Not quite Mad Max: Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In

Abstract

This article suggests that Dead End Drive-In (1986), Brian Trenchard-Smith's little-known Ozploitation film, deserves reconsideration from Australasian film scholars because it offers a valuable contribution to discussions about Australian masculinity, car culture, phobic narratives and the White Australia Policy. It is argued that the drive-in as detention centre foreshadows later Australian anxieties about immigration and border protection. Clearly a ‘phobic narrative’ full of ‘white panic’ (Morris, 1989, 1998), it exhibits many of the anxieties about Australians and ‘auto-immobility’ that Catherine Simpson (2006) discusses, and fits neatly into Tranter's (2003) discussion of cars and governance and Bode's (2006a) arguments about whiteness and Australian masculinity in crisis.