by John Rhall
Dermody and Jacka claim that Wake in Fright and the smothering mateship Grant endures, “manages to portray a horror at the heart of Australia that is about the conditions of sexuality” (2: 81). They are referring to how this film examines the dark side of the myth of Australian mateship, holding forth the binary oppositions of destruction and protection that close male-bonding can arouse. Phillip Adams, the one time Chairman of the Australian Film Commission, comments upon what he believes is a “curious sexual insecurity in the Australian male” and suggests that “mateship and isolation are pervading themes in Australian literature, and it has to come from the fact that men bonded to other men, rather than to women.” (88). While Adams is aiming the bulk of his comment at the Australian film Gallipoli (1981) which he describes as “an exploration of love, man to man” (87), his reasoning could be seen to extend to Wake in Fright. However, the images of this male “love” exhibited in Wake in Fright is anything but honest and gentle, but instead can be seen to reside in the realm of the savage and the bestial. The shock for Grant after being sodomised by Doc Tydon can be seen to be compounded by Grant’s desire for respect of higher education (of which he is part) personified in Doc Tydon, a man of letters and one of a British educational background which Grant unquestionably accepts as superior. Grant’s growing realisation that the demonic outback has contributed to the creation of a devil; one who has violated him in a manner that questions Grant’s own manhood, in a way that it has never been questioned before, makes Grant’s horror all the more real.
The fear of not fitting-in and remaining the perennial outsider haunts Grant as much as his own quest for sexual identification, as personified in this macho hell-hole, and how he may best demonstrate his maleness. For Grant, being a man involves playing the game that is set before him, from the two-up game to the shooting game, to the drinking game – Grant fails all the tests. Turner sees Grant’s dilemma like this “It is not until he loses that he is forced to take the culture on its own terms” (42). Turner also claims that Grant loses because he sees himself as a man apart with his attitude of superiority because of his academic background which makes him view “the locals (as) too ignorant and unsophisticated to understand” (42). The mateship myth portrayed in Wake in Fright is all the more worrisome because it seems to offer false hopes and worthless remedies to the human condition (43). Turner proposes a theory as to how this arose, arguing that trace memories of the privations suffered by those landed unceremoniously on the Australian shores so long ago have somehow lingered, producing a “profound effect on the myths and meanings articulated within the culture then and since (76). Certainly Turner is entitled to his view, even if it stretches back to the first fleet commanded by Captain Cook. However, could the backwoods demons in the Hollywood movie Deliverance (1972) blame their unwholesome attitudes on the American founding fathers? Neil Rattigan explains the way Australians differ from most others in their concept of mateship like this:
There is a fundamental schizophrenia that runs through Australian culture. Present-day culture is the legatee of the process of both colonizing and colonization. Australia was a colony in the same way America had been and Canada was, although different from either. Nonetheless, as a result of being and perceiving themselves to be members of a colonized society – and a dispossessed and despised one because of the penal origins of most of the colonists – Australians developed a culture based upon the rejection of much of the dominant colonizing culture of England. Thus, while there was a continuity of many of the ideological state apparatus of England...a cultural identity developed (which would become in turn a national identity) based upon the denial (as much as possible) of class distinction, based upon ideas of egalitarianism, collectivism, and the distinctly Australian mythos of mateship. These ideal were not universal, of course: they did not extend to the aboriginal population in any way, shape, or form, and they did not apply to women except in certain circumstances (11-12).
