By way of North: reorienting the feminine other in Australian film

Abstract

ABSTRACT Within the body of scholarship on Australia's North, the cinematic Northern Territory has been identified as a potent site of Australia's racialised discourse and the nation's identity debate [Carleton, Stephen. 2009. “Cinema and the Australian North: Tracking and Troping Regionally Distinct Landscapes via Baz Luhrmann's Australia.” Metro 163: 50–55, 55], and its theorisation has tended to reflect scholarly preoccupations with national identity, place and a critique of a certain kind of masculinism that fetishises white-settler manhood as quintessentially Australian, with the role of the feminine and the non-white Other either marginalised and/or examined in relation to these [Hogan, Jackie. 2010. “Gendered and racialised discourses of national identity in Baz Luhrmann's Australia”]. This article reorients such views. It foregrounds the feminine via a comparative study of three female protagonists in three Northern-set films and theorises these through a framework that draws on Rossiter's Theory of Nature and Identity Formation, Creed's neomyth, and Sandars' conceptualisation of The Daughter in Australian cinema. Observing a lineage between these characters this article proposes that a cinematic trope of ‘The Woman in the North' is emerging in Australian film; and that it plays a role in progressing and reflecting Australia's gendered and racialised discourse.