Australian film has teetered between good and bad taste ever since the flourishing of the 1970s, a time when the industry became reborn again after the previous zenith in the 1920s. Often, good taste has been associated with the realm of the cerebral, and bad taste with the fleshy or the visceral. For example, Peter Weir championed exploitation aesthetics with his 1973 film The Cars That Ate Paris before the statesmanlike formalism of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). The early revitalisation of the film industry in Australia was marred by the indecisiveness of where it should head – in the direction of the avant-garde and experimental, or in a more commercially palatable direction. This debate continued throughout the 1970s, but ultimately sexploitation films, which burgeoned in the early epoch, lost out. The Australian film industry didn’t know if sex would sell over the more cerebral endeavours of the petit bourgeois. Perhaps, if Australia had finessed the sexploitation film, we’d enjoy a more avant-garde national cinema fifty years later. After all, Picnic at Hanging Rock is just overrated art-cinema.
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Australian cinema coincided with the birth of the medium as a whole and produced seminal works like Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Tait’s film was one of the first known examples of a feature film about Irish bushranger Ned Kelly. Longford’s film is about Bill (Arthur Tauchert) who lives in Sydney and is down-on-his luck. He falls in love with a woman named Doreen (Australia’s early cinema heartthrob Lottie Lyell) but appears more interested in the cultured Stror ‘at Coot (Harry Young). Bill’s uncouth behaviour and the underlying love story that permeates Longford’s film would inform later Australian films, albeit less traditionally. However, by 1923 American cinema dominated Australian screens, comprising 94% of all exhibited films. With the introduction of vertical integration, the production, distribution and exhibition of films in cinemas were dominated by America’s big five studios (MGM, Warner, Paramount, RKO and Universal) making it almost impossible for Australian products to compete. A long silence drew upon Australian film production, bar the occasional film courtesy of Charles Chauvel or some expatriate. This limited production stemmed from an inferiority complex – tied to wider notions of the cultural cringe – that other anglophone countries could make better films. Arthur Phillips defined the phrase cultural cringe in 1950 in the pages of Meanjin, a magazine devoted to left-leaning cultural criticism, stating, “the Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’” This quote illustrates the way in which cultural inferiority historically shaped Australians’ perception of our own cultural output. Thus, Australian film production slipped into the darkness.
The 1970s sought to change this destiny and reinstate the libido of a once strong and rich film culture. The sexual revolution finally swept across our shores as the left-leaning, and much divisive, 21st Prime Minister Gough Whitlam introduced policies for women including introducing contraception and the establishment of paid parental leave, as well as de-escalating Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war after immense protest. However, the most topical debate within Australian film culture during this decade was between the visceral and the intellectual because film financiers were uncertain what direction the renascent film industry should head.
By 1968, Australian film was at a crossroads. Australia had produced a dozen or so films in the 1960s (including the renowned Pom Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob [1966] and Age of Consent [1969]) and the cultural imperialism of other anglophone countries like the United Kingdom and the United States reigned supreme. Due to this severe imbalance, several politicians had sought to remedy the situation but failed – until the 19th Prime Minister of Australia, a Liberal (conservative) named John Gorton successfully established the Australian Council for the Arts (ACA) in 1968, appointing Herbert Cole “Nugget” Coombs as the chairman (a distinguished economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia). A year later, Nugget created a film advisory committee to tackle Australia’s inadequate film industry. The panel consisted of quiz master Barry Jones (a future cabinet minister under Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke), advertising maverick Phillip Adams (future film financier of sex comedies The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972] and The Naked Bunyip [1970]), Peter Coleman (a right-wing Tory) and two others. The panel aimed to reinvigorate an otherwise dormant film industry so that Australia could tell its own stories, in its own vernacular, for its own people.
However, once the money was secured it wasn’t certain which direction the newly formed Australian Film Development Commission (AFDC) should syphon it. On the one hand there was a battle between the intellectual appeal of European art cinema and the more visceral elements of the body like exploitation cinema and schlock. This discourse played out between experimental and avant-garde directors like Albie Thoms and his Ubu films (later transformed into the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Operative) who thought it would be a hoot to make surrealist cinema courtesy of a heavily subsidised government. Alas, Nugget and the Interim Council decided that making gaudy films that were uncouth in nature was the best way to capitalise on the imminent state funding. The AFDC’s initial budget was $1 million, the amount recommended by the interim committee of the film and TV board, a quarter of which would go towards Bruce Beresford’s sex comedy Barry McKenzie. This demonstrates the notion that sex sells more easily and the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
The council also developed a three-pronged attack to combat the wallowing film industry in Australia; grants for independent film production; a film commission for commercial features; and a film school to ensure ‘disciplined’ filmmaking. In contrast, the high-profile biographer and Brit-at-large Charles Higham, who moved to Australia in 1954, felt that supporting avant-garde film production was the way to go. Suffice to say, Australia was confused which direction this newly formed industry should go.
