Australian Film Theory and Criticism: Volume 3: Documents

By Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis

The third part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Volume 3: Documents concludes the project by gathering together the documents that were produced during the rise of film studies in Australian academia from 1975–85. Through these sources we see the development of the particularities of Australian film theory and criticism, its relationship to its international counterparts and the establishment of key positions and the directions in which they develop. Editors Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis here collect key articles, including the works of Paul Willemen, Sam Rohdie, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris, among many others, in order to conclude this pioneering historiographic account of Australian film studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783208395

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2018 by

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

First published in the USA in 2018 by

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

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2018 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.

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Cover images: Zentropa interior. Photo Sophie Bech; Paradox interior.

    Photo Eva Bakøy; Aardman exterior. Photo Simon Dowling; JVtv exterior.

    Photo Roel Puijk.

Production manager: Matthew Floyd

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-837-1

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-838-8

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-839-5

Printed and bound by TJ International Ltd

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Contents

Acknowledgement

Introduction: ‘Notes for a History of Contexts’

Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

1972

Experimentalists

Sylvia Lawson

1974

Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker

Ina Bertrand

1975

Feminist Critique

Meaghan Morris

1976

Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock

Ian Hunter

Editorial Article

John Tulloch

1978

Gilda: Images of Women – Notes for Discussion

Lesley Stern

1979

Fetishism in Film ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’

Ian Hunter

Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia

Sylvia Lawson

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory

Adrian Martin

Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia

Lesley Stern

Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years

Lesley Stern

1980

Editorial

Robert Rothols [as R.R.]

1981

Stock Shock and Schlock

Stuart Cunningham

Film and History: Canberra Conference

Anna Grieve

Recent ‘Political’ Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA

Noel King

The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary

Adrian Martin

The Second Australian Film Conference, or A Long Way from Lana Turner

Brian McFarlane

Editorial

John Nicoll

On Screen

Tom O’Regan

1982

Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text

Barbara Creed

‘The Public Wants Features!’: The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian

Independent Film Since the 1960s

Helen Grace

1983

Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful

Ted Colless

Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole

Felicity Collins

Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator

Barbara Creed

The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire

Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka

Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films

Ross Gibson

Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English

Noel King

Australian Documentary Cinema

Albert Moran

The Practice of Reviewing

Meaghan Morris

Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation

Tom O’Regan

A National Cinema: The Role of the State

Sam Rohdie

‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’

Bill Routt [as Bill Gent]

Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts

Paul Willemen

1984

‘National Identity’ / ‘National History’ / ‘National Film’: The Australian

Experience

Ina Bertrand

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory

Felicity Collins

After Futur◊Fall

Ross Gibson

Second History and Film Conference Report

Sally Stockbridge

1985

Glimpses of the Present

Philip Brophy

Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals

Rolando Caputo

Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Ross Gibson

1987

Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade

Stuart Cunningham

About the Editors

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Australian Research Council for financial support provided by an ARC Discovery Grant for this project. At Intellect, we thank Jelena Stanovnik for her initial interest in, and ongoing support for, this and other volumes in the Australian Film Theory and Criticism series. Special thanks to Roberto Letizi and Shweta Kishore for their research assistance in preparing this volume, and to Lesley Stern for making available a copy of her notes, ‘Gilda: Images of Women’.

Introduction

‘Notes for a History of Contexts’

Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

In ‘Remarks on Screen’, his snapshot of the cultures of the British film journal (republished in this volume), Paul Willemen writes:

As institution, Screen is a space holding contradictions, promoting some discourses, excluding others, closing off potential areas of productivity, and opening up others. The criteria for (and the determinations on) that dynamic of discourses in movement are many and complex and cannot simply be ‘read’ on the pages of the journal, nor can they be reconstructed by means of an immanent reading of the Screen text. The account of the magazine presented in this paper offers reference-points for a possible way of understanding the magazine’s trajectory in relation to the various forces that determine the conjuncture within which it is caught, and which impress themselves on the way internal contradictions evolve.

(Willemen 307)

Without diminishing the import of what follows, borrowing Willemen’s subtitle for our own, and as has been the focus of the previous two volumes – Critical Positions and Interviews – of this Australian Film Theory and Criticism (AFTC) project, we have taken some direction from the kind of approach proposed by Willemen. As we (King, Verevis and Williams) suggested in the Introduction to volume 1, this project of tracing the academicization of film studies in Australia in the period 1975−85 cannot be read simply from the surface of the text – the collected ‘Documents’ of this third volume – but is dealt with, in our formation, as an unwieldy intersection of institutions, personnel and critical positions. For us, the particularity of film studies in the academy can only be understood in relation to the innumerable ‘discourses in movement’ during this period. Following Willemen, we have proposed across these three volumes that Australian Film Theory and Criticism, in this period (and we would also point to the impact of preceding years and the resonances of those that follow), cannot be contained in three volumes. As we (King and Williams) suggested in the Introduction to volume 2, we look forward to responses to this project, to people addressing its shortcomings and lacunae and following up on its suggestions (10), but would also emphasize that these volumes do go some way towards mapping out a series of networks around which Australian film theory and criticism circulated.

While we have republished Willemen’s ‘Remarks on Screen’ here, some further accounting for these networks was initiated by Willemen in his editing (and ‘Presentation’) of a special Australian Film Culture dossier in Framework issues 22/23 (1983) and 24 (1984), where he collected articles (in issue 22/23) by Sam Rohdie, Tom O’Regan, Noel King and Tim Rowse, Albert Moran, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris and (in issue 24) Jan McSweeney, Felicity Collins, Sylvia Lawson, and Helen Grace and Erika Addis. Many of these authors are represented in this volume, as are five of the key articles from Willemen’s dossier (some in versions that predate those published in Framework): Collins, ‘The Australian Journal of Screen Theory’, Gibson, ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’ (from On the Beach), Rohdie, ‘The Australian State: A National Cinema’ (from Arena), O’Regan, ‘Australian Film Making: Its Public Circulation’ and Morris, ‘The Practice of Film Reviewing’.

