A Bloody Good Rant: My Passions, Memories and Demons by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743311578
Google: jamLzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-10-19T23:32:58.409989+00:00

Considerably early, in 1945, the government had decided that film distribution in Australia was so dominated by the Americans and British companies that the government should found its own national film board to ensure that Australian stories were laid down, exhibited as broadly as could be managed and stored in a valuable archive. In 1973 the film unit became Film Australia, and one of its producers, Suzanne Baker, the first woman appointed to such a role, would be the first Australian to win an Academy Award (if you excluded Damien Parer), for Best Animated Short Film—in this case Leisure, animated by the renowned cartoonist Bruce Petty.

There had been in the 1950s and 1960s a number of films based on Australian material successfully made by British and American companies in Australia. My first experience of Australian cinema were the broad-satire Dad and Dave movies of the 1930s: Dad and Dave: On our Selection and Dad and Dave Come to Town. As a kid I was absolutely flattened and enchanted by four heroic films. One was Smithy (1946), in which Australian Ron Randell was the star as Kingsford Smith. He is interesting in that, unlike today’s Australian stars, he suffered from being a colonial. ‘There is no place for an Australian,’ he told the press and he became typecast as the stiff Briton who lost the girl. He was a notable trans-Pacific actor before his time.

Earlier still, in 1940, there had been Forty Thousand Horsemen, Chauvel’s great epic of the drive of the Light Horse through Palestine and to Damascus. It starred the staple Aussie of all films, Chips Rafferty. It was filmed in the sand dunes of Cronulla and concerned with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East in which the Aussies were crucial but understated heroes. We loved it! Talk about Australian identity. And this splendid film came out of a population of about eight million souls! The Overlanders was a 1946 film about drovers bringing a herd of cattle, to deprive the expected Japanese invaders of it, from Wyndham to Adelaide. It had an Homeric impact on me, saving the cattle on a long odyssey. And Chips Rafferty again. To me it seemed the most august film ever made. Sons of Matthew was made later, in 1949, and concerns an Irish family settling in northern New South Wales. It too seemed august, more august than my suburban experience. It held out the promise of a greater scope to life. This did not stop Universal cutting out thirty minutes and renaming it The Rugged O’Riordans for its US release. Yet it too was myth making. The characters in it pursued grand arcs of narrative of the kind missing in the folk of Homebush, where I grew up.

One Australian who top-billed in a notable film based on a Neville Shute book was the astonishingly successful Peter Finch in A Town Like Alice (1956). The English-born Finch came to Australia at the age of ten in 1926 and during

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