PART 39 The Man from Snowy River DAN GOLDING
George Miller’s The Man from Snowy River (1982) is, by many measures, one of the most successful Australian films of all time. Widely loved and hugely profitable, the film drew on the deftness of Australian television drama to help reorient Australian filmmaking towards a popular and international audience. Yet The Man from Snowy River also has a complicated and contested legacy: too gauche for cinephiles and too glossy a portrait of Australia for progressive audiences, it was critically flayed upon release and has received far less attention over time than its contemporaries Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) and Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980). It is a film that lives in the space of a certain kind of national iconography: as Tom O’Regan puts it, The Man from Snowy River is from the world of ‘the cigarette commercial, clothes fashions, real estate, tourism, soap opera (melodrama), bush dancing, John Ford and John Wayne’. Within this contradiction of popular appeal and critical discomfort lies the fascinating enigma of The Man from Snowy River.
The idea for the film came during a dinner party. Geoff Burrowes, the film’s producer and driving force, was challenged by the wife of a friend: ‘Why doesn’t someone in the film industry do something that is central to Australia’s heritage rather than always dealing on the edges of it?’ She suggested Paterson’s poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’, though Burrowes was initially hesitant: ‘It’s too well-known. It’s almost a cliche. Anyway, it’s too short; it only runs five or seven minutes. How can you make a film out of that?’ Somewhat perplexed by his own negative reaction, though, Burrowes eventually realised that, in fact, Paterson’s poem would make an excellent climax to a film. He contacted director George Miller (no relation to the Mad Max director of the same name) to begin work: ‘All we need is another 90 minutes!’
That the task of adding a ninety-minute prologue to perhaps Australia’s most famous poem should fall to Burrowes and Miller was difficult enough. Yet it was even more ambitious, as neither of them had actually made a feature film before. They were colleagues from Australian television, which, at the time, was a very different industry from feature-film production. They had undertaken apprenticeships at Crawford Productions, Australia’s premier television studio; responsible for Seven’s Homicide as well as Nine’s Division 4, The Sullivans and The Flying Doctors, the production house’s ‘titanic achievement was to show commercial networks they needed Australian drama and how to make it’. These were Australian stories with Australian accents – from police and doctors to average middle-class families. Miller, who had directed episodes of Homicide, The Sullivans and Ten’s Matlock Police, epitomised the Crawford approach to talent when he arrived as a 21-year-old interested in photography. ‘They trained you to do everything, they’d throw you in at the deep end to see if you sank or swam,’ he told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2008. ‘I was one of the ones who swam’.
Australian television companies like Crawford were hothouses of production talent. Yet that talent rarely crossed over into feature-film production and, up until the 1980s, the two industries were widely regarded as separate beasts. Under Gough Whitlam’s government, they were, in fact, very much divided, with television policy falling to the then–minister for the media, Douglas McClelland, and film being overseen instead by the office for the prime minister. While the film industry was considered by bureaucrats to be capable of making art, television, according to O’Regan, was cast in the devil’s clothes. It was crude, unsophisticated, uncreative. It was not, in short, what the new Australia – an Australia equipped with cultural capacities by the unprecedented expansion in arts expenditure in the Whitlam years – needed.
However, as the 1970s became the 1980s, the film industry gained greater support and, crucially, tax concessions for production, which included television miniseries. This allowed for more lateral movement between the industries and for a shift in aesthetics as populist television workers began to contribute to feature films. This ‘10BA’ era (citing the relevant section in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936) saw a dramatic growth in films produced, and also in popular international hits – not just The Man from Snowy River, but also The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir, 1982), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) and Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) – before the 10BA subsidy was wound back from 1988.
The straightforward, non-ironic approach of television was well suited to this moment in Australian film history. Local audiences had recently flocked to the cinemas to enjoy the sincere American genre homage of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981). And, as O’Regan points out, a film like The Man from Snowy River was successful in part because it ‘is getting to the cinema the same audience that makes Cop Shop, A Country Practice, The Sullivans and A Town Like Alice rating successes on Australian television’, but also because it gave audiences earnest entertainment in the
