Felicity Collins and Therese Davis,
Australian Cinema after Mabo.
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
ISBN 0 521 54256 1
204pp
AU$39.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press)

The power of cinema lies not only in what it makes us see but also in what it encourages us to think of. This involves not just a question of making us think – as if we could ever not do that – but much more importantly, the question of where it takes us in thought and what it brings to thought. Felicity Collins’ and Therese Davis’ new book, Australian Cinema after Mabo groups together a specific selection of films made since the mid 1990s and through them, enriches our understanding of the immensity of the cultural changes to which we are witnesses (though, in the shock of the present, we may not even know what we are seeing or experiencing).

The book deals with three key issues: firstly the commercial and cultural responses to the post-Mabo “history wars” which are observable in Australian cinema; secondly the experience of what the authors identify as the “aftershock” of the 1992 Mabo High Court decision and the impact this has had on the landscape tradition of Australian cinema and thirdly, the role of trauma and grief in a located cinema through which a nation’s coming of age is expressed.

The authors take the figure of the blacktracker in recent cinema (The Tracker, Rabbit-Proof Fence) as an emblematic starting point from which to propose systematic backtracking as a method for understanding and coming to terms with trauma. Backtracking (“this brooding passion”) involves a process of revisiting, reviewing and renewing stories, characters, landscapes and icons and can be regarded as “a vernacular mode of collective mourning, a process involving griefwork and testimony”(172). Memory is central to this process and, for the authors, is referred to in four ways, involving firstly, historical memory as the chronological ordering of events; secondly, involuntary memory involving chains of association incited by shock; thirdly, memory of the past as a work of mourning and fourthly, repetitive, belated memory arising from trauma.

The book is organised in three sections, coinciding with the three main issues the authors set out in Chapter 1; the first section, Australian Cinema and the History Wars sandwiches discussion of Moulin Rouge (Australia/USA, 2001), The Dish (Australia, 2000), Lantana (Australia/Germany, 2001), Australian Rules (Australia, 2002) and Walking on Water (Australia, 2002) with two very fine chapters, the first on backtracking and the fourth on Mabo – Life of an Island Man (Australia, 1997). The work is informed by Benjamin’s theories of history, modernity and shock, and Miriam Hansen’s replay of cultural theory’s approach to cinema as an intimate public sphere of experience, via Siegried Kraceur. The authors add a further dimension to this film theoretical framework by drawing upon Leela Ghandi’s use of Aristotle’s model of friendship – the idea of philia – and the Epicurean model of philoxenia in order to explain the difference between exclusive friendship (philia) as the basis of citizenship and a model of inclusive friendship (philoxenia )which could embrace strangers. They suggest that it is the Epicurean model which is most useful in understanding the spectator’s identificatory dilemma in The Tracker. The first section ends with the best discussion I’ve read of Mabo – Life of an Island Man, locating the origin of the film in the traumatic defacement of the grave of Eddie Mabo in Townsville Cemetery in June 1995.

The book’s second section, “Landscape and Belonging after Mabo” revisits the landscape tradition in Australian cinema, noting, most importantly and profoundly, via the discussion of The Castle (Australia, 1997), Vacant Possession (Australia, 1995), Strange Planet (Australia, 1999) and Radiance (Australia, 1998), that in the post-Mabo period national history has been displaced into family history and national space into domestic space, explaining the apparent inward-turning of the nation (understanding the complexities of the processes producing this reaction, rather than condemning it).

The third – and I think, strongest – section of the book, “Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age” draws into the discussion insights from trauma theory as a way of thinking about memory and history. Beginning with a chapter on Rabbit-Proof Fence and on the figure of the lost child in Australian cultural history, the authors then discuss Looking for Alibrandi (Australia, 2000), Head On (Australia, 1998) and Beneath Clouds (Australia, 2002) via a consideration of shame, before a final chapter on Japanese Story (Australia, 2003) and Dreaming in Motion (2002). Japanese Story represents for them a “post-Mabo ‘opening of the heart’ to grief”(181) and it is in this kind of analysis, which can be applied not only to the cycle of films which are discussed but to the particular cultural experience of shock and “aftershock” which are central to Australian culture in the post-Mabo period. It is the particular strength of the book that the authors are able to so acutely identify the mood, not only of Australian cinema, but of the country itself in this period.

I do have a specific criticism however. The book does not discuss what is arguably the best film to deal with the mood of the country “after Mabo” – John Hughes’ After Mabo (Australia, 1998) and no explanation is given for the obvious omission of a film, which on the surface might be taken to be the source of the book’s title (though it is true that the title of a Tim Rowse book is the credited source of the film’s title). Hughes also sadly disappears in the index, confused with John Hughes, the director of The Breakfast Club (USA, 1985). After Mabo should have been referred to because it is a film which so clearly documents the shift from the mood of Keating’s Redfern speech, through the Mabo decision, the Native Title Act, the Wik decision and the Prime Minister’s Ten Point Plan and finally the public smashing of reconciliation by the Prime Minister at the Reconciliation conference in May 1997 – an event of such symbolic violence that we still have not fully come to terms with it. After Mabo is of such significance because it tells the story much more from the truth of an Aboriginal point of view and although other films discussed in the book deal with Aboriginal experience, there is very much the sense that the trauma being processed in the book’s discussion is white trauma, or perhaps to contextualise it more specifically within its European tradition – angst.

Now of course we have to acknowledge that particular trauma has occurred for white Australians through this period and it needs to be analysed. But the location of this trauma primarily in the “history wars”, which I think the book could be accused of doing, is to grant too much power to what is simply the continuation of a rather old ideological battle. Because the left has thrown away its weapons in this battle, or they have become blunted by overuse, it has become rather discouraged and defeatist and especially doesn’t even want to be called “left” anymore (because that, after all is an old opposition, which the right is allowed to deploy, but the left has lost its right to do so).

After Mabo documents even the banality of continued effort, the hard work of cultural change but above all it demonstrates in the context of contemporary Australia (from a filmmaker who himself understands Benjamin and has made one of the best films on the topic) the continued truth of so many of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

Although this is a book written by two authors, and one can clearly hear two voices at times, the book is so well structured and edited that the two different voices speak in unison, suggesting a genuine process of collaboration, which is an impressive achievement.

Because of the precariousness of this permanently endangered species, Australian cinema, books on the subject are more likely to concern themselves with the industry and policy context of its emergence and maintenance than with its products. This means we are more accustomed to encountering lists of films thought to demonstrate this or that policy shift, industry development or external affirmation rather than any systematic or thematic approach to individual films. Methodologically, cultural studies’ challenge to the aesthetic autonomy of canonical texts also means that close readings of the kind once reserved for literary or dramatic works are now more likely to be applied to policy documents than to films. Australian Cinema after Mabo is a welcome change to this model. While each of the films discussed deserves more extensive consideration, the book presents us with some of the best writing on individual films we are ever likely to read and will become a standard text for courses on Australian cinema globally. Most impressively, its particular analysis gives us the tools for understanding, not only the value of its cycle of chosen films, but also the emergence of the values of the present in ways which explain despair and give us hope for the future.

Helen Grace
University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 | Last Updated: 19-Jul-05