Preceding Willemen’s garnering of Australian articles for Framework was Noel King’s ‘Recent Political Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA’, which, we think, is the first article by an Australian academic to be published in Screen. Originally presented at the Second Australian Film Conference in Perth (1980), its publication was facilitated by international guest, Manuel Alvarado. At the time, King’s piece was not so much a controversial critique of canonical feminist film works – Jim Klein, Julia Reichert and Miles Mogulescu’s Union Maids (1976) and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) – as it was an examination of the discourses of film criticism in relation to political documentary. Following on the heels of E. Ann Kaplan’s chapter, ‘The Realist Debate in the Feminist Film: A Historical Overview of Theories and Strategies in Realism and the Avant-Garde Theory Film (1971−81)’ from her Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (1983) and prefigured by Julia Lesage’s ‘The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film’ (from Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1978), King’s (white Australian male) intervention attends more to the two films’ reception – in Cineaste (Linda Gordon) and Jump Cut (Ruth McCormick) – and follows the work of Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Paul Willemen to ‘attempt to read these documentaries against the grain, to refuse the reading it is the work of their textual systems to secure. In seeking to refuse these films in their current form a step is taken towards thinking what might be put in their place’ (9).

Screen was, of course, among the highest profile international film journals, but in his AFTC volume 2 interview, Dana Polan talks about his encounter with Australian film (and other) publications during a visit to the 1985 Screen Studies of Australia conference in Sydney. Polan mentions Continuum, The Australian Journal of Screen Theory and Art & Text as some of the local publications he already knew about, and of going to Glebe Books in Sydney to buy

all these small press little editions of things that you couldn’t find elsewhere [...] and that was the one thing that really impressed me, the amount of publishing that was going on by little presses, by presses that were doing [...] that might do one volume and then cease publication, something else would pop up, so there was a kind of frenetic but very localised sporadic activity.

(332)

We can only imagine which other titles Polan packed into his suitcase to take back to the United States: copies perhaps of Filmnews, Filmviews, Tension, On the Beach, Cantrills Filmnotes, Express, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, LIP, The Virgin Press, Intervention, Arena, Cinema Papers. While not all strictly film journals, publications such as Tension, The Virgin Press and Express, brought together a unique mix of fashion, art, music, film, video, television and politics.

One of the least known of these magazines was Stuff edited by Philip Brophy and we include from it Bill Routt’s (signed as Bill Gent) ‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’ from 10 August 1983. Routt cites Brophy, as well as Adrian Martin, as part of one of the twin poles that he could identify with upon his arrival at La Trobe University’s Media Centre (Melbourne) in the 1970s (the other being early Australian cinema as a research field which had rarely been tilled). Routt is perhaps best known for his work on The Story of the Kelly Gang (1902) and the films of Charles Chauvel while his most challenging, lively and eccentric work – such as ‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’ – is on trashy popular culture stemming from his unique embrace of philosophy, aesthetics and mass entertainment. Brophy’s own ‘Glimpses of the Present’ (reprinted here from Tension, 1985) is another article that comes from this admixture of music, film, fashion, art and is perhaps closer to Routt’s work than anything else included in this volume. Having said that, one might include Ted Colless’ ‘Super 8: The Phenomenon Turns Eventful’, an essay that attends to the Super 8 format’s place in contemporary culture, and is reprinted (in this volume) from the first issue of On the Beach, an ephemeral journal that included writing on a variety of audio-visual formats as well as on art theory, poetry, graphic design and music. Edited by a collective that included Ross Gibson, Lindy Lee, Sam Mele, Mark Thirkell and Mark Titmarsh, On the Beach was a short-lived, but yet signal publication from postmodern Sydney of the early 1980s. Another was Lockjaw, a product of the Zerox Dreamflesh collective that worked in Sydney’s underground in the same period (it was recently republished by Telephone Publishing, with an afterword by Gibson, 2016). Another two essays by Gibson – ‘After Futur◊Fall’ and ‘Yondering’ – republished here from Art & Text (1984 and 1985, respectively) are important articles that follow his landmark ‘Camera Natura’ and extend the sensibility of the ‘small journals’ network to a publication that became one of the longest running and most important sources of art and film criticism in Australia (see in particular issue 34 [1989] that included essays by Polan, Colless and Routt, and also Jodi Brooks, Tom Gunning, Annette Michelson and D. N. Rodowick).

As we wrote in the Introduction to AFTC volume 1, much of the fervour and, in some cases, the funding available through various government agencies for publishing ventures was a mirror to the similar enthusiasm for the films of the Australian Film Revival of the 1970 and 1980s. Sylvia Lawson’s singular contribution to Australian film culture coincided with the early agitation for an Australian government-initiated film industry. Lawson’s ‘Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia’ (from 1979’s Film Reader 4: Point of View: Metahistory of Film edited by Blaine Allen) was a reassessment of the renaissance in Australian feature filmmaking from a historical perspective. Lawson’s ‘Experimentalists 1’ (1972), reprinted here from an early journal, Lumiere, and other pieces – such as her review of film critic John Hinde’s book Other People’s Pictures (1981) – represent her early advocacy for Australian film culture. Within a film historical category Ina Bertrand’s ‘Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker’ from the initial (1974) issue of the reformatted Cinema Papers is the earliest example of this kind of writing from our period of investigation, and a fine example of how Bertrand’s original, empirical research broke ground for film history in this country. Her ‘National Identity/National History/National Film: the Australian Experience’ – from the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (1984), the official journal of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) – is (like King’s ‘Recent Political Documentary’) an instance of early participation in international debates: in Bertrand’s case, investigating the role of national cinema and television in the fashioning of audiences. Stuart Cunningham’s ‘Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade’, from the first issue of Continuum (1987) (the journal borne of the demise of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 1976–85) forms part of this film history category yet is also, as per the case of Cunningham’s later Featuring Australia: The Cinema of Charles Chauvel (1991), one of the few auteurist accounts of an Australian film director.

The attention paid to national cinema by Bertrand and Cunningham is also evident in the work of Sam Rohdie, then a recent émigré from the United Kingdom and United States who contributed ‘A National Cinema’ to Arena (1983). Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s attention to Australian national cinema as an industry, a category overshadowed by much of the textual work undertaken in this period, is represented here in their paper, ‘The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire’ (reprinted from Filmviews, 1983), which led to their important two-volume, The Screening of Australia (1987, 1988) and its (unofficial) third instalment, The Imaginary Industry (1988). Also addressing the notion of national cinema, this time from without, Tom O’Regan’s (aforementioned) ‘Australian Film Making: Its Public Circulation’ anticipates his Australian National Cinema book (1996) and Albert Moran’s ‘Australian Documentary Cinema’ (from Arena, 1983) was an article that divined the institutional basis for this type of filmmaking and led into his book, Projecting Australia: Government film Since 1945 (1991). Similarly, Helen Grace’s ‘The Public Wants Features!: The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s’ (from Filmnews, 1982) considers the state of independent filmmaking in relation to the model of the feature film during the revival.

