The Land Out Back

Isaac Harrisson

Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971) opens with a slow, 360-degree pan. There is no landmark in sight, no feature to mark the horizon’s edge. We see only an orange-red shrub-land. Yet, we are at a destination, a place carved into the wilderness: Tiboonda. It consists of two shacks, a pipeline, a telegraph line, a railway line, and a small timber platform at the station. When the camera settles and the eerie music stops, the premise is clear: there is no-one else here. We are isolated, alone.

We have found ourselves in the outback. The Back Country. Beyond the Black Stump. The Back o’ Bourke. The Back of Beyond. The Never Never.

Through a particular vision of the land, this vast, vague territory known as the outback is defined by its away-ness. Its many names describe not so much a place but a place-away-from-places. Immediately it conjures up images of isolation, abandonment, and a never-ending red.

While these names for the Australian continental interior have their origins in pastoral settlement and its associated mythologies, the images that reaffirm this spatial condition are constructed predominately through cultural media, rather than experience. From the paintings of Russell Drysdale and Albert Tucker, to the emerging popular literary genre Outback Noir, to the cinema of the Australian New Wave, the representation of the outback is consistently sublime, aestheticised as awe-inspiring through its threatening, boundless and incomprehensible qualities. It attracts with its propensity for horror.

In the outback, you can be confronted by giant crocodiles; hunted by Mick Taylor; be run off the road by Humungus’s gang of roving marauders; have to flee from your homicidal father; endure a bout against Blaster in the Thunderdome; get stranded in a town that sustains itself on the remains — human and vehicular — of deliberate car accidents; be terrorised by a giant boar; suffer the wrath of a vengeful ecosystem; or, possibly most frightening of all, come face to face with a pack of werewolf nuns. In the 1970s, the outback territory rose to prominence as a regular antagonist in the films of Australian New Wave — one derived from frontier colonial narratives predicated on environmental and cultural exploitation.¹

As Lisa Radford and Jarrod Rawlins write in their mock-interview,

[in film] the outback is not a place of life or, rather, of any life that is worth knowing. This is the representation and it is disturbing not only in its dystopic rendering but also in its negation of the other. [These narratives] are denying the Aboriginal Australian by maintaining a landscape that is not lived. This landscape is simply unreal, and its perpetuation is irresponsible.²

This aestheticised landscape follows the sublime tradition, considering both Immanuel Kant’s understanding of the sublime as an incalculable object, and Edmund Burke’s assertion that the sublime produces emotions of fear, danger and astonishment. To read the outback as sublime, however, is to preserve colonial storytelling, to paint the continental interior as a wilderness of otherness that ignores its Indigenous histories, knowledges, and cultures. It is to present it as a landscape to be conquered and controlled, rather than lived. Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright remains one of the clearest representations of this narrative.

Wake in Fright’s protagonist, John Grant (Gary Bond), travels from the aforementioned Tiboonda to Bundunyabba, otherwise known as the Yabba. He intends to spend one night in the town before flying to Sydney for six weeks, a holiday from his bonded teaching position in the education department. Upon arriving in the Yabba, Grant is immediately confronted by a set of distinct rituals that he must begrudgingly participate in.

Grant is a man of “culture” in a place he does not belong. His room in the hotel in Tiboonda is decorated by a collection of unique mineral samples, a poster of The Beatles’ recently released studio album Abbey Road, and a calendar depicting temples of antiquity. He is dressed in a neatly tailored suit and is well-spoken. In short, he represents an educated city-dweller. Upon meeting Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty) in the bar in the Yabba, this contrast is made more apparent. Crawford does not understand Grant’s joke about being a “bondage slave” to the education department. With expectant nods, Crawford compels Grant to drain his beer, twice. As he attempts to leave, Crawford’s hand clasps him on the shoulder — he is not finished yet — and the scene cuts.

These scenes establish Grant as a foreign, cultured man in an uncivilised place. As the film progresses, and Grant becomes trapped in the Yabba, the outback setting is revealed to be more and more perverse — an excessively masculine nightmare. This place is something to be survived, something to be avoided at all costs. The reckless, rough bushman. The zealous devotion to alcoholism. An ever-present veneer of sweat. A menacing landscape of lost innocence. It is not for the civil.

The outback we see in this film is, in fact, Broken Hill. The mining town on the western edge of New South Wales was the set location not only for Wake in Fright (1971), but also A Girl in Australia (1971), Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981), Razorback (1984), Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and A Strangerland (2015), as well as numerous television shows. While Broken Hill benefits from its relative proximity to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, as well as pre-existing infrastructures leftover from various mining booms, it is the town’s flat, red, and arid landscape that make it such an ideal filming location.

Indeed, the fictional town of Bundanyabba is also a thinly veiled rendering of Broken Hill. Kenneth Cook, author of the 1961 eponymous novel, drew upon his experience working there for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The pubs, hotels and streets from Broken Hill that inspired the novel are the same ones, albeit with fictional names, that provided the sets for the film. In the film we find ourselves at the Imperial Hotel, the Town Hall, the bond store at 160 Crystal Street, the former Bon Marche building at 325 Argent Street, and the Broken Hill RSL. Broken Hill’s population receives the same fictionalising, estranging treatment. In this setting, the people that call this place home are turned into nightmarish caricatures. Their hostility turns the town from a home into a dwelling for the sinister. Broken Hill is abstracted to become the hellish Bundanyabba, and in doing so, it establishes the imaginary for the archetypal outback town.

Beyond the town, the continental interior has likewise been flattened. It becomes a singular, monocultural, monospatial landscape. Put simply, here is a place that is only flat, red, isolated and dangerous. A fictionalised account of Broken Hill and its surrounds represents the whole — a territorial synecdoche.

With Wake in Fright, Australian cinema ignites a distorted representational lineage of the outback. This representation provides an excuse to ignore the continual dispossession of land under a regime of extraction, including the destruction of cultural sites, and erasure of land rights.³ Cultural perceptions are far from innocent: “out of sight, out of mind” is a carefully constructed convenience.

This idea of the outback is immensely potent. In 2011, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) was set to be filmed on location in Broken Hill. The previous two installments, Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, put forth post-apocalyptic visions in which the dry earth was an antagonist. However, prior to filming, the arid region surrounding Broken Hill was inundated with rain, causing the barren landscape to bloom.

These flowering plains were at odds with the vision of the outback forged in Australian cinema, although the region encompasses a number of climatic zones in which numerous species of flora thrive. As such, a dissonance occurs between a constructed image of a landscape and its reality. Instead, the orange sand dunes of the Namib desert in Namibia were a closer approximation to the cultural idea of the Australian landscape, and so the production was moved there. When the outback is revealed as a place of life, it is no longer the outback.

The term “outback” describes a fictitious landscape, but these stories have come to overwhelmingly dominate a collective mythology of the Australian interior. As Alexis Taylor writes, “These are the stories that Australia chose to tell itself and wanted to believe, about a land that had been stolen from Aboriginal people”.⁴ These myths have been reflected and amplified in film, reifying that outback is always away. What if it was represented and conceived, instead, as home?