Wake in Fright

"What's the matter with you people, uh? You sponge off you, you burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child... that's alright. Don't have a drink with you, don't have a flaming bloody drink with you - that's a criminal offence. The end of the bloody world!"

Quite possibly the greatest film ever made about Australia, Wake in Fright won't sit well with the average Aussie viewer. In fact, upon it's release it was shunned by sectors of the Australian film-consuming community and didn't quite make the impact it should've, perhaps due to the fact that it cut a little close to the bone. It's my firm belief that this is a film that should be studied in schools, both in the context of what it says directly about the Australian character and what our reaction to it says about the Australian character. Wake in Fright was more or less the first film to put modern Australia on the silver screen as it truly was... prior to this the Australian film industry was basically non-existent. Up until the '40s it had acted as a satellite film industry to England, depicting Australians who were for all intents and purposes displaced British citizens. There were a sprinkling of Hollywood productions made on Australian soil in the late '50s, but it wasn't until the British-financed Wake in Fright that it suddenly seemed possibly for Australia to have a self-sufficient industry of its own. Wake in Fright's importance and impact was so big that it spawned two parallel lines of cinema in the '70s and beyond - the artistically-inclined Australian New Wave (spearheaded by Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Bruce Beresford) and the crowd-pleasingly low brow films that have come to be known as the Ozploitation movement. Wake in Fright has elements of both these waves of filmmaking, and is just a damn fine film to boot.

John (Gary Bond) is an upper class schoolteacher serving his time in the isolated outback town of Tiboonda. He resents being stationed so far from what he deems to be civilisation, and when the school holidays come around he aims to return to Sydney for a reprieve. Along his journey he comes to Bundanyabba (AKA "the Yabba"'), an outback town where he stops to rest and have a quiet drink. Some locals at the Yabba introduce him to an underground two-up ring, where he gets a taste for gambling. John sees a chance to make enough money to free him from his outback teaching post, but he ends up losing everything instead. As a result he's stranded in the Yabba, without a dollar to his name and unable to even get to the next town. He falls in with some 'friendly' locals, and they initiate him into their way of life... a kind of hell from which there seems to be no escape.

Wake in Fright's biggest weapon is its subtle use of irony to examine the widening gap between intellectualism and the working class in Australia, perhaps most immediately evident in the contrast between the gentle music that plays throughout the opening credits and the first line of dialogue; an abrupt 'Shut up!' that foreshadows the barely restrained tension that bubbles under the affable manner of the average Australian country character. As John travels out of Tiboonda he finds himself invited to drink with a group of drunken locals on the train, which he politely declines in favour of sitting by himself. It's this aloofness that is his only really defence, and dropping it will be his undoing. An interesting side note of this early train-set scene full of 'friendly' Aussies is that there's also an aboriginal man sitting by himself - a keen visual reminder of the seperatist reality of Australian culture. This simple truth gets blown up to magnificent proportions throughout the course of the film, almost to a point where it's literally too hard to look at.


In a film full of contrasts - such as the juxtaposition of the jovial nature of the Australian character with the desolated, sand-blasted environment - it's perhaps the contrast between the intellectual teacher and the working class rural Australians that is most dangerous. The Yabba townsfolk don't take too kindly to John's resentment of their habitat and culture. His arrogance leads him to unashamedly label two-up as a "simple-minded game". Nearly everything he says and does makes it obvious that he looks down on the Yabba, he even casts the 'fair go' temperement of the locals as the "arrogance of stupid people". The flipside of this is what comes to be termed as the "aggressive hospitality" of the rural Australian, a subtle and cunning strategy the Yabba folk employ to trap their prey. It's never made explicit or said outright, all this stuff happens just under the surface through the narrowing of eyes and some deceptively friendly phases. John may be an unsympathetic protagonist when the film begins, but by the end the balance of power has tipped well out of his favour and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him despite his deficiencies. The Yabba men toy with him, for all his cleverness they're always in control of his life. They take his money, destroy his concept of time, and degrade him completely. To them he's uneducated because he has no understanding of their lifestyle. When they take him shooting he wants to claim his kill, but they tell him there's no point because all the foxes are mangy in the outback, and he realises the pointlessness of his assimilation. By this point it's also too late, a kind of stockholm syndrome has taken hold of him - leading to a disturbingly barbaric roo-shooting sequence. By the end of his transformation he even throws his beloved books away, all the civilisation is washed out of him, and escape becomes nothing more than a fantasy.

Of the actors it's probably Chips Rafferty and Donald Pleasance that stand out the most. Rafferty (in his last film) has an important supporting role as the local representative of the law, and Pleasance (with a perfect Australian accent) plays an alcoholic doctor. The 'good' doctor admits that his 'disease' (alcoholism) prevents him from practicing in Sydney but that in the Yabba this affliction is barely noticeable. It's a sadly acute observation that all but labels Australia's propensity for drinking as an outright blight on our national character. Along with a talent for beerswilling, the Australian character is further represented by several other tropes - a reverence for the ANZACs, two up, mateship, and pokermachines as a 'healthy' tradition. Add to this a friendliness that only really exists as long as you fit the unspoken rules of the friendly atmosphere, and the aforementioned "aggressive hospitality", and you have an image of the Australian that fits a little too uncomfortably. There's also the suggestion that an Australian man must be masculine in order to be a 'true Australian'; an idea that also feeds into the divide between intellectualism and the working class. John finds that he actually has more in common with the reserved daughter of one of his new 'friends' than he does with any of the males he meets, further highlighting his 'unaustralian-ness' in comparison to the Yabba blokes.

I'm sure quite a lot could be written about this film, such as its use of visual motifs like blinding lights to represent the sun and heat of the outback, or the way it passes its comments with minimal judgement for either side of the aforementioned divides. It's actually quite a serious piece of anthropology under all the mindless drinking, punching and humiliation, the dark flipside to films like Dimboola and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

TRIVIA: The film was internationally known as Outback at the time of it's initial release.

DIRECTOR: Ted Kotcheff
WRITER/SOURCE: Evan Jones, based on a book by Kenneth Cook.
KEY ACTORS: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, John Meillon, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Dawn Lake

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1961 novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook.
- The other big early '70s Australian film of artistic note is Walkabout.
- Some other '70s films that examine the Australian character were Dimboola, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don's Party, Last of the Knucklemen, Sunday Too Far Away and Stork.
- Director Ted Kotcheff's most famous film is probably First Blood.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - nominated for the Palme d'Or.