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Wake in Fright positions Grant as a man who is seen unable to unburden himself by expressing his fears and anxieties, no matter how much mateship is shouted from the rooftops of Tiboonda (the fictional outback town where the film is set). Grant’s problem is meant to be seen as his lack of education in mateship history, made all the more poignant because he is cast as a teacher who is unable to learn. The circularity of confusion that Grant finds himself in can be seen as a metaphor for a wider crisis facing society; one where the overt expression and empty rituals of mateship represses the ability to communicate on any level but the banal and the superficial, and where being an individual is treated with suspicion and intolerance, and Grant is marked as such by his own hand (Murray 72). Graeme Turner observes that Grant, like Mrs Appleyard the principle in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), is obsessed with being somewhere else; clearly visible in a collection of the “reminders of the world elsewhere” scattered about Grant’s room (41). Turner also notes that the only connection Grant seems to have established with his current “landscape” are the things of a “detached, superficial observer, as shown in his ‘rock collection’ and the predictable sketches of bleached tree trunks and the skulls of dead sheep” (41). Dermody and Jacka see Grant’s obsessed desire of returning to the city as a counterpoint of his “landlocked” horror of a nightmare that is all but his own making as he “descends into hell at the hands of the menacingly friendly townspeople” (2: 80). Grant’s repression is also conditioned by an imagined class barrier based on what he perceives to be his qualifications as a teacher; something that puts him in a world of the elite – Grant is a snob. Turner makes the point that Grant’s downfall as in part attributed to his “mockingly supercilious” attitude to those around him and his basic mistake of being “convinced” he is in some way superior to the inhabitants of Tiboonda (41). Grant’s rejection of place and those around him can be said to be total when he expresses to the local girl Janette his wish to leave Australia and go to England; just like the rest of the locals that Grant meets, Janette can’t comprehend wishing to be anywhere else. The sex scene between Grant and Janette is a barren and loveless affair that can be seen as Grant’s desperate attempt to prove to “manhood” before he slips into a world that is full of real questions but only provides artificial answers based on myth (41).
Graeme Turner contends that the beer-swilling back-slapping yokels are not affected by Grant’s entry into their world because Grant is seen simply as a curiosity in their midst, they recognise his difference with glib comments: “Where’s the bloke with the jacket?” and they occasionally make use of the irony that can be directed his way by calling him “Ned Kelly” thus inadvertently mocking a myth that celebrates the “heroism” of “defeat” by a murderous bush outlaw – but they never acknowledge Grant the person (41). The lack of empathy and the paucity of consideration for Grant extends to the citizens of this demonic wasteland who with their constant refrain of “best little town in the world”, begin to sound like robotic simulacrums of humanity and are a pointed reminder of rampant nationalism (41). Wake in Fright can be read as a lesson in the lack of real communication for many more places than “the Yabba” (the desolate county that stretches to all points of the compass depending on whom is asked) thus contrasting Grant’s inability to make meaningful contact with the plight of many foreigners who make Australia their new homeland. There is also the important dichotomy between an over-educated Grant and the “foul yobbos”, who thrive in spite of the “dehumanising effects of the outback” (Rattigan 307) with Rattigan contending “it is the bush that makes these men the way they are” and arguing further that “if the civilized Grant and Tydon cannot withstand its malevolence, why should it be expected that others can?” (307). Thus, the message would seem to say that education, regardless of level, is no match for this forbidding landscape which will expose the true value of human nature. The fact that the bush can have its way with you as easily as Tydon has his way with Grant is exemplified in Grant’s return to “the
Yabba” after his convalescence in hospital. Grant’s return to that which oppresses him can be seen as a signal that the demonised landscape has won over human endeavour. It can be argued that Wake in Fright works to destabilise the blind acceptance of the mateship myth and the belief in egalitarian values.
