AustLit

'A chook enters the frame. A black cat evades the lens. An animated panther won’t be denied. In 2021, these are the figures that lurk on the outskirts of conscious thought in the days after I eject Ronin’s DVD of Breathing Under Water (Susan Murphy Dermody, 1991) from my laptop. 30 years have slipped by since I first viewed this film on a cinema screen with an audience of indie-filmgoers. The memory of being part of that audience — lulled by water and voices, darkness and whimsy, movement and pause — resonates with and is shadowed by the spectre of ‘last days’. In 1991 Dermody’s film evoked the destruction of life on earth by masculine technoculture, the eclipse of human time by the digital and a feminine quest (embodied by Beatrice, Maeve and Herman) to find another way. In 2021, despite the climate emergency, the digital eclipse of cinema and a global pandemic, what the film evokes most strongly, for this writer, is the passing of a milieu defined by an ethos of indie-filmmaking, film thinking, film activism. I take this special issue of Senses of Cinema, then, as a space in which to pause, remember and reflect on a moment of experiment in Australian feature filmmaking, and to revive interest in Breathing Under Water as a female quest, an essay film, an autofiction and a mode of self extraction. '  (Introduction)

'In 2020, FREEMAN became the most-watched documentary in Australia. This article situates the film's intercultural, multivocal, and multiperspectival story of Cathy Freeman's gold-medal win at the Sydney 2000 Olympics in three contemporary contexts: the Trailblazers collection of sports documentaries that entertained Australians during COVID-19 lockdowns; the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia cities and towns that defied COVID- 19 bans in 2020 and provided a context for remembering Cathy Freeman as a Black activist in the 1990s; and a First Nations context that recognizes Freeman as a Kuku Yalanji woman whose public roles have helped to transform the terms of stranger relationality between Indigenous, settler-colonial, and immigrant Australians.' (Publication abstract)

'In Dispossession and the Making of Jedda, Catherine Kevin offers a quietly compelling account of a paradox that defined settler colonialism in mid-20th century Australia: its fascination with Aboriginality at a distance—on screen and in the scenic centre and north of Australia—alongside its inability to see (let alone comprehend) the ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal people close to home. What prompted Kevin to explore this paradox was the casual revelation of a family connection to Charles and Elsa Chauvel, Sydney-based filmmakers who, in 1950, set up a production company with wealthy woolgrowers of the Yass Valley in southern New South Wales. The company would finance and shoot a Technicolor film in the Northern Territory, featuring “magnificent scenery and magnificent aborigine types” (59).' (Introduction)

'While postcolonial critique has been a remarkably fertile field within the humanities, the concept of the postcolonial has been problematic when applied to the peculiar situation of settler-colonial nations. In such nations, the colonial period has been largely relegated to the past. Yet, unresolved issues of treaty, sovereignty, native title and reparation for discriminatory policies such as child removal provide clear evidence that the nation states that replaced colonial regimes have yet to be decolonized.' (From Authors introduction)

'Popular Australian film comedy since the early 1970s has been dominated by reinventions of the national type. These reinventions involve transformations of the urban larrikin and the bush battler, first established in silent film classics such as The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford 1919) and in Cinesound Studio's Rudd family comedies of the 1930s, directed by Ken G. Hall. These comic types continue to surface in popular film and television as the larrikin, ocker or decent Aussie bloke, exemplified in the 1970s by Bazza McKenzie, in the 1980s by Crocodile Dundee, in the 1990s by Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle, and most recently by cable TV showman Steve Irwin until his untimely death in 2006. Yet despite decades of multiculturalism, little attention has been paid to the impact of post-war, non -British immigration on Australian comic types. This chapter examines three popular comedies which champion ethnically marked characters as either 'New Australians' (They're a Weird Mob, Michael Powell 1966), 'wogboys' (The Wog Boy, Alexsi Vellis 2000) or `chockos' (Fat Pizza, Paul Fenech 2003). It asks whether 'wogboys' and 'chockos' - as diasporic, multicultural or new world comic types - have trumped the larrikins and ockers of Australian screen comedy, or whether 'wogsploitation' films are popular with Australian film and television audiences precisely because they tap into a long. standing national type without disturbing its key characteristics.' (Publication abstract)