Diasporas of Australian Cinema

By Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert

Diasporas of Australian Cinema is the first volume to focus exclusively on diasporic hybridity and cultural diversity in Australian filmmaking over the past century.Topics include post-war documentaries and migration, Asian-Australian subjectivity, cross-cultural romance, "wogsploitation" comedy, and post-ethnic cinema. This collection also provides a useful reference text for scholars of Australian film and cultural studies, with material on contemporary film-making and pre-World War II cinema. Containing previously unpublished articles by some the most recognised experts on Australian cinema, the book is a vital contribution to the burgeoning international interest in diasporic cinemas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781841503363

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Diasporas of Australian Cinema

Edited by

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert

First published in the UK in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago,

IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Sue Jarvis

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-197-0

EISBN 978-1-84150-336-3

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface: Diasporas of Australian Cinema – A Provocation

Toby Miller

Part One: Theories

Chapter 1    Introduction: Rethinking Diasporas – Australian Cinema, History and Society

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert

Chapter 2    Tinkering at the Borders: Lucky Miles and the Diasporic (no) Road Movie

Catherine Simpson

Chapter 3    Ethics and Risk in Asian-Australian Cinema: The Last Chip

Audrey Yue

Chapter 4    ‘I’m Falling in Your Love’: Cross-cultural Romance and the Refugee Film

Sonia Magdelena Tascón

Chapter 5    White Aborigines: Women, Space, Mimicry and Mobility

Anthony Lambert

Part Two: Representations

Chapter 6    Wogboy Comedies and the Australian National Type

Felicity Collins

Chapter 7    Excess in Oz: The Crazy Russian and the Quiet Australian

Greg Dolgopolov

Chapter 8    Anzac’s ‘Others’: ‘Cruel Huns’ and ‘Noble Turks’

Antje Gnida and Catherine Simpson

Chapter 9    ‘Now You Blokes Own the Place’: Representations of Japanese Culture in Recent Australian Cinema

Rebecca Coyle

Chapter 10   Other Shorelines, or the Greek-Australian Cinema

John Conomos

Part Three: Film-Makers

Chapter 11   ‘A European Heart’: Exile, Isolation and Interiority in the Life and Films of Paul Cox

Marek Haltof

Chapter 12   Sophia Turkiewicz: Australianizing Poles, or ‘Bloody Nuts and Balts’ in Silver City (1984)

Renata Murawska

Chapter 13   Lebanese Muslims Speak Back: Two Films by Tom Zubrycki

Susie Khamis

Chapter 14   Sejong Park’s Birthday Boy and Korean-Australian Encounters

Ben Goldsmith and Brian Yecies

Diasporic Filmography

Garry Gillard and Anthony Lambert

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been an incredibly enjoyable collaborative and scholarly journey. To our contributors listed in the index, thank you for the privilege of working with your amazing ideas, and for your patience. Our gratitude goes to a number of institutions and individuals without whose support this book would not have been possible. Institutionally we would like to acknowledge Macquarie University’s Divisional Research Fund, especially Anne Cranny-Francis, Peter Doyle and the Departments of Media and Critical and Cultural Studies. In addition, we would like to thank Simon Drake at the National Film and Sound Archive (Sydney and Canberra) and the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London. There are also a number of people whose generosity with additional reviewing of papers extended beyond the call of duty and they include Ina Bertrand, Felicity Collins, Maree Delofski, Grisha Dolgopolov, Susie Khamis, Leonard Janiszewski and Effy Alexakis. We are indebted to all the film-makers and artists whose work is mentioned in the following pages; in particular, for their generous donation of materials and time, we would like to thank Gosia Dobrowolska, Sophia Turkiewicz, Tom Zubrycki, John Weiley, Michael Bourchier and Blink films. Our gratitude goes to Intellect for their professionalism, to the anonymous reviewers of this book and in particular to the very efficient Melanie Harrison. Also to Toby Miller, thanks for your ‘provocation’. Finally, Catherine and Renata’s sincere thanks to Anthony Lambert, who came on board just as the chapters were rolling in. Without his rigorous editing, inspiration and dedication to deadlines, we would probably still be working on this book!