Any accounting of Australian film culture during this period, as Lesley Stern tells us in her interview in AFTC volume 2, should include the feminist presses and networks, and the influence of second wave feminism, internationally. Stern’s essay, and also those included here by Barbara Creed – ‘Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text’ (LIP, 1982/3) and ‘Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator’ (Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 1983) – are important contributions (the latter prefiguring Creed’s essays in key international journals such as Screen and Camera Obscura). Stern’s earlier ‘Independent Feminist Film-making in Australia’ (also from The Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 1979) anticipates Creed’s work while her ‘Gilda: Images of Women, Notes for Discussion’, written in the mid-1970s and passed around as mimeographed notes, had enormous influence and is published here for the first time. Stern’s ‘Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years’ (Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 1979), about the Australian teen soap opera, is our only piece of television criticism and, as Charlotte Brunsdon tells us in Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dish (1997), is one of the earliest examples of feminist television criticism anywhere in the world (39).

As suggested in AFTC volumes 1 and 2, an important contribution to the burgeoning networks within and beyond Australia, was made by the journal editorials and conference reviews that figured prominently in the period 1975−85. John Tulloch’s editorial for the founding volume of Australian Journal of Screen Theory (1976) sets out the theoretical positions for the journal as it commenced, while R.R.’s (Robert Rothols’) editorial for Filmnews similarly gives some indication of the times. Others pieces – including editorials and interviews, and film, journal and conference reviews by Rolando Caputo, Anna Grieve, Ian Hunter, Brian McFarlane, Adrian Martin, John Nicoll and Sally Stockbridge – provide a broad sense of some of the debates and contexts of the period.

There is more here – King’s ‘Changing the Curriculum’ (from Australian Journal of Cultural Studies), Hunter’s ‘Fetishism in Film Theory and Practice’ (Australian Journal of Screen Theory), Cunningham’s ‘Stock Shock and Schlock’ (Enclitic), and others – but much that is missing, too. This is in part because we have tried to avoid replicating works already reprinted, for instance in Moran and O’Regan’s key anthology, An Australian Film Reader (1985), but also because we have respected the wishes of our contributors, sometimes prioritizing one essay over another, or (at their request) omitting works that we thought essential to the period. It is worth pointing out that Adrian Martin, one of the more significant figures in Australian film studies in this period, is under-represented in part because he is in the process of digitizing all of his writings for a dedicated website and wanted to reserve his articles for this venture.

To conclude – and as Tom O’Regan notes in his Screening the Past review of the first volume of Australian Film Theory and Criticism – this project takes its cue from some reflections on cultural mobility and exchange: ‘not the origin of ideas – here, there, coming in, going out’ but rather ‘the performance of the text on the spot, and how intellectuals work to define their spot in the world, and its relations to other spots’ (Meaghan Morris, quoted in AFTC 1, 21). In this third volume, the vehicles for this mobility and exchange are the small journal essays, the scholarly conferences, the specialist books and the journal circulation networks, but there is also the agility of people – the contributors represented herein – to which we give thanks for their contributions and inspiration.

References

Bertrand, Ina. ‘Francis Birtles – Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker’. Cinema Papers, vol. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 30–35.

——. ‘National Identity/National History/National Film: The Australian Experience’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 4, no. 2, 1984, pp. 179–86.

Brophy, Philip. ‘Glimpses of the Present’. Tension, vol. 8, 1985, pp. 20–23.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dish. Routledge, 1997.

Caputo, Rolando. ‘Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals’. Filmnews, vol. 15, no. 9, Dec. 1985, pp. 9–12.

Colless, Ted. ‘Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful’. On The Beach, vol. 1, 1983, pp. 12–15.

Collins, Felicity. ‘The Australian Journal of Screen Theory’. Framework, vol. 24, Spring 1984, pp. 114–21.

——. ‘Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole’. Filmnews, Nov.–Dec. 1983, pp. 12–13.

Creed, Barbara. ‘Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text’. LIP: A Feminist Arts Journal, vol. 7, 1982–1983, pp. 16–27.

——. ‘Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator’. Australian Journal of Screen Theory, vol. 15/16, 1983, pp. 67–88.

Cunningham Stuart. ‘Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade’. Continuum, vol. 1. no. 1, 1987, pp. 26–46.

——. Featuring Australia: The Cinema of Charles Chauvel. Allen and Unwin, 1991.

——. ‘Stock Shock and Schlock’. Enclitic, vol./no. 5.2/6.1, Fall 1981/Spring 19, pp. 166–71.

Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka. ‘The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire’. Filmnews, vol. 13, no. 6, June 1983, pp. 10–13.

——. The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ’80s. AFTRS, 1988.

——. The Screening of Australia, Volume 1: Anatomy of a Film Industry. Currency, 1987.

——. The Screening of Australia, Volume 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema. Currency, 1988.

Gibson, Ross. ‘After Futur◊Fall’. Art & Text, vol. 16, 1984, pp. 82–92.

——. ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’. On the Beach, vol. 1, 1983, pp. 5–10.

——. ‘Landscape in Australian Feature Films’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 47–51.

——. ‘The Place and Time of Zerox Dreamflesh’. Lockjaw (Reissue). Surpllus and Telephone, 2016, pp. x–xi.

——. ‘Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’. Art & Text, vol. 19, Oct.–Dec. 1985, pp. 25–33.

Gordon, Linda. ‘Union Maids: Working Class Heroines’. Jump Cut, vol. \14, 1977, pp. 34–35.

Grace, Helen. ‘The Public Wants Features! – The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s’. Filmnews, Nov.–Dec. 1982, pp. 6–8.

Grace, Helen, and Erika Addis. ‘Serious Undertakings: Release Script’. Framework, vol. 24, Spring 1984, pp. 128–41.

Grieve, Anna. ‘Film and History: Canberra Conference’. Filmviews, Dec. 1981, pp. 14–15.

Hinde, John. Other People’s Pictures. Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1981.

