PERTH, Western Australia — With a couple of misgivings, I
recently joined some friends to see the film Australia.
It turned out to be neither as good nor as bad as it might have
been.
It was nice of the Australian government to give what amounted
one way and another to about $80 million of tax-payers’ money to
20th Century Fox (owned by the umbrella company of that
well-known pauper Mr. Rupert Murdoch), to help finance the film,
but at the end of the day one cannot call it much more than a
moderately successful piece of entertainment and a good
travelogue. The concluding wrap about the fact that an apology
for the “stolen generation” was issued by the Prime Minister in
2008 might have been more informative with the words, “This is a
paid political advertisement by the present Australian
government.”
In fact, the whole story of the so-called “stolen generation” is
complex and remains controversial. Some, not all, part-Aboriginal
children were taken into care because they were not accepted by
either white or Aboriginal society. Whether they were torn from
loving mothers and exploited in menial work or rescued from death
or terrible deprivation remains a matter of debate, and the
safest thing to say is that it is impossible to generalize. The
number involved also remains very uncertain. Here, however, all
is made simple.
Clichés flourish like a herd of kangaroos (in fact, there
actually is a herd of kangaroos). The rich cattle-king
(Australian version of a cattle-baron) is of course a crook, and
his overseer is a murderer. The society ladies of Darwin are
ugly, racist and mean-spirited, the Aborigines are innocent,
loving, noble and wise, and the Chinese cook is jolly yet
inscrutable. The obligatory drunk eventually redeems himself and
dies bravely (in a scene which, to my considerable embarrassment,
I found actually quite moving). Australian drovers are shown
wearing revolvers, as if expecting Jesse James or Billy the Kid
to dry-gulch them at any moment. In a climactic confrontation in
the bombed ruins of Darwin the villain turns out to be the young
hero’s father, adding a touch of Star Wars, his Aboriginal
grandfather taking the role of Obe-Wan, not to mention those of
Gandalf and Dumbledore.
Still, simplistic is what this film is about. It is basically a
very lavish comic-book. I was not quite sure that the first
half-hour or so was not written by Barry Humphries as a
caricature of Australian stereotypes, and this level of
characterization is pretty well maintained throughout.
However, religious susceptibilities are not offended much. I
expected the Catholic mission, where, in the film, the half-caste
children dread being sent, to be portrayed as a hell-hole staffed
by sadistic hot-eyed fanatics or child-molesters, but in fact the
mission seems a happy enough place, with the children playing by
the sea.
The priest comes across as a rather silly-sounding young man
constantly invoking The Lord. However, he is also brave and
dedicated, taking a mission-boat back to a Japanese-held island
to rescue children there after the first bombing of Darwin. He is
shown in black clerical garb and dog collar, though I have a
feeling that missionaries in the Northern Territory tended to
wear shorts and open-necked shirts.
The plot is not, as some unkind critic stated, about Nicole
Kidman discovering a Botox mine in the outback, but the first
half is concerned largely with an equally improbable cattle-drive
which seems to go to Darwin via the Olgas in Central Australia,
the Bungle-Bungles in Western Australia, the Never-Never and
various gorges in the North-West, rather like, on a larger scale,
the Barry Humphries film in which the innocent Australian
arriving at London’s Heathrow airport is driven by taxi to the
city via Stonehenge. A small half-caste boy stops 1,500 cattle
from stampeding over a cliff by the use of magical Aboriginal
powers. With Nicole Kidman’s arrival the parched wasteland of
Faraway Downs station blossoms equally magically into lush grass
and flowers. Nicole Kidman herself, I thought, gave a better
performance than some other critics have claimed.
The Japanese landing on an island off Darwin in World War II
didn’t happen, but is plausible. There were probably some small
covert landings along the coast for reconnaissance, and indeed
one crashed Japanese flyer was said to have been captured on an
offshore island by a film-loving Aborigine with the memorable
words: “Stick ‘em up all same Hopalong Cassidy!”
Despite the geographical mix-ups (well, John Ford left us with
the impression that most of the American West was like Monument
Valley), the scenery is spectacular and some of the camera-work
very impressive. None of the acting is actually too bad.
It would be a mistake to treat Australia terribly
seriously. It is really a very large Western, or perhaps
South-Western — three hours of pretty harmless entertainment and
easy to watch. Conservatives, indeed, might applaud the revival
of this somewhat archaic form, with its simple heroisms,
villainies and magics as stylized as a Japanese Noh drama.
