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Riding the Brand-new Wave: how Aussie Movies won The World

When Australian New age films burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of age of cinema however Americans were especially perplexed by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers.

“They acknowledged that Sunday was a great film but they didn’t understand it,” he says.

“It was quite incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t an Australian. At American screenings, you may also have had it in Dutch.”

But French audiences were far more inviting of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide cars and truck dealer who ‘d offered Carroll a Peugeot.

“She stated, ‘oh yes beloved, I know Parisian street slang, I’ll equate all of it for you (into subtitles)’,” Carroll continues.

“I keep in mind sitting in the cinema and the first thing that turns up is somebody in the shearing shed states about the squatter, ‘his shit doesn’t stink’. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is ‘he farts above his asshole’.”

In the substantial screening space, “the whole audience just went insane, definitely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France”, Carroll chuckles.

“It’s the language of the bush,” discusses famous Australian star Jack Thompson, who represented the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.

“There’s a wonderful camaraderie expressed because motion picture. Sunday states something much more extensive about the Australian character than a number of other films that examined our success and failures.”

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states “it resembled a journal, it was just how people acted – I remember, due to the fact that as a teenager, I was in those sheds.

“Sunday Too Far has a truly vital part in my career and in my memory; I ‘d dealt with that wool press, I ‘d gotten that wool. I knew how difficult it was … it was the world of working males.”

Thompson was a star of a multitude of other New Wave movies, consisting of Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.

Carroll remembers also feeling well qualified to be associated with Sunday Too Far, which was recorded at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.

“I grew up on a sheep residential or commercial property so I discovered how to class wool. My honours thesis remained in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were,” he says.

“And Jack and I were sharing a home together, and I understood that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, ‘I do not understand where we’re going to find shearers from’. And I said, ‘Well, I understand’.

Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a crucial role in the period.

“The SAFC was an essential beacon in the development of the Australian film market,” states Thompson.

“Tale after tale crucial to our understanding of ourselves was informed and funded by that entity.”

The New York Times described Australian New Wave as “capturing a minute of flexibility and abundance that was over almost before we understood it” and “having a vitality, a love of open area and a tendency for sudden violence and languorous sexuality”.

“That’s me,” states Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.

“Used to be, mate,” chuckles Carroll, 80.

As a young actor, it was like “riding the crest of a wave, it was spectacular”, says Thompson.

“There was certainly an extremely focused vitality, a special appeal, unlike anything else at the time.”

Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was an exceptional period for Australian movies.

“More than 220 films, that’s more than 20 movies a year. And when you read the titles, it’s simply incredible,” he says.

“We never had another duration like that, with the originality and the creativity.”

The SAFC’s 2nd feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which likewise turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema.

“The terrific thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans comprehended it,” states Carroll.

“And After That Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had substantial results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were crucial to opening the American market.”

Thompson keeps in mind that Australia made the world’s very first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, “and we had a crucial Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927”.

“Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here was able to control the Australian movie market, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, absolutely nothing much taken place in Australian cinema,” he says.

While Sunday Too Far was New Wave’s first industrial success, 1971’s Wake In Fright is widely considered the era’s opening film.

It was Thompson’s very first film and the last for experienced character star Chips Rafferty, who passed away of a cardiac arrest before it was released.

It evaluated at Cannes and received beneficial responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian ticket office.

It’s the story of an instructor waylaid in a mining town where a betting spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he gets involved in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to ethical degradation.

It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, “and individuals were saying ‘that’s not us’, regardless of the reality the book was composed by an Australian”.

“Because when we were seen on screen (formerly), we were viewed as these pleasant caricatures, we weren’t utilized to seeing it and we didn’t wish to see it,” he states.

During an early Australian screening, when a male stood, pointed at the screen and opposed “that’s not us!”, Thompson famously screamed back “take a seat, mate. It is us”.