Reel Men: Australian Masculinity in the Movies 1949-1962

By Chelsea Barnett

Set against the shifting social and political backdrop of a nation throwing off the shackles of one war yet faced with the instability of the new world order, Reel Men probes the concept of 1950s masculinity itself, asking what it meant to be an Australian man at this time. Offering a compelling exploration of the Australian fifties, the book challenges the common belief that the fifties was a ‘dead’ era for Australian filmmaking.

Reel Men engages with fourteen Australian feature films made and released between 1949 and 1962, and examines the multiple masculinities in circulation at this time. Dealing with beloved Australian films like Jedda (1955), Smiley (1956), and The Shiralee (1957), and national icons of the silver screen including Chips Rafferty, Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, and Peter Finch, Reel Men delves into our cultural past to dismantle powerful assumptions about film, the fifties, and masculinity in Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522872484

Book preview

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Introduction

In the 1957 film The Shiralee, Jim ‘Mac’ Macauley is locked in a battle with his estranged wife Marge over custody of Buster, their young daughter. The division between husband and wife is fierce and bitter, and their mutual hostility plays out as each fights to keep Buster in their care. For months, Buster has accompanied her swagman father on his travels around Australia, looking for work to finance his movements from one small country town to the next. Mac wishes to retain care of Buster, and Marge wants to take the girl back to Sydney, yet both are primarily motivated by spite towards the other. Although separated for much of the film, the pair are briefly reunited and, in the midst of flinging cruel barbs between them, Marge says something to her husband that particularly stings. ‘You think the life you lead’s fit for a kid?’ she spits with contempt. ‘You make me sick. It’s a dog’s life, even the kid herself would tell you.’ Mac startles; Marge has struck a nerve, her reproof clearly hitting at a deep-seated fear.

While the conflict between Mac and Marge unfolds throughout The Shiralee, this scene is particularly revealing. Mac is so affected by Marge’s words because she makes a good point—the swagman’s life, lived on the open road and with no permanent address, is a far cry from the contemporary Australian suburban frontier that was politically, socially and culturally advocated as the best and most suitable place in which to raise a child. Yet the film makes clear that Mac, like the other nomadic swaggies of his ilk, feels ill at ease in Australia’s cities and suburbs. And so Mac is caught between expectations of what it meant to be a swagman and what it meant to be a ‘proper’ father in the Australian fifties: he cannot keep Buster with him on the road, and he does not wish to live with her somewhere in the nation’s suburbs, yet he is unwilling to relinquish custody of his daughter to his estranged wife. What, then, is Mac going to do? The Shiralee is an interesting example of Australian cultural life in the fifties precisely because it represents Mac as being caught in a situation without a clear-cut solution. By extension, the film suggests that there was, in fact, no solution to the tension between these two models of masculinity: the single swagman and the suburban father.

Reel Men is primarily interested in the sorts of cultural tensions around masculinity that films like The Shiralee acknowledged. Of course, not all films in the Australian postwar cultural landscape reached the same unresolved conclusion as The Shiralee. Yet in arriving at a narrative conclusion—or in attempting to—these films were not just negotiating between different, and competing, understandings of masculinity, but were saying something about an imagined Australian manhood. And indeed, what emerges in Reel Men is a sense of contradiction: a sense of unanswered and even unanswerable questions, and a sense of uncertainty about what it meant to be an Australian man in the fifties.

This cultural confusion sat at odds with the specific set of ideas about Australian manhood that were articulated and mobilised in the aftermath of World War II. Faced with the problem of postwar social unrest and instability, institutionalised repatriation schemes were explicitly gendered in their vision for a stable and settled postwar nation. Women who had taken up paid wartime work were expected to step back into the home, making space for returned servicemen to ‘rightfully’ assume their roles as husbands and fathers and, most importantly, as breadwinners.¹ Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto correctly observe that this idealised social stability was the ‘imagined solution to the instabilities of the period’.² But despite these social duties, men’s satisfaction with the breadwinner role was far from universal. Currents of discontent permeated the social world. The burgeoning postwar consumer society may have enabled women to claim economic agency and autonomy, yet men’s resentment built as wives usurped their husband’s wages.³ The pressure of holding sustained employment could be insurmountable for working-class men, and the prospect of being without work, unable to financially support the family, could lead to suicide.⁴ Clearly, while a work-based masculinity functioned as the key to postwar recovery and social steadiness, men in this period jostled against the responsibilities of the male breadwinner role. That Australian men did not easily or neatly live their lives in accordance with these ideals reveals something of the social dissonance of the fifties, yet this revelation rests upon a general assumption that the cultural production of gendered meanings was a stable and uncontested project. Looking to dismantle such an assumption, Reel Men is instead concerned with the instabilities and contestations that imbued the cultural landscape of the Australian fifties.

