AustLit

Australian cinema has a long history of depicting violent men: from Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976) and Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) in the 1970s, Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992), Blackrock (Steven Vidler, 1997) and The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998) in the 1990s, to Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011) in the 2000s. Throughout this period, Australian cinema has paid exclusive attention to men’s violence: vigilantes, petty criminals and troubled young men in the suburbs. Felicity Holland and Jane O’Sullivan declare that these ‘lethal larrikin’ films are in discussion with concepts of Australian masculinity, ‘questioning and subverting a number of almost iconic assumptions about power, powerlessness, and violence in Australian masculine culture’ (79). In recent years, however, there has been a small but impactful cluster of films that show women acting violently, too. Suburban Mayhem (Paul Goldman, 2006), Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2011) and Hounds of Love (Ben Young, 2016) all contain female characters who exhibit intensely violent behaviour, committing (or conspiring to commit) acts of homicide and murder. While critics have examined men’s brutality extensively, Australian women’s aggression has not been considered in the same way (Butterss; Heller-Nicholas; Holland and O’Sullivan; O’Brien; Villella). Female violence in Australian cinema is a new and unanswered question. (Introduction)

'Like the majority of Australians, I grew up in the suburbs - the southern suburbs of Sydney, to be precise; I was a Kogarah boy. I had no idea, at the time, that I was inhabiting a dismal purgatory, a haven for provincial smallmindedness, hypocritical piety and low-level kink, from which I could either escape (to the city or, better, overseas) or face the slow extinction of my finer feelings... How could I know? I’d read none of the books, seen none of the movies that might foster this belief. I don’t believe the phrase “the Australian ugliness” was ever uttered, either at my primary school or in my parents’ house. Only later, better read and more aware, did it occur to me that I was supposed to despise the things I had cherished. And then, obediently, I did.' (Introduction)