peking (1970), with Nancy Kwan. All three of these films were directed and co-written by US TV director Eddie Davis (1907- ).

Such pulp aside, two of the most important films of the early '70s were likewise directed by visiting filmmakers: Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, retitled Outback for international release, were both made in 1971. These two films looked beyond the seaside cities to the mythic landscape of the sparsely populated interior, but in a dark and penetrating fashion that evoked, in a fashion very different to earlier films, the defined limits of western civilisation as discovered on the edge of the outback. Walkabout's diffuse, alien-feeling narrative, as purveyed through Roeg's finely textured filmmaking - it was his first film as solo director - depicted two teenagers (Jenny Agutter and Lucien John), stranded in the desert after their suicidal businessman father (effective and popular actor John Meillon) burns their car and shoots himself, who are then rescued by a wandering Aboriginal boy, played by David Gulpilil (1953- ), a former dancer credited here as "Gumpilil". The indigenous boy's innate understanding of nature and capacity to survive in the outback contrasts the endangered civility of his two charges, and the disconnection turns tragic when the girl rejects in fearful misunderstanding the boy's mating dance, causing his suicide.

Kotcheff's film detailed the travails of a British schoolteacher (Gary Bond) terrorised to the point of psychological collapse and reversion by yokels in a rural hamlet. Kotcheff, a Canadian who has since said that he was drawn to make the film as it made him reflect on a similar strain of crude redneck culture in his homeland. Nonetheless, the specific evocation of its Aussie variety was sufficiently strong meat to make the film as derided as it was acclaimed upon release, so that while it went on to alert world cinema patrons to something new happening in Australia, it was long neglected at home. Wake in Fright even featured Chips Rafferty, in his final feature appearance before his death that same year, and also provided the film debut of an actor who would practically replace him as a singular icon of on-screen Aussie masculinity, Jack Thompson.

Walkabout and Wake in Fright, whilst being groundbreaking in their approach to style and story in an Australian setting, nonetheless still retained a production model close to that of the '50s films, financed by overseas studios, featuring British actors and helmed by established foreign directors. The same can be said for Tony Richardson's unfortunate 1970 attempt to film the Ned Kelly myth, starring an embarrassing Mick Jagger. Genuine local filmmaking was slower to flourish and less sophisticated when it did. Amongst the handful of other features released in 1969, one, David Cahill's You Can't See 'Round Corners, being the adventures of a young Vietnam veteran and renegade, was rough and basic, but it hit enough of a nerve to inspire a subsequent television series.

Another '69 effort, Two Thousand Weeks, notable chiefly for being the first stab at feature directing by Tim Burstall (1929-2004), a former journalist and documentary maker who had formed his own firm, Eltham Films, in 1959. Two Thousand Weeks was an attempt to establish an antipodean answer to European art cinema - Burstall claimed inspiration in Fellini's 8 ½ - but the film's impact was more one of raised expectations than popular success.

Burstall soon, however, became the closest thing Aussie cinema had known to a reliable hit-maker since Ken G. Hall. His Stork (1971) and Alvin Purple (1973) were sticky, trippy hipster sex farces that both satirised and exploited the fading influence of suburban moralism in the face of new age mores, doomed to date swiftly and badly in both tone and technique, but genuinely popular at the time. Burstall soon expanded his horizons to make Petersen (1974), taken from a work by wunderkind playwright David Williamson (1942- ), a comedy-drama about a working class man uneasy in an academic environment. End Play (1975) was a tolerable thriller, and the spurious period bawdiness of Eliza Fraser (1976) featured Susannah York and Trevor Howard. Burstall's last film of the '70s was his best, the macho drama Last of the Knucklemen (1979), which explored with taciturn humour a team of miners working on an outback site, cursed by endemic boredom, who are subject to occasional power tussles between alpha males, settled in ritualised fist-fights.

The early '70s saw filmmakers grasp onto any material that might provide a base of existing popularity to build on, and this produced some shoddy adaptations of popular TV series like Number 96 (1974) and The Box (1975). Barry Humphries (1934- ), a comic writer and actor, had gone to Britain to work and had become involved with the famous satirical group that founded the magazine "Private Eye". Humphries had created for that magazine a comic strip about the classic Aussie ocker, in the character Barry McKenzie. He returned to Australia to star in John B. Murray's The Naked Bunyip (1970), playing another of his stock characters, suburban matron Dame Edna Everage, in what was essentially a sex comedy, mixing fiction segments and documentary footage that hid graphic images under a floating cartoon bunyip (that's a kind of aboriginal mythical Bigfoot). Bunyip made substantial money, and did much to bolster the arbiters of the Revival's claims of an untapped waiting audience.

