HEARTS ADRIFT

A CINEMATIC TEXT THAT, THREE DECADES ON, REMAINS A RARITY DUE TO THE CENTRAL PLACE OF WOMEN IN BOTH ITS PLOT AND PRODUCTION, HIGH TIDE TELLS THE STORY OF A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER REUNITED. SUZIE GIBSON AND DEAN BIRON EXAMINE THIS UNDERAPPRECI-ATED AUSTRALIAN FILM’S USE OF ROAD-MOVIE AND COMING-OF-AGE TROPES IN PORTRAYING THE TUMULTUOUS YET ULTIMATELY TOUCHING RELATIONSHIP THAT BLOSSOMS BETWEEN ITS TWO FEMALE PROTAGONISTS.

Writing in 1988, film scholars Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka suggested that the New Australian Cinema had, during that decade, begun experiencing its middle-aged spread: a period of feature films ‘mired in an endless reiteration’ that mirrored the supposed monotony and fatigue of cinema worldwide at that particular historical juncture. With the mainstream excesses of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller & George Ogilvie, 1985) and Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) dominating the cinematic landscape, Dermody and Jacka saw salvation only in the handful of ‘eccentrics’ sporadically being served up by the local industry.

With the benefit of hindsight thirty years later, some of those understated oddities can rightly be considered lost classics. Films such as Albie Thoms’ Palm Beach (1980), John Duigan’s Winter of Our Dreams (1981), Phillip Noyce’s Heatwave (1982), Paul Cox’s Lonely Hearts (1982), Carl Schultz’s Goodbye Paradise (1983) and Ian Pringle’s Wrong World (1985) glimmer like diamonds sprinkled across a bland desert of period films and predictable excursions to the country’s vast and minacious