Guest blog: Odette Kelada
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Reviewed: An interdisciplinary conference on history, film and popular culture, 7 Dec – 8 Dec.
Thoughts on returning from a conference on the film ‘Australia’ by Baz Luhrmann - Two days to pour in detail over the sprawling colourful ‘epic’ that attempts to meld a ‘Gone with The Wind’ romantic exuberance with a larrikanesque knock about aussie adventure tale. I embarked with the AIS team to Canberra rather unsure of what might await and with a few questions in mind. I’m no big fan of the film as I read it as a highly troubling and current day colonial fantasy, but was there a chance that all the brilliant minds at this forum may persuade me otherwise? Could it be that in the mire of critical race reading, I had lost the ability to enjoy a generous entertainment spectacle when it came bounding in all its red dust kangaroo embossed technicolor glory? And was that catchy slogan – something about going walkabout to find oneself, really capitalist white tourist induced appropriation or eerily insightful observation on the modern day concrete oppressed office worker?
Standout keynote speech by Prof. Meaghan Morris launched the conference with a wonderful nuanced reading of the complexities in the responses to this film, an original take on cliché and a great description of Nullah’s magic weaving gestures as ‘oogabooga’ that looked more kungfu claw (taught by the cook perhaps) than anything identifiably Indigenous . Morris’s observations traveled with me over the next two days as I listened to various presentations and attempted to emulate the spirit of openness and dialogue fitting such an auspicious start. In the first session, Ann Genovese gave one of the most interesting papers from a cross-disciplinary perspective, as she connected the film’s narrative around the Stolen Generation with legal cases brought by Indigenous litigants fighting for recognition of the illegality of their removal. Her paper offered a fascinating reflection on myths in law and how these sit alongside the mythmaking around the story of Nullah in the film. Philip Morrissey in his thoughtful presentation on the film offered much to ponder but it was his shocking and yet uncannily persuasive suggestion that given Nullah’s propensity to pop up in inappropriate places (including the bedroom), interrupting any ‘wrong side’ business that was afoot, and his strange long haired allure as he ‘sings’ Lady Ashley, that Nullah was possibly going to come back and marry Lady Ashley, which drew an illicit gasp from the audience. ‘Australia’ as Oedipal fantasy certainly broadened the implications of the film’s narrative arc. Johanna Simmons, project coordinator of AIS, gave a compelling insight into the spectacularistion of history that has been repressed, drawing attention to Luhrmann’s representations of the Stolen Generation and the Darwin Bombing as two such histories. Simmons sophisticated exploration of how the film may be read as an attempt to counter this repression and the effect of melodrama as genre on this endeavor, was enhanced by the presentation of images illustrating various cinematic devices employed by Luhrmann. The visual impact of seeing the poster for ‘Australia’ juxtaposed with the poster for the American film ‘Pearl Harbor’ left little doubt that in the almost identical imagery, Luhrmann was reaching self-consciously beyond intertextual referencing to overt mimicry. ‘Redeeming Aboriginal masculinity’ by Shino Konisho was another paper that stood out as she gave a unique reading of the film, opposing Germaine Greer’s condemnation of King George as ‘a tasteless joke’ by suggesting that he was on the contrary, a positive example of paternal love. The range of presentations varied in substance and clarity over the duration of the conference but overall most had something of interest to say, be it on landscape, aural semiotics or international reception.
Apparently the enthusiasm by academics to attend a conference on ‘Australia’ outweighed the expectations of the conference conveners, Konisho and Maria Nugent, who did an excellent job of providing a cohesive program from the many threads. Indeed by the end, rather than assuaging the appetite for this film, the participants appeared well able to continue the discussion ad infinitum. After the two days, while I found myself adhering to my initial concerns and sense of disturbance, there’s certainly a great deal more to the film than I had appreciated. There’s no doubt from all the multi-disciplinary approaches that Luhrmann created a fertile landscape for debate, controversy and analysis on diverse fronts. Witnessing some of the fervent affection by a number of participants for the film, I swayed between a sense of oversaturation with all things ‘Australia’ and starting to wish that I too had been able to be swept away with the Drover and the Wizard of Oz, to some far far away place. But no, we were still in Canberra, the locus of many a flawed fantasy, and soon to be in the airport lounge.