We would all like to pay special tribute to long-suffering family and friends. In particular, Anthony would like to acknowledge his partner Matthew, parents Les and Brigid, sister Pauline, brother Daniel and their families, as well as the children and grandchildren of his late sister Bernadette Carstein, who passed away as this book was coming together. Renata would like to acknowledge the support from Jasiu and Mum Basia. Catherine is eternally grateful to her partner Bruce, to Mona and to daughters Ayesha and Rahni.

PREFACE: DIASPORAS OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMA – A PROVOCATION

Toby Miller

Diasporic hybridity, the organizing concept of this exciting volume, is at once a tribute to the tenacity and pugnacity of diasporic groups to sustain cultural formations, and a recognition of the inevitability of messy, abject, mixed cultural forms. In this preface, I would like to consider population issues theoretically and numerically, ending with some ideas for textual analysis. It is some time since I have been an informed student of Australian cinema, but what follows has enriched my memory, updated my present knowledge and stimulated me to consider the theoretical and political issues that animate this bold and innovative book. We inhabit a worldwide crisis of belonging, a population crisis of who, what, when and where. More and more people feel as though they do not belong; more and more people are applying to belong; and more and more people are not counted as belonging. Australian multiculturalism, the concept that underpins and is questioned by this book, was an attempt to deal with the beginnings of this crisis to ensure two things: labour peace, against the risk of restive unions, and racial peace, against the intolerance of European-descended white people. The screen texts spawned by the cultural side to this policy have been manifold and manifest, often critical of the idea of multiculturalism as well as its programmatic implementation.

So where did this global crisis come from? It began in the 1960s and has continued since, because of:

  changes in the global division of labour, as manufacturing left the First World and subsistence agriculture was eroded in the Third;

  demographic growth, through unprecedented public-health initiatives;

  increases in numbers of refugees, following numerous conflicts amongst satellite states of the United States and the former Soviet Union;

  transformations of these struggles into intra-and trans-national violence, after half of the imperial couplet unravelled;

  the associated decline of state socialism and triumph of finance capital;

  vastly augmented trafficking in human beings;

  the elevation of consumption as a site of social action and public policy;

 renegotiation of the 1940s–70s compact across the West between capital, labour, and government, reversing that period’s redistribution of wealth downwards;

  deregulation of key sectors of the economy; and

 the development of civil-rights and social-movement discourses and institutions, extending cultural difference from tolerating the aberrant to querying the normal and commodifying the result.

The dilemmas that derive from these changes underpin political theorist John Gray’s (2003) critique of ‘the West’s ruling myth … that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign’, a veritable embrace of Enlightenment values. Modernity is just as much to do with global financial deregulation, organized crime, and religious violence as democracy, uplift, and opportunity; just as much to do with neoliberalism, religion and authoritarianism as freedom, science and justice (2003: 1–2, 46). The essays in this book illustrate how the struggle for the redefinition and redeployment of these ideas, ideals and realities plays out on screen in a white-settler colony under erasure through difference.

Australia is typical rather than aberrant in having to deal with these questions. Of the approximately 200 sovereign states in the world, over 160 are culturally heterogeneous, and they comprise 5000 ethnic groups. Between 10 and 20 per cent of the world’s population currently belong to a racial/linguistic minority in their country of residence. Nine hundred million people affiliate with groups that suffer systematic discrimination. Perhaps three-quarters of the world system sees politically active minorities, and there are more than 200 movements for self-determination in nearly 100 states (Miller 2007). Even Australia’s mythic site of origin and contemporary dominant fraction, the Northern Hemisphere’s ‘British-Irish archipelago’, once famed ‘as the veritable forge of the nation state, a template of modernity’, has been subdivided by cultural difference as a consequence of both peaceful and violent action and a revisionist historiography that asks us to note its emergence from the millennial migration of Celts from the steppes; Roman colonization; invading Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and Normans; attacking Scandinavians; trading Indians, Chinese, Irish, Lombards and Hansa; and refugee Europeans and Africans (Nairn 2003: 8).