Chapter 3
Sexual Repression and Colonial Fear
Where Wake in Fright foregrounds its forbidding view of the landscape with its hot, dry, desolated look, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) relies on the power of suggestion. Brian McFarlane notes the impression of the terrain in this film: “The landscape may look passive from a distance but up close it may be fraught with danger for the uninitiated” (74). McFarlane’s point about landscape in Picnic at Hanging Rock is echoed by Dermody and Jacka who state that the earlier representations of Australian outback landscape were something that was “taken for granted” that is, inert, benign even, has now changed so that “in Picnic, the landscape is loaded with beauty, power, and even gender; fatally so” (2: 105). Picnic at Hanging Rock not only blurs the line between fact and fiction -- some people still believe it to be based on a true story (Shiach 41) -- but with its ethereal illusions, dream sequences, voices off and mysterious events – watches that stop at noon, Miranda morphing into a swan – it works to subvert a comfortable reading of the Australian bush landscape. Is Picnic at Hanging Rock a horror film as we understand horror films? There is no visible monster, there are no scenes of extreme violence and bloody excess, no shots using subjective point-of-view of an unseen malevolence stalking its prey (as it does in Mad Max), and apart from a dead girl in the potting shed there is mostly suggestion implanted in the mind of the viewer. While the label gothic was applied to some of Australia’s horror films it was not consistent and even went out of favour when the gothic elements were difficult to locate. Dermody and Jacka make the claim that the gothic had mostly disappeared in Picnic at Hanging Rock (2: 50), on the other hand Noël Carroll claims that gothic is a “rubric” extending over a large area that was largely superseded by the emerging use of psychological horror that did away with the “overreaching” synopsis of the gothic, that is, the in-your-face shocks and horrific moments were left more to the literary era in favour of stories, and eventually films, that showed a horror that may be visited upon the “ordinary” and the “innocent” (4-6). Joseph Grixti also states that the eighteenth century “gothic literature” was the wellspring from which modern horror sprang. Grixti notes the important contrast in that these early gothic stories almost always depicted extreme violence and violation (16-17) none of which is on show in Picnic at Hanging Rock, instead we have suggestions of impending doom rather than graphic images and we are left to assemble the ramifications of the horror in our minds. It is argued that the horror “suggested” to the spectator is more likely to influence deeper emotional attachment than that which is “expressed” on the screen in an explicit manner (Wells 108-109).
The suggestion of an uncanny begins early in the film. After the camera introduces the ‘Rock’ in a ghostly setting (accompanied by the lead character Miranda reading a poem off screen), the film Picnic at Hanging Rock opens in a manner common to many American horror films by subduing its audience into a false sense of security with the introduction of solidity; a view of the bricks and mortars of the school for girls set in charming gardens and safe surroundings. Dermody and Jacka see the setting of the college in its juxtaposition with the landscape of the rock as giving the film “an air of perverse Britishness – or Europeanness – seeking the frisson of contact with the necessarily mysterious, alien bush, and the disturbing ‘Rock’ that protrudes from it” (2: 105). The end of the story is told at the beginning by a text during the titles so that the only surprise that awaits the viewer is to find out which girls go missing on the group of rocks and so makes the unfolding events seem predetermined and unchangeable; as fixed in time as the landscape itself. Graeme Turner sees the evocative feeling of the film like this:
The opening of Picnic at Hanging Rock presents a slow pan across a landscape which is gradually losing its veil of fog, the camera moving from the natural majesty of the rock to the presumptuous order of the Ladies’ College. As the opposition between these two entities is established visually, it is punctuated and emphasised by the sudden introduction of the flutes in the soundtrack. The basic conflict of the film is established even before the titles have concluded. And the resolution of this conflict leaves the rock impervious and victorious; the society is routed and the film-maker, Marlow-like, asks us not only to see this occurrence as ‘one of the great mysteries’ but also as some intimation of the innate and obdurate strength and hostility of this world. Such deference to the land and its imperatives is at least equivocal (as indeed it is in Clarke and Lawson) in that the land is not a considerate host (29).
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Turner is referring to what he sees as an ongoing conflict between Australians and their native landscape, for as he points out, both Marcus Clarke (artist) and Henry Lawson (bush poet) held views of the bush that were not always images of a paradise but were sometimes ones that could also induce states of “weird melancholy” and occasionally contained hints of “isolation, madness and death” (26). Although there is little outright horror to be seen, apart from the body of Sara decaying in the hothouse with her “head crushed in” (Green 103), there is a subtle and relentless drive exhibited in this film that could be said to spook those who are unfamiliar with the Australian bush. P.P. McGuinness argues that while “the mysterious events unfold, a sense of some unnameable horror, some unlocatable threat develops also – the Hanging Rock looms over the action exuding a dark miasma intensified by the brightness of the sunlight and the idyllic bush scenery” (188). It can be argued that the themes in Picnic at Hanging Rock touch a deeper cord with the Australian public regardless of believability in the unfolding events because of its very pristine Australianness. Turner speaks of picaresque Australian bush-period films in general but could easily be describing the public longing for such films as Picnic at Hanging Rock:
The preoccupation with the land and its communities is so strong in Australian narrative as to be remarkable. The trend infects accounts of Australian film as well as fiction, even in the studies of the national film form which examine the productions of the industry at regular intervals in an attempt to describe the Australian film in terms of its social content and visual style. Given the basic inappropriateness of the bush legend and the iconography of the bush to contemporary Australian existential realities, the congruence of interest and focus on these pastoral myths require explanation. The longevity of the pastoral ideal, surviving as it does Australia’s urbanisation and suburbanisation, suggests that its survival is due to its ideological and mythic function rather than to its close relation to historical conditions at any point or series of points in Australia’s past or present (32).