Soon Humphries' cartoon creation became the subject of 1972's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which also served as the first feature of Bruce Beresford (1940- ). McKenzie, detailing the adventures of wide-eyed young Barry's (Barry Crocker) in England, provided a slapdash framework for Humphries' caricature of the post-colonial culture clash. It inspired as much cringing as it did laughter for its unabashed celebration of the cruder aspects of Aussie beer-and-burp humor, but it was one of the biggest hits of the era precisely for unleashing a clichéd cultural archetype. Beresford, Humphries and Crocker repeated their success two years later with Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.

Beresford's talents however were more diverse than could be expressed through such material. Beresford had been involved in film production since he was 13, when he had photographed a short film, Time of Crisis, for a friend. After making several more shorts and documentaries himself, including a short stint working in Nigeria, he had become, at age 26, head of production at the British Film Institute, turning out reportage on an array of subjects.

After his two Barry McKenzie successes firmly established him as a feature director, Beresford made Side by Side (1975) in England, built around the glam rock craze of the mid '70s, with Humphries again, before returning to make Don's Party a year later. Adapted from David Williamson's strong play, Don's Party returned to that epochal year of 1968, portraying a group of young lefties who gather on election night to watch yet another defeat for the Labour party and fight out their own various sexual and emotional crises. Beresford followed it quickly with a pair of wilfully disparate films: The Getting of Wisdom (1977), adapted from a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, about life in a girls' boarding school early in the century, and the genuinely punchy crime flick The Money-Movers (1979), establishing him firmly as Aussie cinema's most versatile figure, possessing a rare touch with actors. Beresford's deliberately tackling a diversity of material, including the genteel, feminine world of The Getting of Wisdom, perhaps summarises what is often perceived as indicative of a swift, reactive counterbalance to the crudities and caricatures of the Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple films.

Beresford's chief rival for prominence in the era, Peter Weir (1944- ), produced his first feature, The Cars that Ate Paris, in 1974, after a set of short subjects that had promised a strong if unruly talent. Cars, anticipating later works like Mad Max, with its borderline sci-fi and exploitation of Aussie car culture, also kicked off Weir's genuine fascination with the theme of invasive irrationality and destructive forces assaulting civil stability, a theme that he would take on next with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), adapted from a novel by expatriate author Joan Lindsay. This proved a defining work which announced in international terms the robustness of the Aussie "New Wave". Often cited as the single greatest Australian film, Picnic was a canny choice of subject on Weir's behalf, dramatising as it did the unease of an imported European culture in an unfamiliar landscape that demanded adaptation or promised annihilation.

This was dramatised by a story which was supposedly, although not actually, based in a real event (an aspect of the film's success which anticipated the gimmicks that made a hit of similar The Blair Witch Project many years later) in which a trio of adolescent private schoolgirls disappeared on a picnicking expedition with their classmates and teachers on St Valentine's Day, 1900. The truth of what has happened to them isn't clearly defined, but it becomes apparent that some mystical force has claimed two of the girls: the third turns up, amnesiac and bedraggled, when a young Englishman (Dominic Guard) braves invisible barriers to locate her. The event shatters the school the girls attended and drives its fearsome headmistress (Rachel Roberts) to suicide. Weir's success was in making the tale, in essence a glorified Twilight Zone episode, feel both intensely allusive and elusive in nature with his intricate use of sound effects, and glaze of artful menace.

Weir followed it with The Last Wave (1977), the tale of a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) who uncovers a long-hidden indigenous prophecy of apocalypse. This was a more explicable exploration of a new-age anxiety over natural calamity and the resurgence of repressed forces, rooted clearly in the notion Aboriginal culture might have possessed insight into the state of the world that eludes the invading white world. Not quite as well-received initially, it looks today slightly more satisfying in both filmmaking and narrative shape than Picnic, providing a truly chilling coda.

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