Caught between empires: ambivalence in Australian films

Abstract

Australian films have gained an international reputation for their whimsical look at everyday life. Beneath the quirky veneer of Australian movies, however, lies a deep ambivalence to Australia’s cultural dependency on Britain and America. The article explores this dependency in two interrelated parts. Part one examines how in the early period of Australia’s film renaissance the collective focus was on the search for a distinctive national identity. An identity that concentrated on presenting Australia from a settler perspective shaped by Australia’s colonial past, rather than as a post-colonial society psychologically scarred by its past. The settler identity became ironically one of mimicking the British in the search for a unique national identity. The predominant form this identity took was through the character/caricature of the “ocker”, ostensibly an anti-authoritarian “man” whose failings were disguised by sentimentality. By the 1980s, Australian filmmakers began to shift their gaze from that of a colonial one to that of an Imperial one and this shift was principally towards America, which, in turn, made the settler identity more ambivalent against a nation that had experienced a revolutionary break from Britain. The emergence of Aboriginal land rights saw the positions of the settler become even more problematic as indigenous peoples came to symbolise the authentic Australian identity. Part two explores this ambivalence by comparing how both Australian and American filmmakers attempted to deal with the political traumas created first by the removal of the head of government, and second, by the Vietnam War. While American film directors excessively played out the politics of these traumas, Australian filmmakers repressed the shortcomings of their own political regime. The lack of balance was fertile ground for the subsequent political move to the right, evident in the whitewash of Australia’s role in Vietnam and the reaffirmation of the Constitutional Monarchy.