Such confusions and tensions produce the first of three arguments that this book makes. Contrary to the ideal of a singular, breadwinner masculinity, multiple understandings of masculinity were produced and legitimated by the multiple and conflicting political, social and cultural forces in the Australian fifties. What’s more, detailed discussions of these individual films reveal that these masculinities were in contest, competing for legitimacy within the confines of a respective film. Such contestation forced films to legitimate one model of masculinity over the other within their narrative confines. Yet this was a difficult choice. Some films managed to mark one model as legitimate, while others left the choice unresolved and, in some cases, rendered the choice unresolvable. This tension was amplified across the archive of films from this period. The collection of Australian films from the fifties did not produce one ‘ideal’ understanding of masculinity for Australian men to adhere to and embody, but instead produced a contest over legitimacy. While the unsteadiness of the contemporary cultural landscape produced historically contingent masculinities that were often contradictory, films actively negotiated between them. Yet ultimately the cinematic, cultural landscape of the fifties functioned as a site of contestation over the representation of legitimated, hegemonic masculinities.

My focus on masculinity situates this book within a rich and ever-growing field of gender history. Instrumental to the emergence of this field have been the efforts of historians to shed light on and bring attention to the lives, actions and experiences of women. That many of these histories have been written in contexts like the fifties, which are popularly believed to have been a time of stifling oppression and conformity, brings nuance to our understandings not just of women, but also our sense of time and place. Feminist historians in Australia have worked hard to uncover and write more nuanced histories of women in the fifties that challenge the dominance and homogeneity of the ‘oppressed housewife’ narrative.⁵ As this project has unfolded, historians have also acknowledged the need not just to bring women into the historical record through their lives, but indeed to interrogate the historically contingent gendered meanings through which subjects and their experiences are produced. This is not restricted to the study of women. Forty years ago, Natalie Zemon Davis encouraged the historical study of men as men, arguing that the historian’s goal should be ‘to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past’.⁶ The discipline has since rightly moved on from the assumption that men are neutral subjects who function outside of gender’s influence, and Australian historians have been some of the most enthusiastic to have heeded Davis’s call. Marilyn Lake’s 1986 insistence that ‘[i]t is time that we started treating men, historically, as men, socialised into masculinity … and pursuing their masculinist interests’ continues to loom over Australian gender history—and with it, of course, the study of Australian masculinity.⁷ Reel Men thus joins a vibrant and continually developing collection of scholarship invested in historicising masculinity, and in drawing attention to the ways in which contingent meanings of masculinity emerge and gain legitimacy—that is, in destabilising the masculine as the norm.

Although Davis was looking to masculinity in the 1970s, it was the cultural and linguistic turns of the 1980s and 1990s that chiefly prompted historians to interrogate gendered meanings and categories, and which continue to shape the work of gender and cultural historians today. Writing in 1986, feminist historian Joan Scott invited scholars to employ gender as a category of historical analysis: to not just ‘examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed’, but also to ‘look for the ways in which the concept of gender legitimizes and constructs social relationships’. Such an approach, continued Scott, would reveal ‘the reciprocal nature of gender and society and … the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics’.⁸ Scott’s approach continues to offer promising and productive avenues for historical research, and it is her theoretical lead that Reel Men consciously and deliberately follows. This requires not just understanding what ‘masculinity’ might have meant in this Australian postwar context, but also tracing how these meanings are articulated in avenues and relations of power that are seemingly not about gender at all. An examination of the ways gendered meanings, specifically of masculinity, have particular implications in and across various terrains thus means that ‘poetics [can] help us understand politics’.⁹