Hunter, Ian. ‘Corsetway to Heaven’. Cinema Papers, vol. 8, Mar.−Apr. 1976, p. 371.

——. ‘Fetishism in Film Theory and Practice’. Australian Journal of Screen Theory, vol. 5/6, 1979, pp. 48–66.

Kaplan, E. Ann. ‘The Realist Debate in the Feminist Film: An Historical Overview of the Theories of and Strategies in Realism and the Avant-Grade Theory Film (1971−81)’. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. Methuen, 1983, pp. 25–141.

King, Noel. ‘Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English’. Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1983, pp. 47–55.

——. ‘Recent Political Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA’. Screen, vol. 22, no. 2, 1981, pp. 7–18.

King, Noel, and Tim Rowse, ‘Typical Aussies: Television and Popularism in Australia’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 37–42.

King, Noel, and Williams, Deane, editors. Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 2: Interviews. Intellect, 2014.

King, Noel, et al. Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1: Critical Positions. Intellect, 2013.

Lawson, Sylvia. ‘Experimentalists 1’. Lumiere, Nov. 1972, p. 18.

——. ‘Serious Undertakings: Deconstructions, Demolitions’. Framework, vol. 24, Spring 1984, pp. 122–27.

——. ‘Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia.’ Film Reader, vol. 4, 1979, 63–71.

Lesage, Julia. ‘The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film’. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1978, pp. 507–23.

McCormick, Ruth. ‘Union Maids’. Cineaste, vol. 8, no. 1, Summer 1977.

McFarlane, Brian. ‘The Second Australian Film Conference, or A long way from Lana Turner’. Cinema Papers, vol. 31, Mar.−Apr. 1981, pp. 40–41.

McSweeney, Jan. ‘Filmnews’. Framework, vol. 24, Spring 1984, pp. 95–113.

Martin, Adrian. ‘The Australian Journal of Screen Theory’. Cinema Papers, vol. 23, Sept.–Oct. 1979, pp. 573–575.

——. ‘The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary’. Cinema Papers, 31, Mar.–Apr. 1981, pp. 41–101.

Moran, Albert. ‘Australian Documentary Cinema’. Arena, vol. 62, 1983, pp. 83–89.

——. Projecting Australia: Government Film Since 1945. Currency, 1991.

——. ‘A State Capitalist Venture: The Southern Australian Film Corporation’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 43–46.

Moran, Albert and Tom O’Regan, eds. An Australian Film Reader. Currency, 1985.

Morris, Meaghan. ‘Feminist Critique’. Cinema Papers, vol. 7, Nov.–Dec. 1975, pp. 207–09, 286.

——. ‘The Practice of Reviewing’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 52–58.

Nicoll, John. ‘Editorial’. Filmviews, Dec. 1981, p. 3.

O’Regan, Tom. ‘Australian Film Making: Its Public Circulation’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 31–36.

——. Australian National Cinema. Routledge, 1996.

——. ‘On Screen’. Intervention, vol. 15, 1981, pp. 44–62.

——. Review of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1: Critical Positions by Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams, http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/australian-film-theory-and-criticism-volume-1-critical-positions/.

Rohdie, Sam. ‘The Australian State: A National Cinema’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 28–30.

——. ‘A National Cinema: The Role of the State’. Arena, vol. 62, 1983, pp. 78–87.

Rothols, Robert [as R.R.]. ‘Editorial’. Filmviews, Mar. 1980, pp. 2–3.

Routt, Bill [as Bill Gent]. ‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’. Stuff, vol. 10, August 1983, n.pag.

Stern, Lesley. ‘Gilda: Images of Women, Notes for Discussion’. Unpublished [c. 1978].

——. ‘Independent Feminist Film-making in Australia’. Australian Journal of Screen Theory, vol. 5/6, 1979, pp. 105–21.

——. ‘Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years’. Australian Journal of Screen Theory, vol. 4, 1979, pp. 39–48.

Stockbridge, Sally. ‘Second History and Film Conference Report’. Filmviews, Apr. 1984, p. 23.

Tulloch, John. ‘Editorial Article’. [excerpt] Australian Journal of Screen Theory, vol. 1, 1976, pp. 3–5.

Willemen, Paul. ‘Presentation’. Framework, vol. 22/23, Autumn 1983, pp. 26–27.

——. ‘Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts’. Southern Review, July 1983, pp. 292–311.

1972

Lumiere, Nov. 1972, pp. 18–19

Experimentalists 1

Sylvia Lawson

Like the outside of the Sydney Opera House, the Experimental Film Fund is one of those clear reasons for hope that Australia one day will become a civilized country, and plain evidence that it is, in patches, civilized even now.

No doubt too that, like the Opera House, the fund came into being for highly political reasons; at the PR screening of Fund films in Sydney last month, Mr [Peter] Howson [Minister for the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts] left us in no doubt that it is and will continue to be used for political flag-waving. No doubt it has not always been perfectly administered, and that some worthwhile projects have been refused and some less-worthwhile ones accepted.

All that granted, the fund is still one of the best things we have. It embodies our communal recognition that film is something other and more than Love story, that it’s a pervasive, polymorphous, infinitely variegated form of late-twentieth-century expression, which can and should be within the grasp of many.

It carries on, however, under running fire. The attacks are generally of two kinds. The film-trade and the TV execs hate the fund because, they say, it encourages sloppy amateurism, self-indulgent individualism – ‘these longhairs don’t understand that people go to the pictures to be entertained’, and so forth.

Some of the distrib./exhib. men like to point to the more incoherent examples of avant-garde filmmaking and use them as sticks with which to beat local film industry campaigners. These, of course, are slingshots from the camp of the Philistines, but they can’t be ignored; the film-trade men have been known upon occasions to influence politicians and handers-out of grants.

The other sort of perennial criticism has to be taken more seriously. It comes from film industry people, documentary makers and prospective feature makers, who feel that the fund, along with the proposals for the Film School, exists as a convenient – and not really all that expensive – smokescreen for the government’s essential inaction on the question of establishing a viable and continuously functioning film industry.

They are partly right, and Mr Howson, when he stood up in his turn at the Commonwealth Centre theatrette after Peter Coleman had led off, and said his piece like a good schoolboy about how much the government was doing for the film industry, seemed to confirm precisely that argument: that the fund is a piece of tokenism, that it is actually depriving the professionals.

