Defining "Australian"

Note: An article with an Australian perspective in a series dealing with neo-realism in cinema, across the world OR as a blog comment for About “Neo-Neo Realism” in The New Yorker

I recently saw two critically acclaimed Australian films, Wake in Fright and Last Ride, at Cinema Nova, in Lygon Street, Melbourne. Just a few hours before my first ever flight to Australia, I happened to watch Wolf Creek.

In totality, these films had a profound effect on me; an effect that made me consciously think about the reasons behind why such films get made and distributed, their overall domestic and international appeal and their impact on national identity as viewed internally and by the outside world.

That's when the connection occured to me - a counter-flow of Edward Said's Orientalism. Put in a nutshell, this theory proposed that the Western world at large, particularly former occidental colonizer nations forged a specific construct of the East that benefitted the colonial project.

However, even now, years after the colonization has officially ended, the problems caused by these artificially fabricated oriental stereotypes continue to haunt and overshadow the experiences of a large number of people from the East. A fairly large number of people from the West continue to assume certain attributes of anyone from the East based on these rather archaic misguided pre-conceived notions.

When I heard accounts of this from others, I always did take it with a large grain of salt. However, having been in the occident for a few months now, I have had similar experiences. My customers where I work listen to me talk and almost immediately glance at my name badge and then look at me and realize that I’m not from "here". They are curious to know where I am "originally" from and how long I’ve been in the "here". I tell them. Upon hearing that I’ve only been "here" for 3 months, their immediate response always, always is, "Oh, but your English is very good". The first time I heard it, I was dumbfounded (I’m very rarely speechless.) It took me a few months and several repetitions of this incident to come to terms with it and now I just laugh it off with, "Thanks, so is yours!" I was not amused at all, however, when a classmate expressed the same doubts in my Publishing and Editing Masters program at University!!

But, then I did some more thinking and realized that it IS actually mutual—the creation and perpetration of cultural stereotypes. No, it’s not just the occident dishing it out to the orient. Counter-flows are plenty.

What do most people who have never been to Australia think of Australia? Sunshine, vegemite, sports, outdoors, wildlife, flora and fauna, beer, bbqs, humour and English accent that is markedly different from British or American sensibilities. That pretty much sums up Australia for the very average person from the orient and perhaps even elsewhere in the world.

These rather one-dimensional, insular ideas are also perpetrated very often by popular media and cinema. While films like Muriel’s Wedding, Crocodile Dundee, The Castle, television shows like Kath and Kim, work together to create a specific idea of the Australian experience and life, films like Wake in Fright, Last Ride and perhaps even Wolf Creek, do exactly the opposite; they create contrasts, add depth and dimension to the populist, broad generalised notion about Australia.

Surreal, neorealist cinema is perhaps the only way out; the only way to strive to achieve a semblance of balance in creating depth and adding a variety of dimensions to singular populist notions one culture has about another.

A glimpse of some of the scenes of each of these films, clearly illustrates this contrast in identity formation.

Digital Restoration of Wake in Fright



Trailer of Last Ride



Trailer of Muriel's Wedding



Scene from The Castle