Studies of masculinity must pay heed to Raewyn Connell’s groundbreaking sociological work from the 1980s. Connell not only argued that we should replace the concept of a singular masculinity with masculinities, but also distinguished between these multiple masculinities, identifying them as hegemonic, subordinate and complicit. While acknowledging these different gendered types, I am most interested in what constitutes hegemonic masculinity in the Australian films of the fifties. For Connell, hegemonic masculinity is that model that is ‘culturally exalted’ and has a ‘successful claim to authority’.¹⁰ More specifically, this singular model of hegemonic masculinity is positioned atop a hierarchy that not only guarantees the dominance of men and the subordination of women, but also has dominance over other, subordinate masculinities as well. Yet Reel Men explores the tensions that emerge and unfold when multiple masculinities are in contest for legitimacy—that is, for hegemony. While recognising the significance of Connell’s work to the field, this book simultaneously argues that this hegemony was not constituted by just one model of masculinity in the cultural world of the fifties; therefore, the contestation between masculinities was a struggle for hegemony.

Reel Men is set against a period of change and uncertainty, though many today consider the fifties are characterised by the reverse. In 1997, John Murphy and Judith Smart argued that ‘the fifties’ functioned predominantly in metaphorical terms: mere shorthand that referenced a past that was ‘static, complacent and monocultural’ or ‘prosperous, unified and satisfyingly middle class’, depending on one’s political leanings.¹¹ Some twenty years later, these associations remain.¹² The second argument of this book thus unfolds in relation to these lingering and still-powerful ideas. Reel Men argues that this was a period in flux. Understandings of masculinity were being reconfigured and reshaped by political, social and cultural forces both specific to the Australian postwar context and which carried particular implications given the nation-building project underway in the early Cold War years. Contrary to assumptions of cultural rigidity, these contradictory forces produced an era of cultural contestation.

This book contains an analysis of fourteen Australian feature films, each released between 1949 and 1962. These years reflect the beginning and ending of the fifties as an historical period. Studies of historical periods acknowledge that they do not always fit easily or conveniently within the confines of chronological decades, and so Reel Men makes a distinction between the 1950s as a decade and ‘the fifties’ as an historical period; the analytical work of the book is bound to the latter.¹³ We begin in 1949, the year of Robert Menzies’ election victory and the beginning of his second term as prime minister. It is true that Menzies’ election victory came in the last month of 1949. There was over the course of that year, however, a broader shift in the Australian political, social and cultural milieu that marked a distinction from the past.

Menzies’ ascension to the prime ministership indicated a broader desire of the Australian people to distance themselves from the Labor party governance that was shaped by World War II and its legacies in the immediate postwar years. Labor prime minister Ben Chifley’s postwar leadership was marked by attempts to maintain measures of wartime governmental control. Although he promised that from the postwar period would emerge ‘new worlds’, Chifley’s desires to maintain food and petrol rationing to assist a war-weakened Britain sat uneasily with a nation ready to move on from the restrictions and shortages of the war.¹⁴ His efforts to nationalise the banking system in 1947 led to a series of legal challenges that would keep the matter in the courts two years later which, along with the Coal Strike of June 1949, led to suspicions and accusations of the government’s socialist leanings. These events were also uncomfortably close to the 1949 election for Chifley. Menzies capitalised on the tension between the government and its constituency and mounted his election campaign on a platform opposed to rationing, nationalisation and Labor’s ostensible weaknesses regarding communism. That Menzies emerged victorious indicates something of the nation’s desire to move into a period of postwar modernity, no longer burdened by the restrictions and fears of World War II.

When thinking about the fifties as an historical period, we must also consider carefully Menzies’ place in it. Menzies famously lauded those he deemed the ‘forgotten people’—the middle class, at danger of being ‘ground between’ the powerful upper class and the protected working class.¹⁵ Given the longevity of Menzies’ prime ministership, we might be tempted to conflate Menzies with the fifties and the middle class, treating them as one and the same. Yet it is important to separate them. I do not wish to position Menzies as a homogeneous representation of Australian life, culture and values in the fifties. Rather, Menzies’ 1949 election victory functioned as an intervention that offered new and different ways to think about national and personal identities. The middle class as a social collective certainly flourished in the postwar years, but its cultural prosperity in this moment signalled a shift from older national narratives that centred working-class ideals, values and gendered ideals. On the contrary, Menzies was an explicit and proud advocate for the ‘salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on’.¹⁶ These were the people who he represented in parliament, and by placing them at the centre of his specific national—and gendered—vision, Menzies offered something other than the continued legitimation of the working-class man as the ‘true’ Australian masculine ideal. And as we shall see, the celebration of the middle class acquired specific national meaning in the broader context of the Cold War. Yet while Menzies’ intervention into Australian cultural life worked to produce and legitimate a model of masculinity separate from an historically lauded working-class model, it should not be reduced to Menzies himself. There is a distinction observed in this book between ‘Menziean masculinity’, used to refer to the understanding of masculinity this middle-class sensibility legitimated, and the man Menzies, as an individual subject who embodied this model of masculinity. Approaching Menzies as an intervention into Australian cultural life rather than understanding him as a mere reflection of contemporary culture signals the transformations underway in this period.