There are two main points to be made against this. The first is that the real tokenism, the real enemy of professional feature-making, is the Film Development Corporation as it is at present constituted, with its implacable policy of rejecting out of hand every project above weird-mob level; and that, of course, is another story.

The second point is that however much the fund may be employed by politicians as a token, it’s the sort of token that squirms embarrassingly alive in their grasp. The great and merciful safeguard is that the filmmaker, once approved for his modest grant, has total control of what he does with it. Thus the fund does enable visual art to come into being. And all art is, on one level or another, subversive.

Which was the whole problem, of course, about choosing from the fund’s 60 odd completed films for the PR screening. What on earth would qualify as nice, pleasant, safe and inoffensive? Very damn little, and we can all be proud of the fact, Aggy Read’s Infinity girl, a segment of Far be it me from it, was listed for screening and knocked out at the last minute, a ludicrous decision – if indeed the problem was one of not offending Howson, Dr Coombs or someone – since of the whole line up, it was probably the only one you could in fact describe as pleasant: a slightly naive montage-lyric centred on topless Julie, a sinuous young boobs-a-lot lady contemplated prettily on the rocks and in the waves.

So they picked films that illustrated poems, or else had verse backing the images: Frank Fletcher’s The blind man, essentially a strip of pictures for Judith Wright’s rather windy and incantatory poem, and John Scheffer’s Drought much more interesting visually, with great Francis-Bacon effects in the distorting mirror images, but marred by a spoken ballad that, though evidently written recently, belonged to the maudlin 90s.

They also picked films with social consciences: Peter Beilby’s Eye to Eye, a modest, tentatively probing observation of autistic children in a training centre environment; it makes an incidental visual poem of their lost eyes and faces, but quite deliberately (or so it seemed to me) avoids any sort of resolving statement. Tony Kovacs’ The Samaritan kind is a bit schematic – young hoods menace a clutch of late-night ferry passengers; the only one with kindness for their victims is the drunk whom everyone avoided – and clumsy here and there in the filming, but it did evoke the mindless violence with nerve-jangling effectiveness.

The other example of narrative on the programme was Michael Robertson’s Rod, co-scripted with Buzo; prosperous young married Couple wake up one northern suburbs morning to view the fragmentation of their earlier hopes and feelings. The colours are often lovely, but it misses, perhaps because Robertson views his people too coldly; they’re not as typical as he seems to think they are, and too well-heeled and out of touch to merit much sympathy. The script is essentially a questioning and probing one, and fails where it neither questions nor probes enough. All this, however, would obviously bear discussion, and the film should be seen more widely.

Two filmers emerged from the session as real image makers – John Scheffer and Victor Kay. Kay’s Magic camera is alternately enchanting and exasperating; double exposed scarlet tinted neg. of cows, beaches, motorbikes, trees in blossom and girls on garden swings can be wild visual magic, when the rhythm of the cutting allows us pause to contemplate the harmonies they offer. When it doesn’t, it’s all pointlessly frenetic, and sometimes Kay lets himself do all over again what the cigarette ad makers have made redundant and clichéd forever. (Neither Kay nor Scheffer match Paul Winkler for originality; Winkler’s Scars, of all recent films enabled by the fund, ought to have been shown. Of his films, and others here unjustly disregarded, I hope to write in another issue.)

The fifteen-minute extract from Su and Jef Doring’s Tidikawa and friends was, beyond all argument, the best thing on Mr Howson’s programme; and in toto the film should be enough to silence the fund’s opponents for life. Researched and directed by the Dorings, splendidly photographed by Michael Edels and Jack Bellamy and edited (down from 20 hours to 80 minutes) with brilliant tact and vigour by Rod Adamson, the film comes out of four months’ living with the Bedamini, one of the least known of New Guinea highland peoples.

Without commentary, except for the introductory passage, the film offers a partial portrait, an exploration of those parts of their lives that the Bedamini allowed the Dorings to see. Young men prepare for initiation; a medium (Tidikawa) waits the attendance of the spirit child from the treetops; a mother weeps, wails and mourns under a tree that holds, on a high platform, the corpse of her baby; inside the long-house, they eat for the baby’s wake.

We come near them with a sort of careful intimacy; close angles of head and shoulder, hands and feet in action, bodies of mothers and children communicate much unselfconscious grace and sensuality; but the Dorings don’t force it, and though we know the houses and trees, and have seen the pigs being slaughtered for the initiation feast, we know the Bedamini only so far, and no further at the end. We know, or guess, also how much goes on out of frame and past the end of the film, and we know all that would be worth seeing too. The film preserves vividness and strangeness together, a great balancing feat of craft and sensibility in one. It should, and will, find a worldwide audience.

Any fund that can help – or indeed bring – this sort of footage into the visible world should be defended to the last ditch (with such defence as includes much constructive criticism). Its limits are wide enough to encompass Tidikawa, and also the work of Albie Thoms; the Scheffer, Kay, Read and Winkler and Cantrill films; not forgetting other diverse growths like Or forever hold your peace, The phallic forest, Brake fluid and The machine gun.

Critics of the enterprise may well feel some alarm that what might at first have looked like a neat little cultural enterprise, a tidy garden, has burgeoned and proliferated so abundantly. Nobody, of course, has to like all the varieties on show. But it should be remembered that the ground where they flourish was, only ten years ago, a desert, where the only hope for the short filmmaker was to con a soft sell doco out of BHP or Caltex.

1974

Cinema Papers, no. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 30–35

Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker

Ina Bertrand

Australians have always shared civilized man’s fascination for the primitive, particularly if it can be enjoyed from the comfortable security of an armchair or a cinema seat. In spite of our reputations for being hard-riding, hard-drinking, individualists, most of us spend, and have done for close to a century, most of our lives in cities or suburbs. Because we can enjoy the far outback only vicariously, we listen spellbound to the real adventurers, explorers and surveyors who have pitted their human weakness against nature and the elements. Francis Birtles was such a man, one of many whose exploits were followed with enthusiasm by the Australian public through newspapers and journals, books and films, in the first quarter of this century.

