AustLit

'I don't remember exactly when I first saw Wendy Hughes, or more accurately when I first became aware of Wendy Hughes as a presence on the screen. I thought I had first seen her in Lonely Hearts (1982), the AFI award-winning Best Feature film directed by Paul Cox, but I now realise she must have been in earlier Australian films, or on television without my being aware of exactly who Wendy Hughes was.

I would probably have seen her as one of the fine cast of My Brilliant Career (1980), directed by Gillian Armstrong, a film that did much to re-establish the reputation of Australian filmmaking internationally. As the concerned, caring Aunt Helen of Judy Davis' Sybilla, it was an important early step for Wendy Hughes and clearly demonstrated her compassionate side.'

'Although they possess 'a European heart', writes director Paul Cox of his films, their roots are firmly in Australia (1998a: 82). In this chapter, I attend to the diasporic aspects of the biography and early films of Paul Cox, exploring well-known works such as Kostas (1979), Lonely Hearts (1982) and Man of Flowers (1983), and paying particular attention to My First Wife (1984). This largely historical chapter works to better comprehend how such films, from the 1970s and 1980s, 'construct' Paul Cox as an exilic, 'homeless' Australian film-maker. These films, well received by Australian and international audiences and critics, popularized Cox's name in the art house world as an Australian auteur making subtle films about human relationships, as 'Australia's Ingmar Bergman' (Chipperfield 1989: 12; Rattigan 1991: 224-26). It is through the recurring themes of exile and isolation, the diasporic motifs of memory and migration, and filmic strategies deploying the construction of mental landscapes and 'European' interiors that the personal relationship between Cox the film-maker and his adopted homeland is to be understood. ' (Introduction)