This afternoon I saw the restored print of Wake in Fright, one of the most critically-acclaimed films of the Australian "new wave" of the 1970s and one of the most criminally ignored by Australian audiences.
The behind-the-scenes story of how this classic film was effectively lost sometime in the 1970s and only recently re-discovered in a US film vault marked for destruction is almost as compelling as the film itself. It is a film I had read about in Australian film history books but, for obvious reasons, had never had a chance to see - until now. All I can say is thank goodness for the National Film and Sound Archive and their fine work in preserving (and, in this case, restoring) our cinematic heritage.
The 1971 film was based on a 1961 novel by then 32 year-old Kenneth Cook, and the NFSA describes the book as follows:
As a young ABC radio journalist Cook had done stints covering Australia’s big rural districts and ended up living in places like Rockhampton in Queensland and Broken Hill in New South Wales. In those days, the late 50s and early 60s, before mobiles, the Internet, good roads, and efficient rail and plane networks, Australia’s big outback towns were so isolated that they seemed a long way from anywhere. From what Cook witnessed, a culture of drinking, game shooting, and gambling and more boozing prevailed...
He never apologised, at least in public, for the sense of horror and revulsion John Grant feels at the hands of the outback locals and their aggressive friendliness.
I have not yet read the book, although I have tried to get my hands on a copy for many years. I hope that a reprint will be issued to accompany the film.
Now to the film. Gary Bond plays John Grant, a somewhat supercilious teacher serving out his time as a "bonded slave" of the education department as a teacher in an isolated outback school. We meet him on the last day of school on his way back to Sydney for a beach and city holiday and a reunion with his girlfriend, although the educated young teacher who speaks with a highly cultivated accent and dresses in crisp white shirts with tie and jacket in the outback heat yearns for something far more sophisticated than even Sydney, hoping some day to "get to England". On his way to Sydney he stops overnight in a mining town, "the Yabba" (patently Broken Hill), and suffice to say he never makes it to Sydney. What follows - his long, lost weekend of debauchery - is actually a very complex story, but the dumbed down version of it is that he is seduced/entrapped into the heavy drinking, gambling and shooting that comprises the exaggerated machismo of the outback world. In a sense, he devolves into something base and uncivilised. Drawn into the world at first by a malevolently friendly copper played with utter brilliance by Chips Rafferty in his final film role, and then later by a possible kindred spirit as another lapsed professional, the alcoholic 'Doc' played by Donald Pleasance, Grant will lose all of his money and his dignity and certainly his intellectual delusions of cultivated civilisation. For me, this is the central, and most terrifying, message of the film: Doc speaks drunkenly at one point of the fallacies of civilisation (not the words he uses, but I can't remember them exactly!), and it is in the other-worldly environment of the hot, isolated and brutal outback that the facades of civilisation are stripped away so vividly. People revert to and embrace their base instincts and desires. Grant's "descent" (it is often characterised by critics as a journey to destruction, but I'm not so sure it's not really a journey to self-discovery and manhood - again, a more disturbing position; that is, that who he becomes is not only who he is meant to be but who he wants to really be - note that he returns to his teaching post at the end of the weekend and tells his landlord that he had "the best" holiday) into booze, gambling and hunting is shown to be an experience that he at first just accepts, but then eagerly embraces. He embraces his devolution into baseless, raw, aggressive masculinity, eventually shooting and eating his own food as he wanders the outback after abandoning his books, perhaps forever.
Now to the film. Gary Bond plays John Grant, a somewhat supercilious teacher serving out his time as a "bonded slave" of the education department as a teacher in an isolated outback school. We meet him on the last day of school on his way back to Sydney for a beach and city holiday and a reunion with his girlfriend, although the educated young teacher who speaks with a highly cultivated accent and dresses in crisp white shirts with tie and jacket in the outback heat yearns for something far more sophisticated than even Sydney, hoping some day to "get to England". On his way to Sydney he stops overnight in a mining town, "the Yabba" (patently Broken Hill), and suffice to say he never makes it to Sydney. What follows - his long, lost weekend of debauchery - is actually a very complex story, but the dumbed down version of it is that he is seduced/entrapped into the heavy drinking, gambling and shooting that comprises the exaggerated machismo of the outback world. In a sense, he devolves into something base and uncivilised. Drawn into the world at first by a malevolently friendly copper played with utter brilliance by Chips Rafferty in his final film role, and then later by a possible kindred spirit as another lapsed professional, the alcoholic 'Doc' played by Donald Pleasance, Grant will lose all of his money and his dignity and certainly his intellectual delusions of cultivated civilisation. For me, this is the central, and most terrifying, message of the film: Doc speaks drunkenly at one point of the fallacies of civilisation (not the words he uses, but I can't remember them exactly!), and it is in the other-worldly environment of the hot, isolated and brutal outback that the facades of civilisation are stripped away so vividly. People revert to and embrace their base instincts and desires. Grant's "descent" (it is often characterised by critics as a journey to destruction, but I'm not so sure it's not really a journey to self-discovery and manhood - again, a more disturbing position; that is, that who he becomes is not only who he is meant to be but who he wants to really be - note that he returns to his teaching post at the end of the weekend and tells his landlord that he had "the best" holiday) into booze, gambling and hunting is shown to be an experience that he at first just accepts, but then eagerly embraces. He embraces his devolution into baseless, raw, aggressive masculinity, eventually shooting and eating his own food as he wanders the outback after abandoning his books, perhaps forever.
This film is often said to be chauvinistic. I disagree. While there is only one major female character, she is shown (and said) to have succumbed to her base animal instincts just as, although differently from, the men. In a male dominated world, she is a fairly liberated, sexually aggressive sort of creature. She, like the men, has reverted unashamedly into something rather uncivilised and, thus, something rather threatening to those retaining the delusions of civilisation. In a way, she is shown to be more powerful than, and to exercise much power over, the men.
Cinematically, this is an impressive film. The other-worldly outback settings of red dust and dirt are both exotic and unnerving, really the perfect setting for this "Australian Gothic" horror. One of the most notable, and disturbing, sequences of the film is its prolonged kangaroo hunt that is graphic, winsome and also rather vile. The homoerotic undertones to the peculiarly Australian (and masculine) dogma of "mateship" are subtle and pervasive, and the implied homosexual encounter between Grant and Doc (for some reason hardly ever commented on in, so far as I can see, in discussions of the film, but in my opinion rather integral) was also shot very cleverly.