Francis’ grandparents, James and Jane, and son David, had arrived from Macclesfield, England in the 1870s. David married another Jane and their son Francis was born 7 December 1882 in Melbourne. Francis was educated at South Wandin Primary School, and then took up a life of adventure that included sailing twice round the world before he was 17 years old, becoming an apprentice seaman on a tramp steamer in the Indian Ocean, jumping ship to join the Boer War and acting as a police trooper in Zululand. Though he returned to Australia, the wanderlust was still strong, and he began a series of long-distance push-bike rides, all notable either for their length, speed or difficult route, many of them establishing records.

He took four months to ride from Fremantle to Sydney in early 1907, attempted the Melbourne to Sydney push-bike record in January 1907, travelling Sydney to Sydney via Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne, covering 8300 miles in thirteen months from August 1907, took only 44 days to ride more than 3000 miles from Fremantle to Sydney via Broken Hill in late 1909 and travelling around Australia once more from Sydney between February 1910 and January 1911. Others attempted similar feats in this period: cycling in fact became, with press encouragement, something of a national sport.

Birtles, however, differed from his rivals in one respect: he had developed an interest in still photography while working as a lithographer and on his trips he always carried photographic equipment. He was not the first to take a camera into the outback: that honour probably belongs to Professor Baldwin Spencer, who pioneered ethnographic film in Australia by recording the ceremonies of the Aranda tribe at the turn of the century. But Birtles was the first whose outback adventures were recorded in a commercially popular form.

At first he took only still photos. For instance, on the run from Fremantle to Sydney in 1909 he carried a No. 3A Graflex, made in Sydney by Baker and Rouse, the predecessors of Kodak, and sufficient film for 500 post-card size exposures. The camera was protected inside its copper case by his clean shirt and socks, and the film was stowed in tins with cotton wool packing and sealed with sticking plaster, so that he was able to report how well the camera stood up to the ‘bad spills and jolting’ of the journey (Australian Photo-review, 22 December 1909: 661). From 1910 onwards he carried a developing tank as well, and developed as he went. The results were used to illustrate his first book (Lonely Lands), and various newspaper and journal articles, all of which helped to finance further journeys.¹ The dramatic descriptions that these writings contained, of adventures such as swimming ‘alligator-infested’ tidal streams with his accessories strapped to his back, and the striking photographs of scenes like camel caravans or aboriginal murderers in chains, brought him to the notice of the Gaumont Film Company.

Most film programmes at that time were made up of two or three short features, perhaps half an hour long, and a number of shorter ‘scenics’ (travelogues), ‘industrials’ (films depicting industrial or agricultural processes) and ‘gazettes’ (newsreels). Australian feature films were just beginning; but by 1910 there was a vigorous Australian industry producing shorter films, and local audiences were always eager to see the latest local news on film. Birtles could provide both news and drama, and so the Gaumont Company in 1911 sent a cameraman, Richard Primmer, to accompany Birtles from Sydney to Darwin by bicycle, and to record:

[...] moving pictures or interesting scenes, incidents, studies of native life, habits and customs, kangaroo and crocodile hunting, and in Tact anything or interest [...].

(Australian Photo-review, 22 May 1911: 295)

The resulting film was shown in Sydney in May 1912, and in Melbourne in July. It was 3000 feet long, and the reviews published at the time reveal the attitudes and motives of the filmmakers as well as the content of the film.

Audiences were still delighted to be able to see things previously beyond their experience, things like emus running across the plains, the sugar industry in Queensland, the pearling industry on Thursday Island, the tree on the Flinders River where Burke and Wills carved their initials in January 1862. But already the need to inject spectacle and sensation was recognized, and so the film also contained a ‘thrilling encounter’ between a dog and a seven feet red kangaroo, showed a snake and an iguana exhausted by their long combat, and included a variety of sports enjoyed by the two explorers. Even this was not enough, and so a fight was staged between ‘settlers’ and aborigines. A reviewer noted that ‘the blacks’ were ‘good actors’, who ‘entered into the performance with great zest when they were informed that the fight was a white man’s corroboree’ (Argus 11 July 1912). To engineer such a spectacle would have been anathema to an ethnologist like Spencer, whose purposes were rather more serious than to entertain an audience. Birtles’ work was also different from the Flaherty school of documentary filmmaking, in which, despite an acknowledged intention to produce a commercially acceptable product, the only tampering with the ‘truth’ occurs in the editing (though Flaherty himself departed from this precept in Man of Aran, by re-introducing the characters to a trade long abandoned – trawling). At this stage Birtles probably did not even consider himself as a filmmaker. It was Primmer who was responsible for the filming: for Birtles, the finished product was useful primarily as publicity to encourage sponsors for further trips, and the money won from screening the film was simply useful to keep the pot boiling between journeys.

The promoters of the film set up an essay competition asking children to consider ‘Do pictures educate?’, with special reference to Across Australia with Francis Birtles, and the film ran for ten days to an enthusiastic audience in the Lyceum, ‘crowded to overflowing, both afternoon and evening’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 1912). In Melbourne, West’s presented the film on a programme with a ‘Danish dramatic masterpiece’ called For Another’s Guilt, with the Grand National Steeplechase, Distillation of Orange Flowers, Arthur Chubb and the Widow, some gazettes, and ‘operatic selections, overtures and incidentals by West’s Premier Grand Orchestra’ (Argus, 11 July 1912). But it survived for only a week, from Monday 15 to Saturday 20 July 1912.

This was not the first time that Birtles had appeared before the public on film, for after Primmer left him in Darwin to return to Sydney with the film for editing and preparation, Birtles went on to Broome and Perth and from there completed his most famous push-bike ride: Fremantle to Sydney, 3175 miles in the record time of 31 days and two hours. He arrived in Sydney 1 February 1912, to be greeted by an enthusiastic crowd, and this welcome was filmed by Gaumont and presented as part of a gazette on 3 February 1912.

Birtles subsequently abandoned the bike for a car, his first long-distance run being from Fremantle to Sydney in a 10 h.p. single-cylinder vehicle, accompanied by Mr Sid. Ferguson and a bull-fox terrier pup called ‘Rex’. Though this trip took less than a month, he found cars less reliable than bikes: ‘[...] and with a car it is all worry; with a bike it is all work. Personally, I prefer the work’ (Lone Hand, 1 July 1912, 259).

