AustLit

A whimsical comedy about a farm girl and a scandal in a 1920s' country town. When a French artist and war veteran arrives in town and the girl accepts a position as a life model for his drawing classes, the town's conservative values are shaken.

'A tale of a town called Orange and the people who live there. A story too, of longing and courage, which unveils some of the different faces of love. A teenage daughter, a single mother, a caring brother, a romantic girl, an abusive father, a young rebel, a dreamy farmhand and a tough farmer - their stories connect, affecting each other and the challenges they face in their rural lives. All brave love and loss, together weaving a story - a country love story - in a place called Orange.'

Source: Melbourne Independent Filmmakers (http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/cowan_orange.html). (Sighted: 14/10/2014)

A cinematographer and an actress fall in love in London, and return home to Australia, where their dreams of making their own kinds of films come up against the restrictions and limitations of the Australian film industry.

In the earliest years of Australian settlement, Elizabeth Harrington, the daughter of the colony's judge advocate, helps a group of convict women escape from the brutality and repeated rape that they endure at the hands of their gaolers. They escape into the bush, where a young Aboriginal woman teaches them to adapt, and form a new 'tribe,' living off the land without men. However, the troopers, led by Elizabeth's spurned fiancée, come after them.

[Source: Australian Screen]

When Antigone arrives in Sydney from Greece to meet Telis, the man to whom she is making an arranged marriage, she is rejected for being too old. Although she finds sympathy from Telis's older brother Manolis, Antigone begins to withdraw into memories of her youth and ealier romances, while longing desperately for control over her own destiny.

The story is told from the perspective of a migrant who has newly arrived in Australia, and also explores the Greek community in Sydney at that time. In this respect, it offers an alternative picture of migrant life to the comedic narratives of films such as They're a Weird Mob (q.v.).

'The plot is simple. The boys and girls in a branch office plan for their annual social gathering, where hierarchies are levelled and everybody is pals with everybody else.

'The office boy whizzes the new telephonist off from beneath the staff clerk's nose. The Class 4 clerk (or so I would rate him) has his plans for the one day of the year with the fluffy-headed typist who turns out to have something more substantial under all that hair and who has the honour of delivering one of the best lines I have ever heard (regrettably, unprintable here).

'The typist mum with a grown family boozes her self into a state of humanity. The boss nurses an unstated hangup–it is enough to know that it is there, not what it is.

'And so the small conflict situations present themselves one by one, at the grass-roots human level. They create their own tensions to add to the one that happens at the picnic and the film resolves only one of them.'

Source:

Macdonald, Dougal. 'Required Viewing for Office Workers', Canberra Times, 13 March 1973, p.18.