The AIS team is heading off to Canberra in a fortnight. The National Museum of Australia is convening an interdisciplinary conference addressing Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and we’re all presenting papers. Films like Australia can be easy targets for academics and I hope I can temper my discussion with some acknowledgement of where the film suceeds.
The expansiveness of Luhrmann's vision of Australia and his understanding of a mass-viewing audience goes without saying. However Australia aspires to be more than popular entertainment and accordingly warrants consideration and critique. Though set in the 1940s, in northern Australia, the film invites the Australian viewer to interpret it in a larger framework, resonant with contemporary Aboriginal-Settler concerns. From this perspective we are obliged to note some of the film’s shortcomings. For instance, the issue of sovereignty is never addressed and Lady Sarah Ashley’s tenure of Faraway Downs is unproblematised.
In my conference paper I will address another major shortcoming - the manner in which it attempts to resolve the ‘half-caste problem’ as embodied in the figure of Nullah. At the conclusion of the film Nullah goes off with his ‘full-blood’ grandfather to be initiated and to become not only a proper Aboriginal but also a human being. Underlying this is the racialist belief that the ‘half-caste’ is a being, in a sense, without a caste. This 'romantic pessimism' is still present in some popular conceptions of the relation between Aboriginals and traditional culture.
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