Australian Cinema after Mabo Australian Cinema after Mabo is the first comprehensive study of Australian national cinema in the 1990s. Drawing on concepts of shock, memory and national maturity, it asks what part Australian cinema plays in reviewing our colonial past. It looks at how the 1992 Mabo decision, which overruled the nation’s founding myth of terra nullius, has changed the meaning of landscape and identity in Australian films, including The Tracker, Rabbit- Proof Fence, Moulin Rouge, The Castle, Cunnamulla, Looking for Alibrandi and Japanese Story amongst many others. It is essential reading for anyone studying Australian cinema and for those interested in how the history wars of the 1990s have impacted on the way we imagine ourselves through cinema. Felicity Collins lectures in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University. She is the author of The Films of Gillian Armstrong. Therese Davis lectures in Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship. Australian Cinema after Mabo FELICITY COLLINS AND THERESE DAVIS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521834803 © Felicity Jane Collins and Therese Verdun Davis 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 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Contents Acknowledgments page vii Part 1 Australian Cinema and the History Wars 1 Backtracking after Mabo 3 2 Home and Abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 22 3 Elites and Battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 41 4 Mediating Memory in Mabo – Life of an Island Man 59 Part 2 Landscape and Belonging after Mabo 5 Aftershock and the Desert Landscape in Heaven’s Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 75 6 Coming from the Country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 94 7 Coming from the City in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance 112 Part 3 Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age 8 Lost, Stolen and Found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 133 9 Escaping History and Shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 152 10 Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion 172 Bibliography 188 Index 200 v Acknowledgments The joyful co-authorship of this book has been a tale of two cities and a regional centre. Our friendship began in Sydney in the early 1980s when we were both students in the Communication degree at the NSW Institute of Technology. This book is grounded in those formative years when our thinking about film, media, history and culture was shaped by the many luminaries of the infamous Tower Building on Broadway. If the seeds for thisbookweresowninpost-structuralistSydney,theprojectcametofruition through the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and the Film Studies program at the University of Newcastle. In December 1996 we participated in a seminar, Film and Modernity, led by Miriam Bratu Hansen, at the University of Newcastle. This seminar provided the impetus for our desire to rethink Australian cinema in terms of shock, memory and recognition. In Melbourne, the lively debate and recent flood of books and essays by local academics and publishers engaged in the history wars has created a stimulating context for our writing on the politics of memory in post-Mabo films. We are indebted to the Melbourne-based Metro Magazine and Senses of Cinema for their regular forums on Australian cinema, and for publishing early versions of ideas we have developed further in this book. Wethank Jodi Brooks for recommending texts on traumatic memory and for encouraging this project. Con Verevis provided Felicity Collins with the opportunity to present early work on landscape and aftershock at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in October 2001. The 2002 Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Film and History Association at Flinders University gave us the opportunity to road-test the metaphor of backtracking in recent Australian films. We are grateful for suggestions and encouragement from Tracey Bunda, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, John Hughes, Sylvia Lawson and Cassi Plate. We wish to thank Kim Armitage from Cambridge University Press for her enthusiasm and diligence, Joyleen Christensen for her efficiency with the bibliography and Venetia Somerset for her instructive copy editing. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of friends, colleagues and family. vii Australian Cinema and the History Wars 1 Backtracking after Mabo Backtrack: (vb). 1. to return by the same route by which one has come. 2. to retract or reverse one’s opinion, policy, etc. The familiar yet estranged figure of the black tracker has enjoyed a certain longevity in Australian cultural traditions for it easily corresponds with the metaphor of exile and imprisonment in a purgatorial landscape, identified by Graeme Turner as one of the key tropes of Australian fiction. However, with shifts in the Australian social imaginary that accompanied the Land Rights movement of the 1970s, the tracker receded into the background, a result, perhaps, of a critique of racial stereotypes initiated by Aboriginal activists and critics. In 2001–02 the black tracker made an unexpected return to Australian screens in two feature films, Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) and The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002), and a short musical film, One NighttheMoon(RachelPerkins,2001).Inbothfeatures,aniconicactorofthe 1970s,DavidGulpilil,wascastintheroleofthetracker.1 Hisstartling,intense screen presence haunted Rabbit-Proof Fence and dominated The Tracker. Afteraperiodofrelativeobscurity(saveforsmallerrolesinCrocodileDundee, Peter Faiman, 1986; Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders, 1992; and Dead Heart, Nicholas Parsons, 1996), Gulpilil’s return to the screen in two key films of the post-Mabo era, like the films themselves, can be understood as a kind of backtracking, a going over of old ground in Australian national cinema, a going over which reprises and at the same time retracts some of the seemingly intractable figures of Australian national identity. In this book, we use ‘backtracking’ as a key term to describe and inter- pret Australian cinema (and to a lesser extent, television) in the twelve years since the 1992 Mabo decision overturned the nation’s founding doctrine of terra nullius (i.e., land belonging to no one). However, from the out- set, we want to be clear that this is not a book about the Mabo decision itself or the representation of Aboriginality in Australian cinema. It is a book about the cultural rather than political impact of a paradigm shift in Australian historical consciousness. The Mabo decision is central to this 3 shift because it forces Australians to rethink ‘race relations’ and the colonial Mabo pastasintegraltowhatTimRowsedescribesasamorallyillegitimatenational identity.2 Australian colonial histories show that, from day one, European settlers/ invaders recognised the fiction of terra nullius.3 This is evident in their encounters with Aboriginal clans in possession of land, initially in coastal areas and later in the interior, which the British had presumed to be inhos- pitable and therefore ‘empty’ of human life. Yet, as Henry Reynolds argues in Aboriginal Sovereignty, ‘the advantages of assuming the absence of people were so great . that legal doctrine continued to depict Australia as a 4 Australian Cinema after colony acquired by occupation of a terra nullius’. Racist assumptions about Aboriginal culture provided the basis for the continued non-recognition of Indigenous ownership of the land. As Reynolds puts it: settlers/invaders saw Indigenous people as primitives ‘who ranged over the land rather than inhabiting it’.5 Despite a history of Indigenous resistance to dispossession, supported at different times in the nation’s past by a number of non- Indigenous Australians, the story of the nation’s origin, in the occupation of land belonging to no one, remained intact until the High Court’s Mabo decision in 1992. This landmark legal decision to recognise the pre-existing property rights of Indigenous Australians created shock-waves across the nation as non- Indigenous Australians were forced to confront the fiction of terra nullius. As Justice Brennan wrote in his summation of the case: ‘Whatever the jus- tification advanced in earlier days for refusing to recognise the rights and interests in land of the indigenous inhabitants of settled colonies, an unjust and discriminatory doctrine of that kind can no longer be accepted.’6 Events over the past decade have shown, however, that neither the Mabo decision noritssubsequentenactmenthassettledissuesoflandrightsbetweenIndige- nous and non-Indigenous Australians.7 On the contrary, non-Indigenous Australians find themselves