There are now five key zones of world immigration – North America, Europe, the Western Pacific, the Southern Cone, and the Persian Gulf – and five key categories: international refugees, internally displaced people, voluntary migrants, the enslaved and the smuggled. The number of refugees and asylum-seekers at the beginning of the twenty-first century was 21.5 million – three times the figure 20 years earlier. The International Organization for Migration estimates that global migration increased from 75 million to 150 million people between 1965 and 2000, and the United Nations (UN) says 2 per cent of all people spent 2001 outside their country of birth, more than at any other moment in history. Migration has doubled since the 1970s, and the European Union has seen arrivals from beyond its borders grow by 75 per cent in the last quarter-century (Miller 2007). This mobility, whether voluntary or imposed, temporary or permanent, is accelerating. Along with new forms of communication, it enables unprecedented levels of cultural displacement, renewal and creation between and across origins and destinations.

There are simultaneous tendencies towards both open and closed borders in response to these trends. Opinion polling suggests sizeable majorities across the globe believe their national ways of life are threatened by global flows of people and things. In other words, their cultures are under threat. At the same time, they feel unable to control their individual destinies. In other words, their subjectivities are under threat. Majorities around the world oppose immigration, largely because of fear. No major recipient of migrants has ratified the UN’s 2003 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, even though they benefit economically and culturally from these arrivals (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2003 and 2004; Annan 2003).

What is the problem with all this mingling? Bonnie Honig (1998) has shown that immigrants and their cultures have long been the limit-case for loyalty, as per Ruth the Moabite in the Jewish Bible/Old Testament. Such figures are both perilous for the sovereign state (where does their fealty lie?) and symbolically essential (as the only citizens who make a deliberate decision to swear allegiance to an otherwise mythic social contract). There have been many outbursts of regressive nationalism, whether via the belligerence of the United States, the anti-immigrant stance of Western Europe or the crackdown on minorities in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Arab world. The populist outcome is often violent – race riots in 30 British cities in the 1980s; pogroms against Roma and migrant workers in Germany in the 1990s and Spain in 2000; the intifadas; migrant-worker and youth struggles in France in 1990 and 2005; the Cronulla Beach cell-phone conspiracy in Sydney, Australia – on it goes. The two most important sites of migration between the Third World and the First – Turkey and Mexico – see state and vigilante violence alongside corporate embrace in host countries, and donor nations are increasingly recognizing the legitimacy of a hybrid approach to citizenship.

Australia’s immigration program was very Anglo-Irish from the time of Federation until after World War II, when a reserve army of labour was welcomed from Eastern and Southern Europe to build manufacturing industries on the cheap that could quickly be militarized in the event of attack – something that had been lacking before World War II. There was very little cultural accommodation of these new arrivals, while Aboriginal people were regarded as occasional textual signs rather than authors, historians and custodians. Of course, cinema in general took unpaid long-service leave for two decades after the war. By the time of its return, there were also pressures to reform Australian immigration to lessen the culture’s racialized consistency. When added to refugee arrivals from Vietnam, by the late 1970s the nation was changing swiftly. The advent of SBS signified how poorly Australian broadcasting and film had addressed the country’s emergent demography and the renewed political visibility of First Peoples. The country’s project of nationalism was rethought and reinvigorated in a model that was neither entirely mixed nor entirely sectarian, but somewhere in between.

I want to suggest that Australia’s future may well be something like that of Latin America, as newer and older populations continue to intermingle. Consider the history of mestizaje, which began a century ago as the mythology of an entirely new type of person that would be forged from intermingling after the Spanish and Portuguese colonized then were sent packing by independence movements. The valorization of the mestizo is best exemplified by José Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica (1925), which took the mestizo as the race of the future, shaped by aesthetic plasticity. In contrast to Europe, a hybridized and syncretized culture alongside nineteenth century Romanticism went on to constitute a key foundation of Latin American continental and national identity, albeit precariously. Then it was embraced, or coopted, by populist states in the early to mid-twentieth century. Now it is an everyday norm – frequently used to mask the continued economic, political and cultural hegemony of light-skinned people. That said, at an ideological level it remains a progressive force.

