Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliché in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia

Abstract

The first time I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Australia I laughed till I cried. To be exact, I cried laughing at dinner after watching the film with a group of old friends at an inner suburban cinema in Sydney. During the screening itself I laughed and I cried. As so often in the movies, our laughter was public and my tears were private, left to dry on my face lest the dabbing of a tissue or an audible gulp should give my emotion away. The theatre was packed that night with a raucously critical audience groaning at the dialogue, hooting at moments of high melodrama (especially Jack Thompson’s convulsive death by stampeding cattle) and cracking jokes at travesties of history perceived on screen. After the World War II ‘bombing of Darwin’ sequence a fictitious 1941 land invasion of ‘Mission Island’ (Bathurst Island) by Japanese troops had people around me in stitches; when a closing title declared that the government ‘officially abandoned the assimilation policy for indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory in 1973’, one wag called out: ‘at the end of the Japanese Occupation!’. The communal wave of hilarity swept on through a riotous dinner with people enacting their favourite worst scenes and improvising new ones, remaking the film like children playing charades. We did this for hours. It was a wonderful night and in the midst of it my ambivalence about the film that had brought us together dissolved into admiration for its bonding and stirring power as a cinematic event.