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Australia was obsessed with flesh and nudity in the 1970s. It adorned the screens of drive-ins, repertory theatres and in mainstream cinemas. A remarkable number of softcore pornos, including The Alvin Purple films (Alvin Purple [1973] and Alvin Rides Again [1974]) and the Barry McKenzie series (The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972] and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own [1974]) were made. Alvin Purple was the creation of Tim Burstall, a hippie from the north-eastern wedge of Melbourne in Warrandyte, whose 1969 feature film 2,000 Weeks completely flopped but was an unprecedented example of independent filmmaking due to the dearth of films being produced at the time. The Melbourne film critic Colin Bennett, an early adoptee of auteurism headlined his review of the film with, “banality lets down our great film hope,” signifying the backlash that faced independent filmmakers down under. Tits reign supreme in Burstall’s Alvin series as the eponymous character struggles with the attention of every woman wanting to have sex with him against his control. This demonstrates that the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
Burstall’s short-lived production company Hexagon also made the sex comedy Petersen (1974) and the Mondo documentary about Australian underground sex clubs, Australia After Dark (1975). Later, in 1977, films were made like Fantasm Comes Again (a sequel to Fantasm [1976], concerning characters in taboo vignettes like a gym teacher fawning over his student) pseudonymously credited to the director Eric Ram, more famously known as the genre director Colin Eggleston, who made Long Weekend (1978) and Cassandra (1987). Whilst the sexploitation film never died per se, the appeal of art films – by directors like Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong – outweighed the fleshier films. This transition arguably began to occur from 1975, a watershed year for Australian film when Sunday, Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Man From Hong Kong graced our screens. It was also the year in which the state-funding body known as the AFDC transitioned into the Australian Film Commission (AFC). This marked a symbolic shift from the scheme of the AFDC which was funding more risque films to the art-house era of the AFC which championed everything from Mad Dog Morgan (1976) to The Devil’s Playground (1976).
Nowhere was this ideological shift better exemplified than in Barry Crocker’s character Barry Mckenzie from The Adventures of Barry Mckenzie and its sequel Barry McKenzie Holds His Own – a Barry Humphrey and Bruce Beresford creation; about an ocker Aussie bloke who desperately seeks sheilas in swinging London but fails miserably. Barry is loud and obnoxious, a stereotype of Australians who end up in backpacker hostels drinking themselves to oblivion. But the McKenzie films were directed by none other than Bruce Beresford, who had returned from a job as a cameraman for the BBC in Swinging London to participate in the revitalised film scene here. As the future director of Tender Mercies (1983), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Double Jeopardy (1999) it’s fair to say he disowned his earlier films. In fact, so ashamed by his involvement in the films, Beresford refused to be interviewed when Umbrella Entertainment redistributed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie on DVD, leaving it to Barry Humphries to answer questions in character as Dame Edna (Barry McKenzie’s aunt in the films).
Australian cinema lay dormant for decades until the 1970s. Under the watchful eye of several prime ministers there was a movement to revitalise film production in Australia, culminating in the birth of the AFDC, the Australian Film and Television School and the Experimental Film and Television Fund (EFTF). The spark that brought these components together lay in early discussions between the Australian Council of the Arts’ Film Advisory Committee which debated the best way to spend the money. At first Australia championed ‘bad taste’ films and the visceral components of flesh, sex, nudity, schlock and horror, before realising the most palatable cinema to export is that of art cinema. After the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 the government introduced policies that favoured narrative cinema and relegated experimental or underground film further to the sidelines. This can be seen in the transfer of the film, radio and television board from the Australia Council to the Australian Film Commission in 1976. In its annual report of that year the Commission stated it would seek to combine, “both the film-as-a-business and film-as-an-art sections of the film industry,” illustrating the film funding bodies ambitions. Furthermore, the emergence of the Creative Development Fund (CDF) in 1978 meant that narrative and the intellect was taking precedence as our national export. The CDF took over the role of the EFTF and provided money for independent filmmakers. The sexploitation film lost out. Australia has grappled with the dichotomy between the intellect and the visceral for decades. It continues to haunt our cinemas today as Robert Connelly releases a state-funded sequel to his tepid Eric Bana-driven franchise The Dry (2020), likely to succeed enough at the box office to warrant a third or maybe fourth film. We don’t make sex comedies any more. The intellect has prevailed.
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