By June 1912 he had travelled 70,000 miles in six years, seven times across Australia and twice around it, and his exploits were well-known to the majority of Australians through newspaper reports and journal articles, even if few had yet had the opportunity to see him on film, Further car trips in 1912 and 1913 took him from Melbourne to Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide, then to the Gulf country via Birdsville, accompanied by his brother Clive. Unhappily, no movie record was made of these exploits.

In 1914 Birtles was commissioned by Australian Films Ltd to return to the Gulf country to make a documentary film. He chose as his cameraman Frank Hurley, a young man whose film of the Mawson Antarctic expedition, Home of Blizzard, had recently been acclaimed in England and Australia. The two travelled extensively, till a message arrived, dramatically carried in a cleft stick by an aboriginal tracker, inviting Hurley to return at once to join Shackleton in a further Antarctic expedition. Birtles and Hurley hurried back to Sydney, and Hurley embarked within for Buenos Aires to meet Shackleton. It seems unlikely that Hurley had time to develop and edit the film before he left, so perhaps this was Birtles’ introduction to the technical complexities of movie film. In any case, Into Australia’s Unknown reached Australian screens in early 1915, and was widely acclaimed: Dr Gilruth, administrator of the Northern Territory, described it as ‘altogether a remarkable production’ (Argus 18 January 1915). From the advertisements it seems to have been a far more objective documentary than Across Australia, paying far less attention to the exploits of the white adventurers, and offering more film of native customs and the flora and fauna of the area. It ran for two weeks in both Sydney and Melbourne and was released also in Adelaide and Brisbane.

Birtles’ next trip took him back once again to the Gulf country, again by car. This time, however, he had the specific intention of retracing the route of the Burke and Wills expedition of 1862, and reconstructing the story in film. He left Adelaide in March 1915, followed the tracks of the expedition to the depot at Cooper’s Creek, where he found the stockade still standing and filmed the famous tree under which the provisions had been buried: indeed, the inscription ‘DIG’ was still visible. He then continued north, found thirteen of the fifteen marked trees mentioned by King in evidence before the Commission of Enquiry, and followed in the tracks of the expedition right to the mangrove swamps near the coast. Despite serious car trouble, he returned to the area where King had been rescued by aborigines, and took testimony from several who recollected the incident and had cared for King. Since this evidence contradicted some of the statements made by King to the Commission of Enquiry, the papers that reported Birtles’ trip happily revived an old controversy. The expedition had its own sensational moments too. Birtles raced the floodwaters of the Georgina River for 150 miles to reach a ford, only to find the river already more than 50 yards wide at that point. He ran the car back 100 yards and raced at top speed for the water. Stopping the engine and throwing out the clutch just before reaching the flood, he let the car drift. This took him half way across and a boat waiting for him on the other side towed him the rest of the way. He also described how he had if driven with deflated tyres over sandhills during bad dust storms when to stop the engine would have meant that the car would have been buried in ten minutes. Across Australia in the track of Burke and Wills was shown at two Melbourne theatres concurrently over the Christmas and New Year period in 1915–16, with great success. This seems to have been the first film for which Birtles was himself wholly responsible. Further car trips round and across Australia followed in 1917 and 1918, but no film record of these was made.

In 1919 the arrival of Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith in Australia after their historic flight from England was very much in the news. Frank Hurley had flown with them on the last stage from Darwin to Sydney, and his film of this experience reached theatres in the capital cities in mid-1920. Birtles, unlike Hurley, had not travelled with the aviators, but he hit on the idea of covering their route on the ground, and made a film: Through Australian Wilds: Across the track of Ross Smith. It had its premiere in Brisbane in July 1919 and reached Sydney in February and Melbourne in March 1920. It was shown on a programme of films produced by Austral Photoplays Ltd, of which Birtles was now a director. However, though the film was shown for a week in both cities, its reception was less than enthusiastic. The Argus dismissed it without ceremony:

Through Central Australia, by Francis Dirties, was an offering of much interest. A number of aborigines were shown.

(Argus, 15 March 1920)

But Birtles’ reputation as an ‘overlander’ was now good enough for the Commonwealth Government to commission him to survey the proposed overland telegraph route from Adelaide to Darwin, independent of the official government survey party. Roy Fry was his companion. They completed their task and were returning from Darwin with all the records of the trip (including 3000 feet of film) when the car exploded in flames just outside Elsey Station in the Northern Territory. This accident rocketed Birtles to the headlines again. He waited till Fry, seriously injured, had sufficiently recovered to travel, then returned to Melbourne. The car and its contents were not insured, and the Commonwealth government refused to re-fit the party. Undeterred, Birtles arranged to take his first aeroplane flight, in an aerial survey plane to complete the task. Some film was taken during this expedition, but I have been unable to find any reference to its commercial screening: perhaps it was used in gazettes.

The next three years are not well-documented, but in 1924 another film, Australia’s Lonely Lands, appeared in Sydney. It was described as ‘a five-reel thrill’, with the added attraction of Birtles appearing in person twice daily. A reviewer described it as ‘Mr Francis Birtles’ journey of 13,000 miles in a motor car through parts of Australia that are seldom visited by the white man’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 1924).

Another exploit of this period was a dramatic trip from Sydney to Darwin and back. Birtles was accompanied by M. H. Ellis (who described himself as ‘Special Commissioner of a powerful group of Australian newspapers, headed by the Sydney Daily Telegraph, and of the Australian Meat Council’) (M. H. Ellis The Long Lead. London 1927, vi) and J. L. Simpson of Messrs, Bean Cars Ltd. of Dudley, England. There was, unfortunately, no movie record of this trip. On his return, Birtles made preparations for his longest trip yet, by car from England to Australia. He made two starts: on the first he only reached India, but he set out again from London in September 1927 and reached Australia in July 1928. Though his progress was reported in great detail, a disappointingly small reception was accorded to him on his arrival in Sydney.

Birtles’ last film, Coorab in the Island of Ghosts, was released in Melbourne in June 1929, and soon after this he returned once more to north Queensland. He had frequently expressed a belief in the mineral potential of Arnhem Land, but when he finally found gold there he had difficulty in obtaining financial backing. He managed to get capital for an expedition in 1933, and left Sydney with six men and plenty of equipment. After disappointments both at the mine and the Stock Exchange, Birtles ‘went bush’ on his own: the mine was suddenly successful and the news reached him by letter dropped by a search plane, in 1935 he married, and was able to give his wife as a wedding present no less than a gold mine. And so, in 1935, he could conclude his autobiography with muted grandeur:

And that is my story. Like most yarns it has a postscript. I am now enjoying being a man of means and leisure. I’ve got some of the things I’ve always wanted – the sort of things a man of my taste dreams of owning when he hasn’t got a cracker... and all the while I’m planning to go back.

