When the Australian Film Development Corporation was founded under the Gorton government in 1970, its stated purpose was to generate Australian content at a point when Australian film production was at its lowest ebb. Five years later, it was given more heft as the Australian Film Commission and presided over the burst of production that would immediately become known as Australia's film renaissance.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Sunday Too Far Away (1975) and The Devil's Playground (1976) were "telling our stories", according to the buzz-talk of the time. They were confronting the longstanding "cultural cringe" with local history and home-grown myth, "holding up a mirror" that allowed Australians to see their own reflected images rather than American or British ones.
So what do we see in that looking glass now? The Australian hero is not what he was: the shearers, cattlemen and bushrangers of the '70s new wave have mostly given way to less self-consciously iconic characters. Criminals. Animals, such as Babe the pig, the penguins in Happy Feet and of course Australia's collective best friend, the Red Dog. Men in tights. Men in frocks. Gothic ferals and heavy trucks in the Mad Max franchise; glamorous impressions of old movie stars in the Baz Luhrmann films (Australia, Moulin Rouge) which are a sort of camp, extravagant genre in their own right.
There is only a handful of films about women, despite the fact that the cinema audience is predominantly female. For international audiences, Australian cinema is defined by those unfortunate picnickers at Hanging Rock on the one hand and sad, chubby Muriel on the other. But we don't see them as representative of anything. Miranda, the disappearing schoolgirl in Picnic at Hanging Rock, is "like a Botticelli angel": so remote she simply evanesces. And nobody wants to be or know Muriel, even though we all recognise her. She is absolutely Other. And they have few successors, despite the fact that those they do have – The Dressmaker (2015), The Sapphires (2012) – have pulled good audiences. The archetypal Australian hero is not a heroine.
Michael Caton's character learns to live up to his own inherent decency in Last Cab to Darwin.
If this is representative of a broader sexism – and of course it is – there are any number of efforts to counter it. Screen Australia's Gender Matters project has drawn attention to figures such as the fact that only 16 per cent of Australian directors are women. (For perspective, the figure in Hollywood is just 7 per cent.) On screen, kudos goes to George Miller for making the blockbuster female-friendly. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) stars a woman behind its biggest wheel; it also has a plethora of ancillary female characters who are fabulously colourful, such as the motorcycling elderly women who are preserving the world's edible plants in their handbags.
The redoubtable Charlize Theron is, however, a Hollywood star. She is not us; we are not her. If any character in that film shouts "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie" at us, it's that glam-rock bloke on the back of the baddies' truck thrashing a giant guitar. That's us, all right: the noisy larrikin who's going along with trouble for the ride. And who is, for some deep Freudian reason that he almost certainly has no interest in exploring, into a bit of cross-dressing.
So who is "us"? You know that already. By a long, long way, Crocodile Dundee remains the big Australian, with local takings in 1986 of $47million on a budget of $11.5million and a record-breaking 23.5 per cent share of the total box office. Paul Hogan, a cheerful rigger who had made his name in a series of cigarette commercials, encapsulated all the winning elements that had caught the public imagination in a sprinkling of earlier Australian films. He had the cheek of Chips Rafferty and the dash of Errol Flynn; the innocent awkwardness around women of The Sentimental Bloke (1919) and the can-do cheerfulness of the builders who take a cultivated Italian immigrant into their beery fold in They're a Weird Mob (1966). And he could conquer a crocodile. Like Dad and Dave, he was fighting the endless battle in, of and against the bush.
Hogan's likeable joker may have had a unique super-power with saurians, but in other respects Mick Dundee became the template for "real Australians": heroes decently unconscious of their own hero status, ready with a joke for every occasion, who aren't up themselves and never, ever whinge. Versions of this character pop up in most Australian films. Admittedly, not many people actually go to see them; Australian films accounted for 7.2 per cent of the box office in 2015, with even this small slice consisting largely of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Dressmaker sales. These low figures, however, can be misleading; more of us are looking in the mirror than they suggest.
Anne-Louise Lambert as the evanescent Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock.Credit: Umbrella Entertainment.
In an interesting piece on Australia's box office successes on the website New Daily, George Lekakis points out that some films that don't do well in cinemas have a disproportionate popularity in people's lounge rooms (which is where, after all, we now do 84 per cent of our movie-watching). The example he cites is The Castle (1997), a film that made only $10 million on release but, thanks to home viewings, is now one of the local industry's biggest commercial successes. And if there is one film that captures a particular Australian spirit – and creates a peculiarly Australian hero in Michael Caton's comically uxorious, plane-spotting paterfamilias Darryl Kerrigan – it is this story of a suburban clan that won't be moved.
Caton is a maestro of this kind of unsung working-class hero. Two years ago he starred in Last Cab to Darwin, third in the Australian box-office rankings in 2015. Caton's Rex lives in the mining town of Broken Hill but, as a cab driver, he's just another suburban bloke. As such, he is stereotypically flawed. Rex has a bunch of drinking mates, a longstanding clandestine companion – kept under wraps ostensibly because she is Indigenous, but probably largely because he is terrified of any entanglement – and doesn't tell anyone when he is diagnosed with imminently fatal cancer. The point is that, on the road to Darwin, he learns to acknowledge how much his woman, his friends and his dog mean to him. He learns to live up to his own inherent decency.
Toni Collette in Muriel's Wedding, as the girl we don't want to be.
Kenny's another one. The eponymous hero of a spoof documentary about a plumber who sets up and maintains portable toilets – played by Shane Jacobson, the director's brother – loves his work, loves his son and suffers the contempt of his father, his ex-wife and some of his more odious customers without complaint. Not that he's defenceless – he has a turn of local phrase and arsenal of poo jokes to rival Barry Mackenzie's – but like any proper hero, he uses that verbal power only for good. Equally importantly, he is oblivious to the fact that the air hostess who asks him out three days in a row is interested in him. We don't like a Lothario in Australia. Not on our screens, anyway.
So that's what the mirror tells us. Do your job well, be fair, be kind, don't belly-ache. It's not exactly inclusive, since it's not addressed to women. As a world view, it does lack nuance. Even so, it's not a bad way to be. In other circumstances – in Gallipoli, say - Kenny would be a good person to have next to you in a foxhole, but few of us are living that kind of life. Australia Day, which used to be a sort of blank at the end of the summer holidays when people had barbecues and labelled schoolbooks for the coming term, is now mired in pomposity and flag-waving. That doesn't seem to have much to do with suburban life. Better just to celebrate being a good bloke.
Shane Jacobsen in Kenny has an arsenal of poo jokes to rival Barry Mackenzie’s.