The Australian literary adaptation: An overview
1993; Salisbury University; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoBy now, what most people associate with the idea of Australian is the sensational-some would say inexplicable-success of Crocodile Dundee (1986).1 This skilfully assembled package of proven and unexceptional ingredients quickly eclipsed the previous commercial successes of The Man from Snowy River (1982) and the Mad Max films (1979, 1981, and 1985). These, in their turn, had eclipsed the phenomenon of tasteful literary adaptation which had been largely responsible for setting the concept of a Australian cinema in motion in the mid-1970s. By eclipsed, I mean of course in terms of box office success,2 but also, even more tellingly, in what had become the received notion of Australian cinema. Whereas Crocodile Dundee and The Man from Snowy River may have been seen as predictable heirs to a century-old tradition of bush-based virtues, of the kind delineated by Russell Ward in The Australian Legend,3 the 1970s literary adaptations were surprising on several counts. In popular perception it may well be that Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is the film that launched the new Australian cinema, along perhaps with Ken Hannam's Sunday Too Far Away, released in the same year. (Both were listed by Melbourne's leading daily newspaper reviewer as among the year's top ten films,4 a state of affairs without precedent in living memory.) Sunday Too Far Away, an affectionately observed study of the competitiveness and loneliness of the outback shearer's lot, was an original screenplay, as remarkably few of the notable films of the revival were. It was a well-liked film, but it was really Picnic at Hanging Rock which caught the public imagination and which helped to establish the idea of a national of a particular kind. It ushered in a series of films based, like itself, on literary sources, set in a carefully recreated past, and of a gentle decorous kind which eschewed the genres of the dominant American cinema. This was, as suggested, a surprising development. First, it ran counter to those ocker (chauvinistic Australian) comedies which had in the early 1970s habituated Australians for the first time in decades to the sensation of hearing their own idioms and their own accents in Australian cinemas. These films, including Tim Burstall's Stork (1971) and Alvin Purple (1973), and Bruce Beresford's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1912), were raucous, parodie reworkings of the idea of the Australian male as a no-nonsense bloke who drinks heavily and expects the women (sheilas in local slang) to be bedmates but certainly not mates on any other level. Stork is a lanky iconoclast; Alvin Purple is mysteriously irresistible to women and the joke is in his attempts to ward off their attentions; and Barry McKenzie is the Australian abroad, teaching Pommie (English) sheilas a thing or two about real men. There is some diversity in these protagonists but they do share an idea of Australianness and maleness that clearly struck some responsive chord with the public, and all were modest commercial successes, recouping the costs of their investments at home and, in the case of Barry McKenzie, doing well in Britain. The point of adducing these broad comedies in this context is to emphasise how unlike them were Picnic at Hanging Rock and those adaptations which followed. They include such titles as Storm Boy (1976), The Getting of Wisdom and The Mango Tree (1977), Blue Fin, The Irishman, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and My Brilliant Career (1979). Apart from Sunday Too Far Away and Newsfront (1978), both based on original screenplays, it was on such largely decorous adaptations that the reputation of the new Australian was founded. At a time when such films were winning critical plaudits abroad,5 when Australia seemed to be producing a kind of art-house without the trouble of reading subtitles, there was a dissentient voice from the American reviewer Pauline Kael who claimed that, There's no real excitement in them. …
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