(Francis Birtles, Battlefronts of Outback, Sydney, 1935: 286–7)

He did go back, repeatedly, on caravan trips with his wife. But his health deteriorated, and he died in July 1941, aged 58. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote of him:

Mr Birtles’ work was of inestimable value to Australia. He journeyed across the continent by cycle, car and aeroplane, gathering important information and recording many exciting events. He claimed to have travelled 500,000 miles overland and to have crossed Australia 88 times, He pioneered the England–Australia car route through Europe and Singapore in 1927, and as far back as 1912 undertook journeys that led to the opening or motor-roads between Fremantle and Sydney and Adelaide and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

(Sydney Morning Herald, 2 July 1941)

All this is true, and undoubtedly reflects the achievements that Birtles himself valued, since he saw himself as an adventurer and explorer above all else. But it overlooks his considerable contribution to the history of Australian filmmaking. Two feature films were made of him and a further four by him, and they pioneered a genre that has survived in almost the same form to the present day (see comments on the genre by Dave Jones, Lumiere, April 1973, 9).

The most recent cycle began with Keith Adams’ Northern Safari and the Leyland Brothers’ Wheels Across the Wilderness in 1967, but these followed in a direct line from Charles Mountford, Frank Hurley, and other less well-known producers back to Birtles himself. Characteristically, such films have been produced independently and record the adventures of their makers in distant and dangerous parts of Australia. Frequently, the filmmakers have been responsible themselves for the promotion of their films, even to the hiring of halls and projection of the film personally, getting to an audience being all that mattered. Men like Hurley and the Leylands, for whom the film was at least as important as the adventure, later moved closer to the commercial cinema. But others, like Birtles, saw the film always as secondary to the adventure, a tool to make further adventures possible. Money for the adventures was rounded up from sponsors: Harrington’s photographic supplies began this by equipping Birtles and commissioning articles for his 1907 cycle trip around Australia, and Dunlop Tyres and Shell Oil backed his last big venture from London to Melbourne. At the same time the films themselves were good publicity, keeping Birtles’ name before the public and thereby making further sponsorship more likely.

The films, with one exception, seem to have disappeared without trace. Birtles Across Australia probably returned to England when the Gaumont Company closed its Sydney offices at the outbreak of World War I. Into Australia’s Unknown belonged to Frank Hurley, and perhaps may yet turn up in a private collection. Of Birtles’ own films, the three travelogues have completely vanished. Some years ago, Coorab in the Island of Ghosts was discovered in a garage and donated to the National Library in Canberra, where it can still be seen. It is a very interesting picture, both for its content and for the problems that it raises in research concerning Birtles.

For it is impossible to reconstruct the story of the making of this film from available evidence. The best I can do is to present a hypothesis, consistent with the known facts, but not necessarily true because there are so few facts to go on.

The sheer weight of Birtles’ achievements had created problems for him. The opening up of the continent, to which he had contributed in no small measure, had proceeded so far that his exploits appeared less and less extraordinary: stories of running out of petrol, becoming delirious with thirst in waterless wastes, having to make impromptu repairs to carry on to the next outposts of civilization, encountering snakes and crocodiles and buffalo and spiders and ants, all recur with increasing familiarity in his articles and diaries. The cool reception accorded in 1924 to Australia’s Lonely Lands suggests that the public were no longer so responsive to the old formula. Frank Hurley had also discovered this: his Pearls and Savages (1921) was well received in Australia but less successful in United States because of its lack of storyline and sex interest, which tempted him to add story to his next two films, Hound of the Deep (1926) and Jungle Woman (1926). Birtles may have decided, too, that his next film should have a plot, or this may have been suggested to him by the Southern Cross Co., which originally backed Coorab. But if the film was to be fiction there was no need to make a special trip to film it, when Birtles already had what must have been the best collection of stock footage of outback Australia in existence. If Coorab was in fact composed largely of extracts from earlier films this would explain:

(i) The disappearance of the earlier films. There are countless other ways these films could have disappeared, but this is at least a possible explanation. Descriptions of scenes in earlier films could well apply to scenes from Coorab: for instance a crocodile hunt and a native tree burial were shown in Into Australia’s Unknown, a corroborree appeared in Birtles Across Australia, Into Australia’s Unknown and In the Track of Burke and Wills, and all the films contained shots of native animals like those which are used in Coorab to illustrate the totems.

(ii) The lack of documentation of any trip that was explicitly planned round the making of Coorab. Some sources speak of it being filmed in 1926, but as Southern Cross Productions folded up in 1923 this would not be possible. There are gaps in the story of Birtles’ life when such a trip could have been made, but it is unlikely that it would go unrecorded if a film had been made during it. Written descriptions of scenes from the film occur in two sources: in a series of articles published in Sea, Land and Air in 1922, and in Birtles’ autobiography published in 1935. In both cases mention is made of living on Cape York Peninsula, which was the setting for Coorab, with a native ‘boy’ called Moses and a dog named Dinkum, and internal clues suggest that these two references apply to the same trip, at some time during the years 1916–20. Some scenes and incidents described in these sources fit perfectly with scenes and incidents from Coorab. One instance of this is the initiation ceremony:

The young men were being subjected to endurance tests to prove their fitness or otherwise for the status of manhood, among which was starvation. They had been required to spend a day and a night, without protection in a mosquito-infested swamp, leaving it at moonrise in the evening; they had been forced to lie all day, naked, in the blazing sun. To increase their torment their heads had been swaddled in soft paper-bark. While they lay there, coolamons of stinging insects had been poured on their sweating bodies. They were forbidden, to cry out or exhibit any sign of suffering.

(Battlefronts of Outback, 164)

(iii) The extreme variation in picture quality that is quite distracting at times and gives the impression of poor editing or the use of all different kinds of stock and/or film shot at different times. Of course technical difficulties of filmmaking in conditions like these were enormous. The film had to be developed immediately to prevent heat damage, so it was washed at night on the edge of a river by the light of a carbide lap when the surface was in danger of being eaten by ‘shrimps’. Taking film at night was