Down-Underground: WAKE IN FRIGHT is the Best Movie You’ve Never Seen

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—Many people associate
Australian films with offbeat comedies like Muriel’s
Wedding or Priscilla Queen of the
Desert. Excellent as such films are, the history of Aussie film-making is a
much darker one, shaped by the country’s harsh landscapes and brutal
history.  Nowhere are these conditions
more evident than in a film that most of us might never have had a chance to
see. Although Wake in Fright was
greeted with accolades when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, the film’s
uncompromising portrayal of colonial life in the Outback incensed Australian
viewers, and poor distribution elsewhere drastically curtailed its potential
audience.   It was only dogged
determination and chance luck that managed to uncover the lone surviving print
of the film in a warehouse in Pennsylvania, days before it would have been
destroyed.  With this crucial piece of
the puzzle of Australian film history now restored, those of us living in the
northern hemisphere have the opportunity of entering Australian cinema through
its darkest doorway. 

Like America, Australia is a former colony that struggled to
find a cultural voice distinct from its British origins.   In 1973 Patrick White was the first
Australian to receive the Nobel Prize in literature and it is during that same
decade that a distinctive national film culture began to emerge.  A bold group of directors—including Nicholas
Roeg, Peter Weir, and Gillian Armstrong—began telling wholly original and often
epic stories that placed Australia’s distinctive landscape at their
center.  Working with absurdly small budgets and means, these directors
offered their own, unique response to the revolutions happening in European New
Wave and the New Hollywood of the 1970s.  Like these other post-War film
revolutions, the new Australian cinema played with familiar genre conventions,
injecting them with an often ruthless sense of realism that reflected the
country’s particular social and ethnic tensions.  The result is a body of film that is both familiar
and strange, engaging, even “accessible” but infused with a sensibility refreshingly
apart from American and European film.

Wake in
Fright is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this
new sensibility, and while it is wholly Australian, it bears comparison with other
films from the same era.  Like Sam
Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which also
premiered in 1971, it depicts a mild-mannered intellectual’s descent into
brutality when he is relocated into an unfamiliar and disquieting rural
world.  Like John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) it graphically acts
out the alienation of city from country. 
Like The Wicker Man (1973), it
depicts an outsider’s initiation into a bizarre alien culture.  Yet Wake
in Fright is arguably more complex and more disturbing than these contemporaneous
classics, at times recalling the work of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus.  If these comparisons seem grandiose, see the
film for yourself and get back to me.

It opens dramatically, with a panoramic shot of the bleakest
imaginable landscape, the camera circling around to reveal a town consisting
only of two small buildings facing a railway. 
This is Tiboonda, where John Grant (Gary Bond) is serving out a kind of
indentured servitude at a teaching post assigned by the peculiar terms of his
student loans.  It is the last day of
school, and the students stare vacantly into hot space while flies buzz and
clock ticks.  At last released from the
confines of the classroom the children flee, and Grant boards a train for the
mining town of Bundanyabba where he plans on catching a plane to Sydney to
spend the vacation with his girlfriend. 

But Bundanyabba, or “the Yabba” as the locals call it, has
other plans for John Grant.  At first the
town seems deserted, but it would appear all the residents are at the pub,
where Grant is treated to the brutish hospitality of a local policeman, Jock
(played by veteran Aussie actor Chips Rafferty), who buys round after round of
beer in what will become a recognizable ritual of initiation.  Mateyness, blokeishness, or what we might
call dudishness, is portrayed almost as a form of sadism, coerced inebriation being
the first of many inductions into the male culture of the Outback, one soon to
be followed by gambling, in an explicable, seemingly free-for-all game the
locals call “two-up” that seems to be loosely based on the simple principle of
heads or tails.  These scenes are
mesmerizing, frequently shot directly from above, as we watch with an almost
anthropological eye as the locals enact this peculiar, almost dance-like
ritual.

Flush with beginner’s luck, Grant pushes it until he loses
all his money, rendering him dependent on the Yabba’s tender mercies.  While he had sought to win enough money to
free himself from his teaching bondage, he finds himself trapped in
another.  With another round of forced
pints of beer the next morning, Grant finds himself beholden to local landowner
Tim Hynes, who brings Grant back to his place, where he meets a bizarre cast of
locals, including Hynes’ enigmatic daughter, two local bullies, and the alcoholic
Doc Tyden.  Played by the always
inscrutable Donald Pleasance, Tyden is Grant’s perverse Virgil leading him
through the Yabba’s surreal Inferno. 

From one bizarre episode to the next, the film draws us in,
along with the protagonist, until we are overtaken by a sense of unreality in
which nothing is true and everything is permitted.  As Grant moves from hangover to binge, his disdain
for the yokels dwindles away, and he engages in acts he never would have
dreamed of before coming to the Yabba. 

This perverse odyssey culminates with a night-time kangaroo
hunt that remains shocking over forty years later (12 people walked out of the
theater when the film was screened as part of a classic series at Cannes in
2009).  The harrowing scene, which portrays
the drunken hunters laughing gleefully as they indiscriminately kill and wound
dozens of passive creatures, was created by editing shots of the actors with
film from an actual kangaroo hunt where the film crew was allowed to tag
along.  The footage was later
instrumental in Australia’s banning of the brutal hunting practices, where
hunters hypnotize kangaroos with bright lights and kill them in droves, for
meat that would be sent to America to be used as pet food, while the skins were
made into plush toys for the growing tourist market. It is this kind of
intersection with Australian history that makes the story of Grant’s descent so
powerful.  It might even be argued that
the kangaroo hunt sublimates and reenacts the history of slaughter that resulted
in the near-genocide of the Aboriginal population. 

These historical resonances make it all the more remarkable
that the film was directed by a Canadian, Ted Kotcheff, who would go on to
greater commercial (if not critical) success with First Blood and Weekend at
Bernie’s.  For this reason it is
considered by some Australian film purists as less than genuine, but it is hard
to imagine any film that engages more fully with space and place than Wake in Fright.  Iconic Aussie musician, screenwriter and director
Nick Cave has called it “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in
existence.”  When the film was recently
screened at the Sydney Film Festival, followed by a Q and A session, one
audience member asked the director if he felt the world depicted in the film
still existed, to which three men shouted, “Does it still exist? It exists in
my backyard!” 

And for all the film’s brutality, the conclusion seems to
imply that the events we have witnessed are just another lost weekend in the
Outback.  John Grant gets off the train
and wanders past the drunken station master, who asks knowingly, “Did you have
a good holiday?” and when Grant answers, “The best,” he almost seems like he
means it.  Though rooted in the
sun-bleached soil of the Australian cultural landscape, Kotcheff’s masterpiece
reveals a penchant for barbarity that is disturbingly familiar.