AustLit

'“I  hope there won’t be any colloquialisms in this fillum Barry”, said Tom Stubbings breathlessly. The senior Sydney accountant had bounded across the tarmac at Kingsford-Smith aerodrome to catch us before we boarded the flight to London to start filming The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. The director, Bruce Beresford, and I were co-authors of the screenplay, and Mr Stubbings was charged with administering the total production budget of $250,000 advanced to us by the ­Australian Film Corporation. He was nervous. Naturally I reassured him: “It’s a family film, Tom”, I said, lying through my teeth. When the film was released on October 12, 1972, and returned its total investment to the AFC in a matter of weeks, it was, notwithstanding, excoriated by every critic, journalist and disc jockey in Australia as a vulgar calumny, a cruel mis­representation of Australian refinement. The movie was a ceaseless stream of colloquialisms new, obsolete and invented. It was the filthiest Australian film of the year, the nadir of Australian cinema which had by then entered its soft-focus “idyllic” phase.'  (Introduction)