The haunting sound track (pan pipes and raucous cicadas) works to juxtapose the normality of cultured colonial existence with the unworldly, nature driven existentialism of a native landscape “older than time” (Shiach 42). The sounds of cicadas rising to a crescendo at significant moments of plot development in Picnic at Hanging Rock echo the pounding beat of music used in the Hollywood movie Jaws (1975) to alert the audience, not the fictive characters, of the approaching shark (Maltby 220). Sound is used to create the border between that which is perceived as Britishness and that which is dreaded as other where the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth dwindles away the closer the white colonialists get to the rock and is gradually subsumed by the pan pipes and their “otherworldly” sounds (Shiach 43). The sexual repression evidenced between the girls in the college as they prepare to journey to the phallic projection of the ‘Rock’ is noted by McFarlane who writes about a scene where one girl scrambling up the hillside sees something that scares her. McFarlane describes the image of what she sees as “an enormous close-up of the bare [phallic?] pinnacle of Hanging Rock” (56). The fact that McFar
lane feels the need to equate the images of pretty young girls in the proximity of large pointy objects as sexual metaphors – his insertion of the word phallic (however he brackets it) tends to disclose a particular reading of this film for McFarlane, and possibly many other critics and viewers. Perhaps they themselves suffer from sexual repression or would it be fair to say, a little like Sigmund Freud, that sometimes a pointy object is just a pointy object.
Dermody and Jacka see a landscape in Picnic at Hanging Rock that is “loaded with beauty, power, and even gender” and they note the girls as ‘outsider other’ with this, “The foreign beauty of the young girls, perversely exotic in their period whites, is offered by the film as sacrifice to the aroused male force of the land” (2: 105). In a similar manner to the testosterone fuelled landscape of Wake in Fright so Picnic at Hanging Rock explores the more subtly gendered subtext of lesbianism and schoolgirl crushes, that instead of ending with rape end with disappearance and death. Ian Hunter argues that “Lesbianism is in the film in the same way the disappearance is, not to be thought about as human reality, but as an emblem of the girls otherworldliness” (192). Brian McFarlane speaks of a “smothered sexual yearning” to be observed in the College as the girls go about their morning toilet and exchange their “lushly-worded” St Valentines Day cards with much “sighing” before they answer the “phallic invitation” of Hanging Rock (73). Rattigan makes much of the significance of St Valentine’s Day, maintaining it “should not be overlooked” in the context of this film (251). Rattigan, perhaps, is referring to the fact that St Valentine was a “Roman Christian martyr of the third century A.D.” and the sending of a Valentine’s Day card denotes a pledge of “love to one’s sweetheart” (Morris 1414). It is an act of making clear that many of the schoolgirls are in love with each other and, as Bruzzi suggests, “Sarah is in love with Miranda” (45). Miranda seems to confirm this when she says “You must learn to love someone other than me, Sara” (Shiach 42). When later in the film Sara commits suicide (or was she pushed? The film does not make it clear) after pining for the still missing Miranda it prompts McFarlane to argue: “It seems to suggest that sexual awakening is as potentially dangerous as it is irresistible” (74). An interesting comparison has been made with Picnic at Hanging Rock and another film where the theme of guilt and death are significant and that is the film Don’t Look Now (1973) where the protagonist foretells his own death (Shiach 51). We can see that Miranda haunts us through the film Picnic with her otherworldly perceptions of her own impending end “everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place”.