Also contributing to the beginning of the fifties was the emergence of Cold War anxieties that dominated the contemporary Australian cultural terrain. In America, lingering concerns relating to World War II and its aftermath meant that Hollywood was making war films well into the 1950s—the 1958 film China Doll, from prolific director Frank Borzage, was released twelve years after the 1946 Academy Award-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives, for instance. This was not the case in Australia. Rather, only two films were released post-World War II that represented the nation in wartime. These were A Son is Born (1946) and Always Another Dawn (1947), and both came well ahead of Menzies’ second prime ministerial stint. I do not wish to suggest that the effects of World War II ceased when Menzies came back to office; as we shall see, many political, social and economic developments of the fifties had their roots in the 1940s and earlier. But that the films of the fifties were engaged with Cold War anxieties instead suggests that contemporary Australian culture was shaped more by the Cold War than the preceding conflict.

The cultural dominance of Cold War anxieties also leads us to consider the gendered meaning of the conflict. Marilyn Lake correctly reminds us that war ‘is a gendering activity’, but we need also remember that war is a gendered activity too.¹⁷ The political theorist Iris Marion Young has argued that nation-states engaged in warfare produce a rhetoric of masculinist protection. She writes that within this logic, ‘the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience’.¹⁸ Young’s argument is worth considering in light of the Menziean gender order, which adhered to stringent expectations of both masculinity and femininity, locating the former in the public sphere and the latter in the private. Understanding the Menziean gender order, both in the context of the Cold War and being shaped by Cold War masculinism, further connects the beginning of the fifties with Menzies’ election victory and the contemporary cultural landscape with these Cold War anxieties.

This study ends in 1962, at the end of ‘the long fifties’. The end of Menzies’ prime ministership in 1966 might seem a more obvious place to conclude, and others have argued that the long fifties only drew to a close when the prime minister finally stepped down some seventeen years after his return to office. The commentator Donald Horne, for instance, noted that the sixties arrived when Menzies resigned in January 1966, ushering in much-needed political change.¹⁹ Yet we miss many of the changing political and social attitudes if we link the end of the fifties to the end of Menzies’ time in office. In the United States, the sixties are said to have come with the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1963; it says much about Kennedy’s influence on the Western world, and the influence of the United States more broadly, that this moment also marked the onset of the sixties outside of America. For the historian Raymond Evans, Kennedy’s death brought on the sixties, ‘a new era in all manner of unexpected ways’.²⁰ Yet Reel Men ends one year earlier—the last Australian film made and released before a four-year lull was in 1962. The production strand of the Australian film industry became active again with the 1966 release of They’re a Weird Mob.

The third argument is for the value of Australian film from the fifties. The dominant narrative in Australian film historiography contends that the fifties were a lifeless period for domestic film production. Contrary to this claim, however, I argue that the fifties were both an active period for Australian film production, and that film was a crucial constituent of a dynamic cultural landscape that was actively engaged in the production, representation and circulation of gendered meaning. This approach to Australian postwar film production opens in chapter 1; it offers a glance back at the Australian film production industry over nearly five decades, as well as engaging with extant, relevant scholarship. A detailed historiographical discussion can run the risk of alienating one’s audience, yet understanding the ways other historians and scholars of Australian film have represented the industry in the fifties is essential, for it clarifies the ways in which Reel Men departs from an oft-repeated narrative about the supposed death of postwar Australian cinema.