Hybridity is both a norm and a strength of progressive forces. Pondering the global data with which I began, Bruno Latour (with Kastrissianakis 2007) thinks the interdependence generated by life in today’s migrant world may shift us ‘from a time of succession to a time of co-existence’, a site where historicity and commonality prevail and we are all mixed in a self-conscious and self-confident way that transcends the bigotry of nationalism.

This also suggests the need for a more hybrid means of interpreting cultural objects, as per Latour’s investigations into cars, laboratories, devices, photographs and theories. Images and icons are not just signs to be read; they are not just coefficients of political and economic power; and they are not just industrial objects. Rather, they are all these things: hybrid monsters, coevally subject to rhetoric, status and technology – to text, power, and nature – all at once, but in contingent ways (Latour 1993). Cultural historian Roger Chartier (1989) proposes a tripartite approach to analyzing texts, viz. reconstruction of ‘the diversity of older readings from their sparse and multiple traces’; a focus on ‘the text itself, the object that conveys it, and the act that grasps it’; and an identification of ‘the strategies by which authors and publishers tried to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribed reading on the text’ (1989: 157, 161–3, 166). This grid directs us beyond traditional aesthetics. Because texts accrete and attenuate meanings on their travels as they rub up against, trope and are troped by other texts and the social, we must consider all the shifts and shocks that characterize their existence as cultural commodities – their ongoing renewal as the temporary ‘property’ of varied, productive workers and publics, and the perennial ‘property’ of businesspeople. It seems to me that this is the way to inhabit diasporic hybridity as a denizen and a reader. Both the texts analyzed in this book and the way they are understood serve as a model.

PART ONE: THEORIES

1

INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING DIASPORA – AUSTRALIAN CINEMA, HISTORY AND SOCIETY

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert

The inspiration for Diasporas of Australian Cinema emanates from the diverse range of films dealing with diasporic experience produced in Australia over the past century. The vital relationship between migration and the moving image is often melancholically invoked, as in films such as Michael Bates’ acclaimed short film The Projectionist (2002), in which a projectionist traipses through Sydney’s darkened laneways as haunting memories flash across the surface of city buildings. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead accompanies this ‘gallery of ghostly visions’ that includes images of migrant workers, a ‘woman in pain’, a ‘man in despair’ and refugees who have been forcibly displaced (Much Ado Films 2002). Using the live-action animation technique of ‘Pixilation’, these poetic images render urban Sydney an uncanny space, while at the same time hinting at both the animated origins of cinema and the imminent death of the cinema projectionist – a last vestige of modernity. The Projectionist exemplifies the ways film can evoke memories of things past, but shows how it can also be a way to make sense of the present and to imagine the future. In this case, the migrant projectionist’s origins are never named. He is the modern Everyman who embodies the traumas of the twentieth century, and the subsequent cultural formations that have developed within a specifically Australian context. While these images haunt the projectionist, they are also liberating as they are cast out and shared with others, a diasporic visibility that becomes part of our collective memory.

This collection necessarily springs from Australia’s specificity as an immigrant society, simultaneously celebrated and suppressed in the Australian social and cinematic imaginary. A comprehensive list of films that reflect the ethnic diversity of directors’ backgrounds, as well as filmic representations, now spans hundreds of titles, some of which we capture in Garry Gillard and Anthony Lambert’s annotated ‘Diasporic Filmography’ at the back of this volume. The commercial success of films such as They’re A Weird Mob (Michael Powell 1966), Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrman 1992), or The Wog Boy (Aleksi Vellis 2000) attest to the popular appeal of films representing non-mainstream Australian cultures. Also, the critical appeal of films such as Clara Law’s Floating Life (1995) or Ana Kokkinos’s Head On (1997) is evidenced by an ever-expanding body of intellectual work devoted to them (e.g. Siemienowicz 1999; Yue 2000; Mitchell 2003; Berry 1999; Bennett 2007). The less-celebrated genres of documentary, short and experimental film-making have nonetheless been the most prolific in dealing with diasporic identities, and this book attempts to attend to their relative absence from critical attention with half the chapters addressing these formats.

Few entire collections deal with diaspora in cinema, and fewer still engage with specific diasporic national cinemas. In his influential Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) considers how displacement affects film-makers, predominantly from the developing world, who move (by necessity or voluntarily) to developed countries. Naficy makes a distinction between three types of accented films/film-makers: exilic, diasporic and postcolonial ethnic. He argues that exilic film-makers tend to define homeland in political terms in their early films, while diasporic film-makers have a sense of collective identity. On the other hand, postcolonial ethnic film-makers are those born to non-white, non-western parents since the 1960s and emphasize ethnic identity within their host country. Naficy argues that the artisanal production mode and stylistic tendencies of ‘accented film-makers’ include such things as the ‘accented’ use of speech; asynchronous sound and multilinguality; the textual presence of the lost homeland; an emphasis on journeying, border subjectivities and hybrid identities; a split relationship with the body; epistolarity as potential conflict/disruption in the narrative; and the self-inscription of the film-maker within the film’s text.

Likewise, Laura Marks in Under the Skin of the Film (2001) focuses on the techniques used in ‘intercultural cinema’; this has emerged ‘from the new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centres which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile and diaspora’ (Marks 2001: 1). Intercultural films embrace the proximal as a means of embodying knowledge and memories through ‘haptic visuality’, which focuses on things such as the texture, tactility and sensuality of objects, ‘as if touching a film with one’s eyes’ (Marks 2001: 162). This moves the viewer closer to the body/human sensorium and is a way of representing memories or longing which many intercultural film-makers negotiate in their displacement.

Naficy’s and Marks’ theories of ‘accented’ and ‘intercultural’ cinema complement one another by arguing that diasporic films and film-makers conform to/seek out a set of formal and stylistic tendencies. Subsequent collections such as Rueschmann’s (2003) Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities further suggest radically different trajectories of diasporic experience in the cinema. This in itself marks the limited capacity of such work to locate the diasporic within the Australian cinematic and cultural context, beyond the identification of conditions that produce embodied responses to exilic displacement. A ‘danger’ of diaspora as an organizing principle of visual culture is, according to Mirzoeff (1999b: 8), the promotion of ‘a new universalism in contrast to the formal structures of national culture’. The interstitial conditions that produce a third cinema and film-makers from the developing world are not interchangeable with those in Australia.

The Australian diasporic context is not, however, uncharted critical terrain, and much recent work addresses at least some aspects of diasporic identity and multiculturalism in Australian film-making (e.g. Conomos 1992; O’Regan 1996; Turner 1997; Rattigan 1998; Ang et al. 2000; Ang 2001a; Gilbert, Khoo and Lo 2000; Cunningham and Sinclair 2000; Bertone, Keating and Mullaly 2000; Hynes 2000; Madan 2000; Lee and Tapp 2004; Rutland 2005; Carniel 2006; Smaill 2006; Bennett 2007; Rando 2007). However, none of the notable books on Australian cinema allows for any substantial focus on the significant role diasporic qualities have played in Australian cinema’s history and industry. Diasporas of Australian Cinema is the first volume to do so. This collection of essays is not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject but to open up the critical terrain and present fresh insights into some of the diasporic aspects of Australian cinema, offering foundations for future discussions on the topic.

Cinema and the diasporic society

Defining Australian cinema has proven a challenging task for theorists, critics and government financiers. With those films that sit at national borders – in terms of origins of creative talent, cast and crew, themes, locations and financing – definitions of the national are fluid with respect to the constant movement of capital and personnel. Deciding where Australian cinema ends and international cinema starts is not the concern of this book. By their diasporic nature, many of the films examined in this volume sit at the borders of Australian and other national cinemas. For this reason, we have adopted a similar approach to Tom O’Regan (1996), where we regard ‘Australian cinema’ as a loose category that is not overly prescriptive in definition. In his landmark text, Australian National Cinema, O’Regan breaks open the national cinema category, positioning Australian cinema as inclusive and inherently diverse.

As a postcolonial immigrant society, contemporary Australia has come a long way from its British penal colony origins. The federation of five states and two territories into a nation in 1901 coincided with the fostering of a British-derived identity and ethnicity through the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. This Act, widely known as the ‘White Australia’ policy, sought to limit the immigration of ‘non-Europeans’ and ‘coloured races’ to Australia (Stratton and Ang 1994). Such thinking impacted on the representation and treatment of Asian characters in the early cinema, a racism evidenced in well-known films such as A Girl of the Bush (Raymond Longford 1921) and Phil K. Walsh’s now infamous The Birth of White Australia (1928), which ends with Anglo-Celtic lovers framed by the plait of a Chinese man, presumably scalped on the goldfields.

The policy was progressively dismantled after World War II, with increased migration (predominantly from war-torn Europe) encouraged, although it persisted until the early 1970s. In order to cope with the diversifying population, a policy of cultural assimilation governed official rhetoric during the post-war period, arguing that ‘new Australians’ would be absorbed socially and culturally into the mainstream Anglo-Australian community.

At the 1968 Citizen Convention, Polish immigrant Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki first advocated multiculturalism, a proposal later consolidated in his Department of Immigration submission Australia as a Multicultural Society (AEAC 1977). Multiculturalism emerged from the perceived failure of assimilation and was a pragmatic response to a society that could no longer sustain national identity dependent on the myth of British origin (Stratton and Ang 1994). The cultural diversity of contemporary Australia belies its own origins in the United Kingdom’s historical inability to meet Australia’s growing workforce demand, especially in the second half of the twentieth century (Jupp 2001: 62–6). This led to the first official national policy of multiculturalism in 1978 and government endorsement in 1989 of the report National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, which contained principles of ‘cultural identity’, ‘social justice’ and ‘economic efficiency’ with the aim being to ‘promote an environment that is tolerant and accepting of cultural and social diversity’ (ACMA 1989). However, Australian multiculturalism differs from that of countries such as the United States in its concern with the synthesizing of unruly and unpredictable cultural identities and differences into a harmonious unity-in-diversity, which serves to protect the nation-state of many cultures (Stratton and Ang 1994). Commentators have since begun to replace multicultural ideals with those of a transient, diasporic collective affiliated with the Australian state (Hugo 2006). With this conceptual revision of state and identity came more prolific filmic representations of the non-core (non-British originated) Australians. The boundaries of Australian national cinema have evolved to reflect and encompass these changes and, as this collection demonstrates, the maturing diasporic hybridity of its constituents.

Extending O’Regan’s (1996) understanding of Australian cinema as messy and diverse, an even more significant dialogical contribution to this book’s theoretical framework is his conceptualization of four pathways for Australian nationhood and its filmic translations: as a European-derived society; a settler society; a New World society; and a diasporic society (O’Regan 1996: 305). The first two pathways imply a Eurocentrism reflective of the persistence of the ‘White Australia’ policy well into the 1970s, while the third – despite its attempts to de-emphasize ethnicity through its ‘melting pot’ definition of Australian society – no longer reflects the cultural dominance of an ethnically unnamed Australian core. The diasporic pathway to Australian nationhood, O’Regan notes, is also wrought with problems. On the one hand, almost consistently throughout Australian history since white settlement, around one-quarter of the Australian population have been born overseas (with the exception of the 1940s), with another quarter having at least one parent born overseas. On the other hand, the most significant number of new or second-generation Australians come from the United Kingdom, suggesting a continuing Anglo-Celtic bias in line with the cohesive rather than diversified concept of nationhood implied by the term ‘diasporic’. Additionally, O’Regan argues that claiming the predominance of a diasporic cinema as a conceptual framework for Australian cinema could lead to the neglect of ‘Australia’s indigenous people or the absurdity of calling a diaspora people of several ancestries who [do not identify diasporically and] are now in their tenth generation in the country’ (O’Regan 1996: 305), a claim further problematized by various intra-Australia migrations,