Wake in Fright

For the eighth streaming choice, this time as part of the Australian Movies collection on ABC iView (in Australia only), we watched Wake in Fright, a recently re-discovered and digitally restored version of the 1971 outback drama. It's directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff and adapted from the Kenneth Cook novel by Jamaican-born Evan Jones. While Cook was Australian, the 'outsider eye' of the screenwriter and director lend the film a curiosity value of a foreigner's peek into the culture of Australia at the time. The fact that the film was not well-liked on initial release shouldn't surprise so much.

Wake in Fright follows a young English teacher, played by Gary Bond, and his attempts to get to Sydney for his summer holiday. Told like this, it sounds like a jovial romp, possibly a Carry On style film. But this is about as far as you get from a romp. The teacher, John Grant, is a stroppy, superior bell-end and the people he meets are, for the most part, yobbish alcoholics, all very suspicious, even hostile, if people don't share a drink with them. Welcome to the Aussie bush.

The fictional towns of Tiboonda and Bundanyabba are desolate and dusty and very hard for Grant to escape from. He's waylaid first by the 'Yabba town cop, played, with sinister comradeship, by Chips Rafferty in his last film appearance, then by an 'illegal' two-up game in the back of a local pub, where he meets Doc Tydon, played by Donald Pleasance. Other people cross his path, including a young Jack Thompson, in his first feature film, and a bored local's daughter, played by Sylvia Kay.

The film's centre-piece is an infamous kangaroo cull, where Grant reaches his peak/zenith, that tips him into a new kind of person, at least for the time being. This 'hunt' is brutally unsettling and reminds us that we're watching a film from a bygone era. Apparently, the slaughter was accepted in the original cut as it wasn't shot for the film, but as a document of an actual hunt, where the animals were to be killed regardless.

Ultimately, Wake in Fright is an important, intriguing film in Australia's history, well-paced and performed, yet still slightly awkward to watch. The story of the film's travails since release is an interesting side note, well explained by the director here. And here's a great Guardian article about the film.

See also:

For a similar look at the Aussie outback, why not The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), directed by Stephan Elliot, and Grant's character arc is quite similar to Bill Murray's in Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis.

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