OUTBACK RELATIONS: WALKABOUT AND WAKE IN FRIGHT

1971 was a key year in the emergence of modern Australia cinema. Two seminal films, Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, were screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May and went on to become significant touchstones for the 1970s film ‘revival’, as well as the broader and ongoing iconography and thematic preoccupations of Australian cinema. These two films arose from the marginally more productive feature-film ecology that took root in the late 1960s and represented a way forward for the ‘national’ cinema in terms of style, theme, characterisation, filmmaking process and form, while also looking backwards, at times critically, to the largely international or ‘locationist’ productions of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In Walkabout's emphasis on the transcendental strangeness and mysticism of the Australian landscape, as well as its troubled but ground-breaking incorporation and representation of Aboriginal characters, their culture and agency, and Wake in Fright's often grotesque, dark, dirty Gothic and deeply unsettling skewering of the foundational myths of Australian mateship and masculinity, it is also possible to see even deeper connections to key trends, forms and films of Australian cinema throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Although both films are routinely listed as important works in various surveys of postwar Australian cinema – particularly after the rerelease of Walkabout in the late 1990s and Wake in Fright's rediscovery in the late 2000s – they also present a stout challenge to commentators proselytising for a national cinema that privileges, and even insists upon, key creative roles being filled by Australian practitioners and financing largely being sourced locally (see Lawson 1985: 175–83).