The activity of the postwar film production industry is demonstrated throughout the rest of the book. Reel Men is made up of six chapters, the final five of which explore in turn how understandings of masculinity functioned in selected films along specific thematic lines. Chapter 2 uses the films Sons of Matthew (1949), The Shiralee (1957) and The Kangaroo Kid (1950) to explore meanings of national identity in the fifties. Beliefs about Menzies’ blind loyalty to the monarchy remain powerful, and further perpetuate the image of the fifties as a conservative, monocultural era. Yet the chapter departs from this dominant line of thinking, arguing instead that contemporary ideas about nation, identity and masculinity coalesced around three competing influences. Loyalty to the British motherland continued to hold sway in the fifties, but the emergence of the United States as an increasingly important ally and cultural influence produced shifting national ties. Lest we think that postwar nationalist ideas revolved solely around and between these twin pillars of influence, the chapter also introduces the radical nationalist intellectual movement of the 1940s and 1950s, which advocated for an individual and identifiably Australian national identity and model of masculinity.

Through the films Smiley (1956), King of the Coral Sea (1954) and The Back of Beyond (1954), chapter 3 interrogates the place of work in the postwar period, arguing that the representation of work, working and masculinity both constituted and was constitutive of broader national meanings and goals. Dealing with the intricacies of class distinctions as they functioned in the fifties, this chapter argues that each of the three films, in different ways, legitimated models of masculinity that relished the importance of work, innovation and modernity: values connected to Menzies’ idealised vision of postwar Australia and postwar masculinity.

Chapter 4 explores the representation of racial identities in the fifties through the films Mike and Stefani (1952), Bitter Springs (1950) and Jedda (1955), and argues that the contemporary cultural landscape predominantly imagined and configured Australia as a white nation. Mike and Stefani’s exploration of the plight of postwar immigrants reveals that those who arrived in Australia in the waves of immigration could adhere to an understanding of acceptably Australian, white masculinity, given they were accepted as migrants on the basis of their existing whiteness. They would, then, not disturb the function and cultural legitimacy of whiteness in the fifties. It was a different matter for Australia’s Indigenous people. Despite the representation of land rights and child removal in Bitter Springs and Jedda respectively, each film represented assimilation as a strategy of elimination that set out to legitimate white models of masculinity, and the ostensibly inevitable removal of Indigenous masculinity and populations, in order to secure the white cultural foundations of the Australian nation.

The final chapters of Reel Men demonstrate that the domestic ideals of the fifties, mobilised through the family and heterosexual marriage, operated as sites of Cold War anxieties and as battlegrounds of meaning. Chapter 5 examines the idea of the family and the male ‘roles’ of father and breadwinner—images almost synonymous with the fifties in popular imaginings of the era. Returning to The Shiralee, alongside analyses of the films Wherever She Goes (1951) and The Sundowners (1960), this chapter explores the tensions that circulated around and through the role of the father. These films offered representations of the idealised, devoted middle-class father, who was legitimated as well by the expert parenting movement that emerged and gained popularity in the aftermath of World War II. But this model of fatherhood was complicated by the films’ representations of fathers’ desire to rid themselves of family responsibilities. Each of the films attempted to resolve this tension, with varying degrees of success.

Chapter 6 moves from the family to the marriage, engaging with contemporary understandings of sexuality. Discussions in this chapter of Three in One (1957), On the Beach (1959) and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959) focus on the understanding of male homosociality through the representation of mateship—a crucial proponent of radical nationalist masculinity. This chapter considers the normalisation of heterosexuality in the context of the Cold War, arguing that the representations of masculinity and male homosocial bonds in these three films trouble expectations and assumptions of heterosexuality, as well as the legitimacy of mateship, and ultimately contest the assumed stability of the postwar heterosexual norm.

Flicking between radio stations while driving home late one night, I caught the back end of a commercial for a station’s pop culture program. It was important to talk and think about films and books, music and television, the advert claimed, because the material we consume reveals something about who we are. This is true—and yet there is more to this thought. Such material not only reveals something of who we are, but produces who we are as well. Moreover, this material also produces and shapes our communities, our institutions, our national and transnational connections, and our personal and collective identities. In short, cultural texts help produce and shape the meanings by which we live our lives and understand the world, as much as they are also shaped by those meanings. Thinking critically about how cultural texts constitute meaning, then, is not only far from a trivial pursuit, but is also a crucial exercise in the project of understanding where we have come from, and where we might go. To this project, I hope that Reel Men can make a meaningful contribution.

Notes

1Stephen Garton, ‘Return Home: War, Masculinity and Repatriation’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1995, pp. 197–201; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 201.

2Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Cambridge History of Australia Volume 2: The Commonwealth of Australia , Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2013, p. 320.

3Michelle Arrow, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia