The book focuses on two key ‘sheep films’: The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933) and Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950). Both movies are concerned with the national project, in which sheep growing and nation building are seamlessly aligned. But Verhoeven artfully demonstrates that it is precisely in their emphasis on textual re-iteration and repetition that the sheep films critique an otherwise ostensibly ‘national’ vision. In the process Verhoeven sheds new light on the importance and implication of discourses of originality in the Australian cinema. ‘Truthfully I will never see these films in quite the same way again...it is in the best sense a strangely compelling and unsettling book.’ Professor Tom O’Regan University of Queensland
Supplementary digital content is available from www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/ebooks/0-522-85240-8/index.html
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS •
•
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited www.mup.com.au
Sheep and the Australian Cinema
Verhoeven
About the Author Dr Deb Verhoeven is a writer, broadcaster, film critic, commentator and lecturer. Between 2000 and 2002 she was CEO of the Australian Film Institute. She is currently Associate Professor of Screen Studies in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT, where she also manages the AFI Research Collection.
Sheep and the Australian Cinema
In this highly readable study of Australian cinema, Deb Verhoeven explores the relationship between a series of films produced in different periods of Australian history that are linked by a common thread—the repeated image of sheep.
Deb Verhoeven
Cover design by Phil Campbell
SOCIAL STUDIES
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Sheep and the Australian Cinema
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Sheep and the Australian Cinema
Deb Verhoeven
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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
[email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2006 Text Deb Verhoeven 2006 Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Designed by Phil Campbell Typeset in Utopia by J&M Typesetting Indexed by Kerry Biram Printed in Australia by University of Melbourne Design & Print Centre National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Verhoeven, Deb. Sheep and the Australian cinema. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 522 85239 4 (paperback). ISBN 0 522 85240 8 (e-book). 1. Animals in motion pictures. 2. Sheep - Australia. 3. Motion pictures - Australia - History. I. Title. 791.436
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Sheep study becomes most interesting after the initial stages … Undoubtedly the sheep deserve far better treatment in many cases than is meted out to them. —Alfred Hawkesworth, Australasian Sheep and Wool: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise
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Contents Illustrations
viii
Acknowledgements
x
Wool blend: Sheep and the Australian social fabric
1
Part 1: Sheep thinking or thinking sheep: Philosophy’s animal within 1. One, two sheep perchance to dream
19
Part 2: When our clips speak together: The Squatter’s Daughter, national origins and cultural continuity 2. A gathering of sheep is the scene of a decapitation, or How Ken G. Hall lost his head
51
3. When familiarity breeds: Contempt, disability and national cinema
82
4. Origins interrupted: Splitting heirs and forebears
147
Part 3: One man’s meat: Bitter Springs, assimilation and sheep 5. Tea and sympathy and a thirst for sheep
183
6. Another man’s mutton … Assimilation and Aboriginal agency 226 7. Rethinking (like) a sheep, acting like a ham
272
Coda
285
Filmography
289
References
292
Index
305
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Illustrations Part 2: The Squatter’s Daughter Figure 1: The Squatter’s Daughter lobby card 49 Figure 2: The Squatter’s Daughter (frame enlargement)— Wayne and Joan ‘sending wool to the world’ 57 Figures 3–50: The Squatter’s Daughter—opening sequence (frame capture) 72–4 Figure 51: The Squatter’s Daughter—Barky parts the fleece (frame capture) 76 Figure 52: A Girl of the Bush—Lorna parts the fleece 77 Figures 53–6: The Squatter’s Daughter—the gumleaf band (frame capture) 78 Figure 57: The Squatter’s Daughter—Ken G. Hall directs 88 Figure 58: A Girl of the Bush—the heroine at centre-stage 101 Figure 59: A Girl of the Bush—Lorna works while Oswald shirks 103 Figure 60: The Squatter’s Daughter—Bidgee (frame enlargement) 106 Figure 61: The Squatter’s Daughter—Jimmy and Zeinah ‘blood calls to blood’ (frame enlargement) 109 Figure 62: The Squatter’s Daughter—the fall of Wayne 113 Figures 63–70: The Squatter’s Daughter—daily dissolve (frame capture) 132 Figures 71–4: The Squatter’s Daughter—where there’s smoke … (frame capture) 133 Figures 75–8: The Squatter’s Daughter—Waratah supercomb (frame capture) 133 Figures 79–80: The Squatter’s Daughter as a type—The Squatter’s Daughter (George W. Lambert, 1923–4) and The Fair Musterer (Hilda Rix-Nicholas, 1935) 152–3 Figure 81: A Girl of the Bush—unknown origins 155 Figure 82: The Squatter’s Daughter—sheep in danger (production still) 164 Figure 83: The Squatter’s Daughter (Hilda Bridges, 1922)— front cover 165 Part 3: Bitter Springs Figure 84: Bitter Springs—‘Out they go—the whole lot of ‘em’ (frame capture) 187
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Figure 85: Bitter Springs—and all they see is sheep (frame capture) Figures 86–7: Bitter Springs—high points and low points of view (frame capture) Figure 88: Bitter Springs—a moving ‘conclusion’ (video capture) Figure 89: Bitter Springs—the Adelaide premiere with Premier Sir Thomas Playford, Nonnie Piper, Prime Minister Robert Menzies and Judy Gainford (Miss Australia 1947)
188 204 209
276
Illustration acknowledgements Images from Ken G. Hall’s film The Squatter’s Daughter are used with the permission of Greater Union Organisation (GUO). The cover image of Hilda Bridge’s book The Squatter’s Daughter is used with the permission of the State Library of Victoria. The George Lambert painting entitled The Squatter’s Daughter is used with the permission of the National Gallery of Australia. The Hilda Rix-Nicholas painting The Fair Musterer is used with the permission of the Queensland Art Gallery. A Girl of the Bush images used with permission of the National Film and Sound Archive (Australia). All images and moving footage from Bitter Springs are used with the permission of CANAL+IMAGE UK LTD.
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Acknowledgements This book began its life as a thesis, which, as interminable as it was, would never have been completed without the persistent support of my supervisors William D. Routt and Barbara Creed. Many other people have encouraged me along the way and deserve to be named: Louise Wignall, Amree Hewitt, Rob Rowe, Lisa Horler, Sophie Cunningham, Linnell Secomb, Elizabeth Jamieson, Peter Kemp, Peter Hughes, Mike Walsh, Jane Thimke, David Hanan, Susan Stewart, Jeanette Hoorn, Quentin Turnour, Marie Sierra, Marilyn Dooley, Glenda Lynch and Martha Ansara. Among my colleagues in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University special thanks to Brian Morris, Adrian Danks, Karli Lukas and Adrian Miles. I would also like to single out the support of my Head of School, Lauren Murray at RMIT University. Both the University of Melbourne and RMIT University generously assisted me with research funds. Further thanks are due to Ian Jones and Bud Tingwell for allowing me insight into their experiences of the mid-century Australian film industry. Among the many library and archive staff who have provided help I would like to mention Ken Berryman, Zsuzsi Szucs, Helen Tully (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia); James Sabine, Aysen Mustafa, Sarah Sanderson and Alex Gionfriddo (AFI Research Collection); and Lyn Gailey from the MEAA. I would also like to thank staff at the State Archives of South Australia, Noel Butlin Archives, New Zealand Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Margaret Herrick Library, National Film and Television Archive (BFI), Ealing Studios Archive and the Quorn Historical Society. Andrew Eather proved to be an eagle-eyed proofreader. I am grateful to Glen Eley (GUO), John Herron (CANAL+IMAGE UK LTD), Lisa Cargill (National Gallery of Australia) and Kylie Timms (Queensland Art Gallery) for assistance with the illustrations found in this book. Added thanks go to all those associated with the production of this MUP monograph, especially Sybil Nolan, Nathan Katz and Cathryn Game. Finally, I reserve my principal recognition for Robyn Logan, whose patient and pragmatic encouragement make her alone primum mobile in the realisation of this manuscript.
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Author’s note Previous publication Aspects of the book have been previously published in the following places: ‘The film I would like to make: In search of a cinema’, in A Century of Australian Cinema, James Sabine (ed.), Reed Books, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 130–53. ‘Sheep’s clothing: A dress in some Australian films’, in Screening the Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film, Ken Berryman (ed.), National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1995, pp. 151–8. ‘Fragments: French sheep and early melodrama’, in Australian and French Connections: A Century of Cinema, K. J. Warren (ed.), University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 93–104. ‘Thinking like a sheep, acting like a ham: Performance in Australian cinema’, Artlink 17, no. 3 (1997), pp. 43–6. ‘When familiarity breeds: Ken G. Hall, disability and national cinema’, in Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Cinema, Deb Verhoeven (ed.), Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 51–67. ‘A national or a notional cinema? Thinking (nothing) of the Australian sheep films’, Credits Rolling! Selected Papers from the 12th Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 2005, pp. 61–71.
Quotations and references I have retained all formatting in block quotations according to the original text. This means there may be inconsistencies in the style applied to film titles, for instance, from one quotation to the next (e.g. ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, The Squatter’s Daughter). The details of some newspaper reviews located in archive files are incomplete despite various attempts to identify the original source. In these instances I have included the archive file reference to ensure that they can be traced. These files include: H. E. Green clippings folder (IATSIS); Bitter Springs clippings folder (BFI); archival files held in the State Records of South Australia (SRSA) [GRG 52/90, GRG 52/1/1949/74, GRG 52/1/1949/97, GRG 7/24/1949/105, GRG 52/1/1949/105, GRG 7/24/1949/163, GRG 24/6/1950/99].
Author’s note
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Disclaimer It is certainly not my intention to offend any indigenous Australians. Some quotations or images used in this book might be offensive, and I apologise for any discomfort or distress that may be experienced.
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Wool blend: Sheep and the Australian social fabric
The sheep was one of the first animals created, since it could supply for mankind all that was most necessary—meat, milk and clothing. English proverb1
At the origin of the nation, we find a story of the nation’s origin. Geoffrey Bennington2
The purpose of this book is to posit and explore a relationship between a series of films produced in different periods of Australian history—a relationship based on the observation of a set of common preoccupations in the films and linked by a representative trope: the repeated image of sheep. Somewhat prosaically I describe these films as the ‘sheep films’. In looking at the repeated representation of sheep (themselves an index of repetitiveness), I intend to explore in detail the importance and implication of discourses of originality in the Australian cinema and to identify an inclination for ‘originary’ thinking in some Australian film criticism and historiography. Sheep and the Australian Cinema focuses in detail on two key sheep films: The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933) and Bitter Springs
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(Smart, 1950). Both films are explicitly concerned with the national project, in which sheep-growing and nation-building are seamlessly aligned. Yet the specific depiction of sheep in these films signals a supplementary impulse that belies an incomplete or partial alterity that is, in turn, suggestive of misgivings at the heart of the national project. In The Squatter’s Daughter this takes form in the depiction and subsequent discussion of impairment and disability in relation to underlying conceptions of individual and national ‘originality’. In Bitter Springs a utopic vision of national origins occurs in a depiction of Aboriginal assimilation, an unravelling government policy that had particular influence on the conditions under which the film itself was produced. I argue that it is precisely in their emphasis on textual reiteration and repetition that the sheep films engage in a critique of an otherwise ostensibly ‘national’ vision. There is an internal tension between the nationalising project (directed as it is to delineation and distinction) and the overwhelming and enormous presence of Australia’s cine-sheep in these films. In this sense the very same films that are commonly held aloft as shining exemplars of a national expressiveness might also be found to be more ambivalently placed towards their role in the national cinema, calling into question the very idea of a collective ‘origin’ from which national cinemas are purported to spring. In his documentary 40,000 Years of Dreaming, George Miller explains the Australian cinema as a sort of ‘whitefella’s Dreaming’. ‘Movies’, he says, ‘are the white men’s songlines that sing us into being.’3 In fact, this very phrase, ‘whitefella’s dreaming’, was his original title for the film. As a bald statement, Miller’s radical attempt to situate Australian films alongside or as an extension of Aboriginal belief systems attributes to the national cinema a far greater spiritual richness and significance than it deserves. His statement is more interesting (and defensible), however, if it is taken to mean that Australian films adopt the role of foundation stories or ‘creation’ myths for white national culture in this country. In this sense, Miller is restating an evident link between national cinemas and the ontological. National cinemas, like many origin fables, occupy illo tempore: the magical time of beginnings. The way the history of the Australian cinema is written and
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rewritten as an unending litany of ‘firsts’ and ‘rebirths’, and the way these histories invariably stress the parallel arrival of the Cinematographe and the national Constitution, evokes a mythical connection between the provenance of the cinema and of the nation in Australia. But the circumstantial thread that weaves between cinema, nation and origins is not just drawn of specific historical coincidence. All national cinemas are ‘ontological’ in some sense. National cinemas act like a primal scene. They constitute the unlikely gaze at one’s own conception (as a nation)—at once self-effacing and conceiving—an impossible moment of perceptual mastery. A moment that should equally be understood as an act of (self-)consumption as it is defined as an act of (self-)production. National cinemas present and re-present the arrival of the nation to itself. Fully absorbed in the thrall of their own genesis, national cinemas are comfortable in the knowledge that they have left nothing unthought. Theirs is a narcissistic, complacent self-presence. National cinemas are sated by their own sense of (mind)fullness. They understand and explain themselves in the all-consuming, all-producing terms of ‘originary’ or foundational thinking—an impossible, totalising thinking that purports to account for everything by getting ‘downunder’ to the ground of all things. In matters genealogical, the quest for Origins is invariably the search for a sort of vanishing point of history—an amniotic abstraction where differences, disparities and divergences (the conditions of classification) disappear. The quest for national origins is in some sense also about the desire for a type of invisibility or indistinguishability, an undifferentiated One-ness from which (national) identity might be mercurially discerned but into which it might equally disappear. This search for origins treads carefully between a desire to assert identity and the constant fear of its desertion. Many Australian films (particularly those preoccupied with their own identity, their national status or Australianness) are characterised by a want of knowledge (of origins) as both a narrative and a formal feature. And often these preoccupations hang in uneasy balance—as if the more attracted to the solace of (originary) invisibility, the more hyperbolic the discursive pronouncements of a film’s ‘Australianness’. The films that perhaps best exemplify this crossed
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purpose are the Australian sheep films. In these films repeated images of amorphous, abstracted mobs of sheep come to represent both an emblematic image of national abundance and the comforts of anonymity, the retreat from identity. The Australian sheep films occur, like the looping sheep themselves, at regular intervals in the history of the national cinema. They include among their number the feature films A Girl of the Bush (Franklyn Barrett, 1921), The Breaking of the Drought (Franklyn Barrett, 1920), The Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall, 1933), Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960), Funny Things Happen Downunder (Joe McCormick, 1965), Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975), L’Australie (Jean-Jacques Andrien, 1989), No Worries (David Elfick, 1993) and Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995). These films are linked by a common, repeated thread—each employing a set of stock visual and thematic motifs. In particular, they mull over questions of fabrication and reproducibility in Australian culture—and the associated themes and strategies of repetition, productivity, breeding, domestication, parentage, cultural maintenance and so on that such a preoccupation might suggest. Both the fear and promise of cultural domestication are threaded through tangled plots that are, if nothing else, decidedly woolly. In the sheep films, Australia is represented graphically as a pregnant paddock, filled to the brim with a teeming, repetitious mass of sheepish equivalence—a country in little need of variety or difference but continually engaged in the futile process of domesticating contradiction and paradox. Even a film like The Breaking of the Drought, which shocked contemporary viewers with its explicit images of the effects of longterm drought on livestock and landscape, derived its power from the idea that the ‘natural’ state of the Australian landscape was quite the opposite. For film historians these are challenging films. Conventional histories of the Australian film industry have invested heavily in the idea of a cinema not unlike the wool industry—a cinema that boasts of national creativity and abundance in the face of environmental hardship.4 But they might have overlooked half the story. In their analyses, so many Australian film historians have become partial—overly invested in the dynamics of (self-)production at the expense of the ‘unthought’ role of (self-)consumption, which equally informs the
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national cinema. There is a missing discourse of consumption in the way the Australian cinema is understood. This lost discourse might take the form of an interest in national audiences (or the lack of them), or the role of the intertext in debates about ‘pure authorship’ in the Australian cinema (the way films and their authors might ‘consume’ one another), or the ways in which discourses of ‘assimilation’ continue to circulate through Australian films and their critical reception. The key problem for the film historian is not how to make the Australian cinema more productive, to argue for structural redress, to urge for alternative or improved expressions (although these critical practices are not without merit in some contexts). The problem is how to change our own process of understanding, how, for example, to approach the matter of origins in the Australian cinema outside the impossible, totalising terms of ‘originary thinking’; how instead to understand the forms of originary comprehension as presented by the films themselves without reiterating the claim of total understanding; then to understand the implications of this approach for the practice of film history, especially its stated mission to discover in past events lessons for the future of the national cinema. If, for example, we acknowledge from the outset that our thinking is lacking, if we abandon the belief that in principle everything is comprehensible, then we cannot also claim with any certainty to be predictive.5 There are, then, two key aspects of the question of origins that mark most attempts to understand the originary in Australian cinema: the implications of its ‘impossibility’ as a totalising instance of conception, and the way in which it is itself conceived by critics and filmmakers alike as a pure moment of production (without consumption). This book, in exposing the unthought discourses of consumption in the Australian cinema (specifically in the sheep films), is not attempting to restore some kind of ‘fullness’ or completion to the national cinema’s originary claims (restoring both production and consumption at the heart of the originary moment) but rather to show how claims of self-presence are impossible (the contingency of production and consumption in the origin meaning that moments of originary conception are always simultaneously erased). For the philosopher Mark C. Taylor the impossibility of originary thinking lies equally in the belief that on the one hand everything is
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comprehensible (and the resultant assertion that nothing remains unthought) and, on the other, that nothing remains unthought as the result of an inability to ‘think nothing’.6 These two observations are implicitly linked. Originary thinking does not—cannot—think ‘nothing’ (of anything). Originary thinking is always partial, even when it claims—especially when it claims—comprehension. What it suspects that it does not know originary thinking simply recasts as a type of conceptual terra nullius—a present absence to which it can lay claim. Originary thinking is able to think nothing only if it is reducible or derivative from identity (Nothing). Or, to put it another way, identity defines ‘nothing’ in binary terms, as the absence that constitutes its essence such that Nothing is really the ‘presence of the absence of being’.7 And, as a presence of sorts, Nothing opens itself to the possibility of re-presentation. The pressing question, then, is how to ‘think nothing’ rather than Nothing: how to imagine the absence of the presence of absence; how to think what is not precisely present nor necessarily completely absent. For Taylor, the task of thinking ‘is to think nothing otherwise than by not thinking’.8 It could be that the complacency of originary thinking is challenged best by a form of thinking that is pervaded by ambivalence (a thinking nothing of Nothing). There is a scene in Spike Jonze’ film Being John Malkovich that attempts something close to a cinematic representation of the impossibilities of originary thinking. Midway through the film the actor/ character John Malkovich enters his own head to watch himself literally ‘through his own eyes’. What he sees is a restaurant in which every person is Malkovich himself and in which every word uttered is also ‘Malkovich’ and, in a punning gesture to this scene of extreme selfassimilation, every menu item is also ‘Malkovich’. In so directly linking a scene of self-consuming ‘in-sight’ or knowledge with language, by collapsing representation and self-knowledge into the experience of comprehensive representative repetition, Jonze exposes the end-logic of originary thinking as ludicrous. In this scene, all identity is reducible to the Same. There is no ‘John Malkovich’ that can be distinguished from ‘John Malkovich’. Later the film continues its speculations on origins concluding with an ‘impossible’ birth (in which two women conceive) but in which (gendered) sameness gives rise to difference. Originary thinking seeks, like John Malkovich, to be totally comprehensive. To comprehend everything is to think the ground of
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all things; to return things to their point of origin is to comprehend everything. Which—as Being John Malkovich points out—can simply mean the reiteration of what can be known or is already known, the reassertion of the indices of self (such as name or self-image). Or, as John Berger succinctly puts it: ‘All theories of ultimate origin are only ways of better defining what followed.’9 Originary thinking leaves nothing unthought, nothing unsaid and nothing unseen. It is the ultimate assertion of authorship in that the author (the conceiver) and the thought (the concept, the conceived) are the same. Or at least this is its conceit. Originary thinking is actually partial because it claims to have thought of everything, but at exactly the same time it cannot ‘think nothing’. No search for origins will ever be fully satisfied. Originary thinking represents a failure to recognise the ambivalence (the thinking nothing of anything) that underlies and undermines any claim to total understanding. Originary thinking (at the precise point at which it claims comprehension) is always partial (one-sided, biased). Therein lies its ‘impossibility’. What is most interesting about many of the Australian films that explicitly concern themselves with the question of (their) national origins are the convoluted manoeuvres by which they contend with the ‘Ab-original’ (invariably imagined in the singular). It is the specific interaction between the national cinema’s privileged claims for the originary and the many indigenous inhabitants of Australia that George Miller’s catchy phrase, ‘whitefella’s Dreaming’, however suggestive, fails to account for. The national cinema might allow whitefellas to repeatedly re-present their origins to themselves, but what remains inconsequential for Miller is the relationship of the cinema to indigenous Australians specifically. In suggesting that the Australian cinema is either an approximation or expansion of ‘the Aboriginal’, Miller resorts to a type of ‘originary thinking’, simultaneously calling forth and then summarily cancelling ‘the Aboriginal’ in order to dignify his own preoccupation with the origins of white Australian culture. In doing so, Miller thinks Nothing of indigenous Australians. When he wasn’t explicitly theorising the genesis of the Australian cinema, George Miller was generating one of the most popular films ever made here. By 2003 Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995) was the fifthhighest box office earner in Australia and the second-highest earning
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Australian film (after Crocodile Dundee). Miller completed 40,000 Years of Dreaming at the same time he was producing Babe, and it’s not surprising to see some of his theoretical concerns about Australian cinema reappear in a different form in Babe.10 Babe is the story of a parentless pig in search of his identity. His identity crisis is in part inspired by his economic circumstances (he needs to find an indispensable role in the farmyard economy) and in part by more private existential considerations (at one point in the film he actually asks, ‘Who am I?’). Babe’s search for a productive identity centres on the active avoidance of consumption—his own. In his desperate endeavour to avoid his own delivery to the dinner table, Babe determines to herd sheep. His newfound identity as a sheep-pig is granted by Farmer Hoggett (a man who is himself identified by a designation that is both porcine and ovine—a hogget is a sheep yet to be sheared) after a moment of public performance in which Babe demonstrates an uncharacteristic capacity for reconciliation that allows him to assert his mastery over a group of misunderstood sheep. Babe’s use of sheep is instructive. The indistinguishable sheep are an obstacle in Babe’s quest for an individual identity. Babe must literally overcome the fluid sheep by organising them into ordered movement. As he organises the sheep he also thinks about them for the first time. According to the film, he must get to know the sheep in order to know himself. But thinking about the sheep is not enough. Babe’s transformation into the gallant sheep-pig of the film’s title occurs only when he learns to think like a sheep. In being (albeit strategically) woolly-minded, Babe learns something valuable about compromise, flexibility and survival. But given this, Babe’s thinking (like a sheep) is ultimately self-serving. In his totalising approach to thought, Babe literally goes the whole hog—he thinks like a pig thinking like a sheep-dog thinking like a sheep. As the film would have it, the sheep in Babe are in dire need of direction—provided by the boundary-riding sheep-pig Babe, who in turn seeks fluidity—provided by the amorphous sheep. In this way the narrative posits a relationship between Babe and the sheep of apparent and calculated mutual benefit. Story over. Except that the film provides absolutely no dramatic motivation or narrative reason for the sheep to be herded. Their only purpose in the film, and therefore the only explanation given for their sudden need for a director, is
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to assist Babe in articulating his identity. In this sense it is not Babe who defines the boundaries for the sheep by giving them direction but rather the other way around: it is the sheep who provide a definition, through counterpoint, to Babe. They ‘give’ him agency (and he gives them Nothing in return). Babe needs their ‘nothingness’, which he alone must transform into something (Nothing). This, in the end, constitutes Babe’s sought-after productivity. But it is not only Babe who seeks a productive purpose. The film’s narrative momentum is also strategic, focused on the production of a happy ending. The movement of the sheep is captured and canalised as much for this broad narrative purpose as it is for Babe’s specific story. In their respective conclusions, neither Babe nor Babe can abide purposelessness. Babe is nowhere near the first instance of such characters or concerns in the Australian cinema. Sheep recur en masse in Australian films, and usually their appearance signals a narrative enquiry into the production of identity. It would be easy to see the longing for origins harboured in these films of indistinguishable sheep—their nostalgia for other times, or places or cinemas—as an analogical story of the Australian cinema itself. But Australia’s sheep stars are not simply a deliberate metaphor for loss of identity. These sheep are also something other than a significant or signifying presence. The challenge is how to think of these repeated images of sheep as being less than significant, to describe their ambivalent movements, rather than a purposeful movement towards ambivalence; to see the vacillations, tremblings, drifts, the unproductive, the near misses, misconceptions, futile subplots and questionable origins without recuperating them for a particular function or overarching argument. The challenge these sheep present for film historians is how to think ‘nothing’ of them rather than simply recuperate them or cause them to add up to something else or not to think of them at all. This book is not attempting to look at the occasional history of sheep films in Australia in order to present a tidy teleology of Australian cinema, as if each individual film is an aspirational element, adding upwards and onwards to the prospect of a more complete or successful later and larger national cinema. Nor does it suggest the inverse, that the past is simply a purposeful journey towards the destination of an ambivalent future. Instead, I want to take as my object of study passing
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moments of hesitant and directionless movement captured in the repeated image of sheep in the Australian cinema. If Sheep and the Australian Cinema can be said to have a stated purpose it is simply to consider not only the presence but also the ‘nothingness’ of these cine-sheep. Its challenge is to think ‘nothing’ … in the sense that we have a responsibility to challenge habitual thinking (the thinking something of …) and in the sense of thinking nothing as a form of operative ambivalence (a thinking nothing of …). In which films might just be films (rather than a cinema). And sheep might just be sheep …
A sheep is just a sheep I for one don’t give a damn where ‘we’ came from or where ‘we’ are going. Philip Brophy11
Australia must advance and populate, or perish. Billy Hughes12
In 1937 the Australian postal service released a series of stamps celebrating Australia’s native animals. The usual suspects were rounded up and memorialised in the name of the nation’s communications: a kangaroo (1s. 2d.), a koala (4d.), a kookaburra (6d.), a platypus (9d.) and a lyrebird (1s.) were released one after the other. But the animal in the midst of the series was unexpected. At centre-stage of our postal celebration of native fauna was the familiar profile of a fat overladen merino (5d.)—as if sheep had been there right from the beginning, bound up with both the land and the nation. By 1934 Australian sheep had been both naturalised and nationalised, a symbol of our ‘native’ difference and our place in a global, colonial taxonomy of ‘State’ animals. The controversial communist journalist Egon Kisch, who visited Australia in their year of release, made special note of this stamp series: ‘The stamps of Australia also obey the word of John, the theologian. They bestow honour and glory on the lamb and its first apostle.’13 Here, Kisch makes a punning reference both to the biblical John and to pioneer wool-grower John Macarthur and his reproductive legacy: ‘The seed of this apostle is still living and the seed of his seed—the
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flocks which he bred are still living, and both are looked upon as the first families in the land.’14 Kisch’s attentions, however, lie squarely with the uncredited and founding family of sheep themselves and not the conventionally acclaimed Macarthurs: ‘Thanks to its sheep Australia reigns over the wool market of the world, and the sheep reign over Australia; their development has determined that of the continent.’15 As Kisch sees it, sheep are themselves figured as the nation’s originators, fundamental to Australia’s national development. They are applauded because they encapsulate a moment of ‘pure’ origination that supersedes any prior or competitive claims to the originary (such as those of indigenous Australians or even convicts). Kisch’s admiration, on the other hand, is strictly ironic. For Kisch, the celebration of the merino’s apparently unfettered productivity, its contribution to national fullness, ignores at its peril an ‘unsettling’ trail of emptiness and devastation: For love of sheep, the courses of rivers were followed, and the inland regions disclosed. For love of sheep, the land was taken away from small wheat farmers. For love of sheep, whole forests were destroyed by fire and ring-barking. For love of sheep, it was thought that the aborigines should be exterminated.16 In a string of poetic observations, Kisch carefully lowers the sheep from the highpoints of Australian history and in so doing recalls an earlier and equally disquieting study. In 1909 the celebrated Australian historian C. E. W. Bean embarked on a year of intensive sheep research in western New South Wales. His findings were published periodically in the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘The Wool Land’ before being collated into On the Wool Track, a monumental study of the habits of sheep—and the shearers, boundary-riders, bullock-teams and the swagmen they shared the landscape with. Bean’s primary quest in On the Wool Track was to locate the meaning of sheep to Australia. His findings were unexpectedly bleak: ‘There, around Lake Eyre, and over some parts of Central Australia, you may see them today—deserted homesteads standing out from the desert
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with the marks of old settlement around them. That is what sheep mean to Australia.’17 For Bean, sheep can be represented only in terms of the condition of their absence as the trace of their (prior) presence. A sheep is quantifiable by its remainder. The price of a sheep’s hermeneutic repletion is an immanent completion—a state in which nothing more can be absorbed—an extreme absence (sheep runs without sheep), and a type of redundance (remnant homesteads that provide shelter to no one). Bean finds in the trace of their passing simultaneously a significatory absence and redundance—a sort of hermeneutic cannibalisation. Sheep graze the field of signification. They literally and metaphorically eat us out of house and home. Bean’s empty homestead where neither human nor animal is at home is a placeless place—and the very terms of his description make it imperative to (re)think the uses to which the distinction between the world of animals and the world of humans can be put. In an empty space, who is my neighbour? With whom or what do I dwell? Bean reiterates the structuring absence of sheep early in his research. With no hint of irony, he tells us that there is apparently nothing to say about sheep: ‘ “It’s a cur’ous thing,” said the bullock driver, shifting his pipe from one corner of his straight, strong, comprehensive mouth to the other, “it’s a cur’ous thing, when you think about it, that though most has made our whack out of ’em, you never ’eard tell a good yarn about a sheep.” ’18 Bean’s anonymous bullock driver goes on to suggest that horses and bullocks, on the other hand, are just like humans, and he proceeds to prove his point with one anecdote after another. He further concedes that Cattle are not just Clever—they’re dead crafty. The journalist Bean needs little convincing. He adds to the litany of sheeply sins the following observation: ‘Everyone has a yarn to tell about his dog and his horse, and even his cow and his cat. But whoever tells yarns about his sheep—even about their vices? The sheep hasn’t got any. It hasn’t apparently any character at all. The best way to describe it is to describe what it hasn’t got.’19 A sheep, Bean says instead, is just a sheep. It is on the one hand without pretensions to humanness (character), but it also holds no mystery to us. According to Bean and his bullock driver, the mannerisms of sheep belong only to themselves. Sheep are themselves and only
12
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themselves. Insular. Self-evident. Sheep cannot be subjected to the realm of narrative since in their insularity they do not possess the attributes of the conventional. Indeed it is only at another representational extreme, when sheep are erased of all singularity and revered as an operator for mimicry, that they are invested with a type of conventionality. To follow like a sheep is to abandon singularity in favour of conformity. C. E. W. Bean’s early twentieth-century sheep anticipate Dolly, the fin de siècle sheep clone, almost a century later. Both represent an extreme absence (nought, the possible) and an extreme presence (the redundant, the many). Without attribute, sheep are fleeced, naked, entirely possible. No difference and complete difference both produce the undifferentiated. These sheep dwell in the province of being both similar to (as a sequence of repetition) and becoming ‘similar’ (as a generic state of indistinguishability). In Bean’s observation, the blankness of sheep are mimetically foreshadowed and followed by the emptiness of the spaces they occupy. Sheep pass (in the various senses of the word). They proceed; and the result is a something that is also a nothing. Sheep increase, multiply, occupy space; there are only sheep. Their blankness is pure processuality. There is no conversion. Sheep, like those counted by the insomniac, are continuously stepping aside—to make room—for another sheep whose function is to step aside … and so on. If a sheep is indeed just a sheep, each is implicated in the process of garnering other sheep—rather than meaning, for example. They are engaged in a process of ‘sheeping’ or flocking. These sheep are not solely objects. They elude a model of knowing objects, of objects that can be ‘known’, not because their meaning is elusive, or because they require deeper or different comprehension, but because there is nothing to be known. To ‘know’ a sheep in this way is merely to acknowledge its nothingness. The Australian sheep films, in arguing that sheep are what ‘Australia’ lacks, reverse Bean’s structure of supplementarity in the conception(s) of the nation—in which sheep are an excess and a lack in the origin. In (perhaps inadvertently) admitting the impossibility of originary comprehensiveness, these films themselves set up a process of necessary and consistent supplementation, thereby producing representation as an effect in a process of deferral that simply
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produces more representation (rather than presence per se). This supplementation, then, is a partial process in which the sheep films struggle towards origin and conclusion, meaning and nothingness. In this sense, the sheep films are not attempting to abjure the nation (or totality) but instead reinscribe it by representing ‘representation’ in terms of supplementary figures (sheep) whose presence simultaneously invokes and works against historical totalities. The problem of origins at the heart of the Australian sheep film, then, is also a problem of representation. Commentators writing on national cinemas frequently propose models of representative difference and likeness in which the ontological status of what is represented—the nation—is seldom put into question but the tenor of its reproduction is. Critics of the Australian cinema, for example, characterise it equally in terms of a problem of (cultural) origins and a problem of (national) representation wherein national difference is repeatedly understood as a creative ‘failure’— the films themselves are simply the disfigured consequence of a clumsy cultural reproduction. This book argues that the sheep films, with their evident interest in questions of breeding and purity, cultural reproduction and continuity, the mimetic and the emblematic, are a particularly rich site for questions of (this) nature, questions that resonate through the critical reception of these films many years after their initial release. It makes its arguments in relation to two sheep films specifically: The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933), the focus of Part 2; and Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950), discussed in detail in Part 3. In dividing its attention between these two key Australian sheep films this book attempts to demonstrate the impossibilities of originary thinking in and about the Australian cinema. In The Squatter’s Daughter this is especially apparent when originary thinking is characterised as both a narrative and social problem of (self-)knowledge, of comprehension and comprehensiveness where identity and authorship are concerned. The analysis of Bitter Springs locates the problem of originary thinking in the way representative structures attempt to achieve closure (since totalisation or comprehensiveness is impossible). Both films must dissimulate in order to cover their own openings or origins, revealing the ways in which their representations are organised by attempted occlusions of the very conditions of those representations.
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The films I write about are also interesting in that they constitute a particular way of thinking about and representing animality or, specifically, ‘sheep-ness’ in the cinema—both encompassing and declining the discursive strategies of ‘becoming’ and allegory. These sheep films are characterised by a constant entangling, confounding and substituting of their signifying terms, which makes them as tantalising for reassessment as they are resilient. In these films, sheep come to embody a series of representative ‘impossibilities’—understood at any given time in terms of both/either emblem and symptom, allegory and mimesis, produce and producer, and so on; and, in every instance, underlining the impossibilities of originary thinking as any basis for a theory of aesthetic or social organisation. Sheep study begs—or, better—risks a kind of woolly-mindedness. It might well be that the study of sheep is one of the few pursuits in which wool-gathering—a kind of dreamy, operative absent-mindedness—might, even in the context of an academic argument, find a place of refuge.
Notes 1
Cited in H. B. Austin, The Merino: Past, Present and Probable, Grahave Book Company, Sydney, 1947 (frontispiece).
2
Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’, in Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha (ed.), Routledge, London, 1990, p. 121.
3
40,000 Years of Dreaming (George Miller, 1996; commissioned as part of the BBC series A Century of Cinema).
4
More recently the analogy of the film industry and the wool industry has been sounded as a caution. A discussion paper written to rally the film industry in the face of poor ‘branding’ almost shouts its warning: ‘Look what has happened to Australia’s once greatest industry, the wool industry. Once it enjoyed status with unprecedented political, community, investor and media support. Australians were strong consumers and the industry was one of our most important exporters. Today, Wool Brand Australia is seriously devalued at home and overseas and is facing boycotts and accusations of cruel industry practices …’ Ian Sutton for the Australian Screen Council (2005), ‘Discussion paper’, http://www.australianscreencouncil.org/about.html, accessed 9 September 2005.
5
Although my theoretical framework differs from his, the idea that film history is necessarily defined by its incompleteness and partiality is taken up at the conclusion of Tom O’Regan’s unsurpassed meditation on the
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national cinema in Australia: Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 354. O’Regan’s call for modesty on the part of film critics and historians derives in part from his argument that the national cinema itself is an ‘unprincipled assemblage’ incapable of a general principle or unitary explanation (p. 40). 6
Mark C. Taylor, Tears, State University of New York Press, New York, 1990, p. 204.
7
ibid., p. 205.
8
ibid., p. 206.
9
John Berger, ‘Why look at animals?’ in About Looking, Vintage Books, New York 1991, p. 8.
10
Although Babe was written and directed by Chris Noonan, George Miller as producer is most commonly identified as the film’s author.
11
Philip Brophy, ‘Cinesonics: Dinosaur sounds’, Real Time/On Screen 35, (February/March 2000), p. 18.
12
Apocryphally uttered in February 1935, when Hughes was Minister for Health and Repatriation.
13
Egon Kisch, Australian Landfall, Martin Secker & Warburg, London, 1937, p. 260.
14
ibid.
15
ibid, p. 267.
16
ibid, pp. 267–8.
17
C. E. W. Bean, On the Wool Track, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1985, p. 8.
18
ibid., p. 9.
19
ibid., pp. 11–12.
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Part 1 Sheep thinking or thinking sheep: Philosophy’s animal within
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Chapter 1
One, two sheep perchance to dream
All we see asleep is sleep, all we see awake is death. Derek Jarman1
When you’re awake, you’re a sheep (asleep). The Bureau2
Sheep literally graze their way across the history of the Australian cinema. They graze and gambol, shifting restlessly across the screen in mobs so large that the very frames they occupy seem to swell beneath the weight. They are the unsung stars of the Australian film industry. Grazing sheep. Gambolling sheep. Gatherings of sheep. A casual viewer could be excused for thinking that we are a nation of insomniacs doomed to imagine an endlessly looped repetition of sheep in our unsettled search for more complete dreams. Endlessly bleating, leaping sheep. Looped. In this sense alone, sheep might be seen as more than a repeated motif of the Australian cinema. These recurrent sheep eventually come to represent something further—something about the act or idea of the multiple and repetition itself. Perhaps the insomniac’s looping sheep are really an end(lessness) in itself. Perhaps our woolly imaginings are really the dreams we long for—or the nightmare. To sleep. With sheep.
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The incessantly gambolling sheep lulls the troubled slumberer with its unrelenting sameness. The anxious sleeper should count the sheep as if it is one in an uninterrupted sequence of many. One. Two. Three. And so on. Each sheep is paradoxically distinct and yet without specificity. With each newly cloned sheep there is an accumulation as well as an equivalence, a redundancy and (a) reason. Sheep are both the opiate and the masses. The would-be sleeper tosses and turns in a state of somnolent turmoil—suspended between wakefulness and entropy. Both and yet not quite either. All awake and yet seemingly paralysed. To the insomniac, frozen in this state of frustrating restlessness, each oneiric sheep heralds the possibility of being the last but is also the first. Their presence both promises and stalls the transition to passivity. ‘If someone were present who suffered from sleeplessness, he would perhaps go home, sit down in a corner and think: The whole thing will be over in a moment; all you have to do is wait for a minute and you will see the ram, and the ordeal will be over.’3 Between every bleating echo is the threshold of a beginning that might also be an ending. What is indistinguishable seems continuous, and the continuous takes us directly to the indistinguishable. The worry of insomnia holds within it a procession of sheep and a cession of sheep. Their distribution and their dispersal. A plenitude and an emptiness. It is the uneasy association of the one and the many. Now you see (a) sheep. Now you don’t. Relief, in the form of sleep, arrives only at the moment we embrace and accept that the sequence (of sheep) is potentially unending and unbounded, that its nascent work includes the (notquite-a) sleeper. The labour of the unrestful is not only to repeat a unity (the folding of subjective/objective) but also to undo it. For Emmanuel Levinas the ‘vigilance of insomnia which keeps our eyes open’ has no subject as such: Wakefulness is anonymous. It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia it is the night itself that watches. It watches. In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being, all the thoughts which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing. They have no support. I am, one might say, the object rather than the subject of an anonymous thought. To be sure I have at least
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the experience of being an object, I still become aware of this anonymous vigilance; but I become aware of it in a movement in which the I is already detached from anonymity, in which the limit situation of impersonal vigilance is reflected in the ebbing of a consciousness which abandons it.4 Multiplicity and unity is in me and my visions of sheep. Relief arrives only when the purpose is lost; when there is no duration. Quiescence accompanies the recognition or acceptance of enigmatic repetition. The rapport with repetition invokes a type of stasis (a presence), a deathly presentiment that is also ec-static (outside presence). The insomniac’s desire is for a passivity that mimics the disaggregating effect of unbounded repetition wherein the end returns us, inexorably, to the beginning; an endless and aimless movement in which the surface stretches triumphantly over the vertical climbs of consciousness. The experience of disintegration mimetically foreshadows the degeneration of death. ‘Insomnia … designates not only the disappearance of every object, but the extinction of the subject.’5 Individuated sheep, understood as ‘particles’ or fragments, lose any life of their own—they are devivified and turned into dying matter. The frustrated sleeper is worn down, worn away, by the immense flow of the passing and presence of the multiple. These aquatic sheep know no shore. They overflow us. Our thirst for sleep is extinguished only when we are submerged, inside and outside a thick suffocating sea of sheep. We are both consumers (of sheep) and consumed (by sheep). ‘The animal which is eaten eats back.’6 Already up to our knees and sinking in the ebbing waters of somnolence, we are prompted by the philosopher Michel Serres to remember the shape shifter, Proteus: ‘Proteus—the god of the sea, a minor and marginal god, nonetheless a god of the first water, a god whose name stands at the beginning—is the shepherd who tends the oceanic flocks in the prairies of Poseidon.’7 The insomniac is the shepherd of multiplicities, of portentous ewes, heavy with possibility. Her sheep both preclude and promise the reprieve that comes with inertia. In the protean state of unrest we drift, looking over the sheep not in fascination or assessment but in what Lingis (following Levinas) has described as a look of rapture—a look of non-interpretation. ‘The eye,
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adrift in the deep[,] is not penetrating, examining, interrogating, surveying, gauging. It passes over surface effects, caresses.’8 This is a look that does not apprehend or appropriate the object it gazes upon. The eye that holds the rapturous look is, according to Lingis, a voluptuous eye: ‘The voluptuous eye does not seek to comprehend the unity in the surface dispersion of shapes, to penetrate to the substance beneath chromatic appearances, to comprehensively apprise itself of the functions and relationships; it caresses, is caressed by the surface effects of an alien domain. It is seeking the invisible.’9 Georges Bataille also describes animality in terms of the depths of the unfathomable. For Bataille, the animal is in the world like ‘water in water’. ‘The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is furthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me.’10 Proteus’ sheep are neither individuated nor made summary. They are multiple and multiplying without recourse to the unifying comforts of the concept. According to Serres, the unit is always mathematical—comprising a sum and a division. ‘That herd must be singular in its totality and it must also be made up of a given number of sheep or buffalo.’11 But, he asks, is it ever possible to speak of the multiple without reverting to the demands of principles, systems, aggregates? Or their obverse: individuals, elements, atoms, numbers? A flock, understood as the multiple, need not be the ‘product’ of an addition. The multiple is neither discrete nor aggregate but a mixture. The multiple lives a perpetually reduced existence. In a state of ‘semibeing’, the multiple is not self-evident as an irreducible element; nor does it signify more than itself, although it suggests both possibilities. The undulations of the multiple, then, are never predictable. The flock, as a multiple, lives in the somnolent twilight between sleep and wakefulness where the distinction between a desire for sleep and sheep is no longer clear. When you’re awake you’re asleep (a sheep).
Conceiving animals We have often been asked whether we believe that animals really think—rather than depend upon blind instinct. We have learned to respect the ability of all animals and birds to think, particularly birds. Charles and Elsa Chauvel12
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[There is] a bestiary at the origin of philosophy. Jacques Derrida13
Bataille’s observation that the animal is defined by that which is at once ‘unfathomable’ and familiar is at the heart of a contemporary philosophical debate about animals and ontology. This debate, which is perhaps best exemplified by the writings of Heidegger and Derrida’s responses to them, rests on the way traditional philosophy systematically engages with ‘the animal’ as other in order to establish the outer limits of (human) identity. There is both a moral and a metaphysical distinction drawn between animal and man in Western philosophy that has not until recently been seriously questioned. This distinction is premised on a particularly Self-serving figuration of the animal by a significant number of prominent philosophers. Animal theorist Akira Lippit goes so far as to describe philosophy’s use of the animal as a type of ‘serial logic’ that goes something like: ‘… the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a radically antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of humanism.’14 Even philosophers explicitly dedicated to rethinking the humanist underpinnings of Western philosophy, such as Heidegger and Levinas, stand accused of failing when it comes to their handling of ‘the animal’. To his devoted critics, such as Derrida, Heidegger palpably fails to ‘think’ animals or animality, and this alone, Derrida claims, points to a wider failure in Heidegger’s philosophical project: to rethink the Western tradition of ontology. Heidegger’s endeavour is to expose the pivotal role of originary thought in Western philosophy, which he calls (following Kant) an ‘ontotheology’ (and where there is theology there is, almost invariably, a sheep or two). The ‘ontotheological’ tradition of Western philosophy encompasses a reliance on fundamentalist principles—on underlying essentials such as Identity, Unity, Being, Presence—which are in turn encapsulated in the notion of the omnipresent One (i.e. God). Metaphysics thinks of beings as such, that is, in general. Metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground-giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of the all that accounts for the ground, that is, of the All-Highest.15 One, two sheep perchance to dream
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According to Heidegger, the height of ontotheological thinking can be found in the writings of Hegel, for whom the goal of philosophy lay in the enjoyment of presence or, as Heidegger summarises his thinking, ‘Hegel, faithful to tradition, sees the matter of thinking in beings as such and as a whole, in the movement of Being from its emptiness to its developed fullness’.16 For Hegel, both the universal and the particular subject achieve self-identity through the recognition of self in the other. So the subject is in a sense tautological, sublating otherness and becoming present to itself through acts of self re-presentation. Hegel finds the fundamental basis of identity in the recognition of Sameness. In his ‘Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger explains how humanism perpetuates the primacy of subjectivity and the subject. In contrast, he proposes a relationship between Man and human consciousness or Dasein (‘being right there’) that ‘corrects’ this emphasis. Heidegger’s quest for ‘ontological difference’ (the difference in and through which both Being and being are determined) is an explicit disavowal of the Hegelian reliance on Sameness and identity, and forms the basis for a substantial amount of the post-structuralist dismantling of binary thinking in Western philosophy.17 But Heidegger struggles with the way in which his concept of Dasein or Being might relate to animals (especially without recourse to the orthodox distinctions founded on divinity or human reason). In seeking to determine an alternative understanding of the ‘difference’ of the animal, Heidegger turns to the animal’s lack of language. This is a crucial distinction, since Heidegger argues that language expands the ontological dimension of Being, which in turn is the basis for his theory of ‘world’ and which in turn drives Heidegger’s critique of humanist notions of subjectivity. For Heidegger, ‘world’ precedes consciousness, giving rise to both conscious and non-conscious existence, without itself being one of them. Humans alone have the capacity to make the world appear (in films for example). According to Heidegger, animals are in the world, but this world belongs to others: The world is not the mere collection of the countable or the uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such things. The world
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worlds and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home … A stone is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of a surrounding into which they are linked.18 Here Heidegger seems to be suggesting, in absolute terms, that animals are worldless. In his earlier writings, however, he was not quite so resolved. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, for instance, Heidegger had attempted to answer the question that preoccupied so much of his later thinking (‘what is world?’) with a threefold answer: the stone is ‘worldless’ (Weltos). The animal is ‘poor in world’ (Weltarm). Man, on the other hand, is ‘world-forming’ (Weltbildend). The lizard might lie on a rock, but it does not know it is a rock. So although the lizard has a world, it is poor in the world—it has a world only in the sense that it is lacking or deprived—it doesn’t have enough. Unlike his philosophical predecessors, Heidegger is apparently uninterested in whether the animal has any immanent or essential features that distinguish it from Man, focusing instead on the animal’s relationship to the world. But his use of the comparative word ‘poor’ points to Man as his conceptual benchmark. The animal is only partial in relation to (human) Being. So when Heidegger announces that ‘Man is the shepherd of Being’, he not only draws on the implied figure of sheep to signal the difference between animals and humans in terms of their relation to Dasein, he also (perhaps unwittingly) concedes the role that animals have (especially those as indistinguishable as sheep) in providing the enabling conditions for the individual’s corralling of identity.19 The full quotation is instructive: ‘Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth.’ The animal exists by implication only and is not even named as such. Being ‘speaks’ on behalf of sheep. Sheep have no capacity to represent themselves—no language. The animal is passive in relation to all the dimensions of Being (even when metaphorically positioned as an absent figure of it). Being simultaneously erases and inscribes sheep—sheep that are always-already lost.
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Sheep are outside Being in so much as they are obscured behind or underneath it (as if Being is a palimpsest). If you scratch away at the surface of Being long enough you might eventually uncover some patiently milling sheep. Man, on the other hand, as shepherd, is the custodian of Being. Being, then, is also outside Man, but Man alone has the capability to influence its movements. And Man is also the principal beneficiary of Being. Being is a counter in the calculation of Man, and Man is ultimately responsible for ensuring his own well-Being. There is here an underlying consistency between Heidegger’s early and later writings, in that the critical point of Heidegger’s conceptualisation of animal poverty is not really a matter of degree but a question of essence. Derrida, for example, claims that Heidegger exiles the animal from the world-forming Dasein in such a way that the two can never be reconciled: The difference he is talking about between poverty and wealth is not one of degree. For precisely because of a difference in essence, the world of the animal—and if the animal is poor in the world, and therefore in spirit one must be able to talk about a world of the animal, and therefore of a spiritual world—is not a species or a degree of the human world. This poverty is not an indigence, a meagreness of the world. It has, without doubt, the sense of privation (Entbehrung), of a lack: the animal does not have enough world, to be sure. But this lack is not to be evaluated as a quantitative relation to the entities of the world. It is not that the animal has a lesser relationship, a more limited access to entities, it has an other relationship.20 The animal’s poverty presupposes a form of having—it can be deprived of world only because it can potentially have a world. So Heidegger’s animal simultaneously has and does not have a world. According to Derrida, the animal’s poverty is a paradoxical condition that results from Heidegger’s belief that the animal does not interiorise its world through reflection (which he believes is directly related to the animal’s lack of language). In linking a (human) capacity for reflection with a capacity for language, Heidegger recalls Herder, who described the rise of human
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language in terms of the capacity to reflect on and distinguish animal noise (specifically sheep bleating). In his ‘Essay on the origin of languages’, Herder observes the relationship between language acquisition and reflection in an originary scene that hypothesises a sheep as the referent of the first word. His choice of an innocuous sheep is not accidental, since he is seeking to exemplify an operative human disinterest as the precondition of language development. The human disinterest in sheep is self-evident, apparently based neither on sexual desire nor on an appetite for lamb lunch: Let that lamb pass before his eye as an image—[something that happens] to him as to no other animal. Not as to the hungry, scenting wolf! … Not as to the aroused ram which has the [she-]lamb only as the object of its pleasure … Not as to every other animal to which the sheep is indifferent, and which consequently allows it to proceed past in light and shade because its instinct directs it to something else. Not so to the human being! As soon as he develops a need to become acquainted with the sheep, no instinct disturbs him, no sense tears him too close to the sheep or away from it; … White, soft, woolly—his soul operating with awareness, seeks a characterstic mark—the sheap bleats!—his soul has found a characteristic mark … This bleating, which makes the strongest impression on the soul, which tore itself away from all the other properties of viewing and feeling, jumped forth, penetrated most deeply, remains for the soul. The sheep comes again. White, soft, woolly—the soul sees, feels, takes awareness, seeks a characteristic mark—it bleats, and now the soul recognizes it again! ‘Aha! You are the bleating one!’ the soul feels inwardly. The soul has recognized it in a human way, for it recognizes and names it distinctly, that is, with a characteristic mark.21 For both Herder and later Heidegger, the faculty of reflection is central to understanding human language.22 And both rely on a figuring of the animal as outside human language. Instead, animals contribute their ‘lack’ of language to the development of human language. ‘The human being recognised the sheep by its bleating; this
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was a grasped sign on the occasion of which the soul distinctly recalled to awareness an idea. What else is that but a word? And what is the whole of human language but a collection of such words?’23 Without reflection and therefore without language, animals play a worldly role but only in the articulation of human identity. For Derrida, it is precisely on this point that Heidegger fails in his questioning of the human subject: ‘The chosen point of departure … is the entity that we are, we the questioning entities, we who, in that we are open to the question of Being and of the being of the entity we are, have this relation to self that is lacking in everything that is not Dasein.’24 In assuming a human capacity for (self-)reflection, Heidegger ends up confirming the very thing he is attempting to put into question: the humanist subject. In attributing to animals an incapacity for reflection and language, Heidegger relegates animals to the boundaries of being, excluding them from the essential categories that constitute existence itself. Consequently, Derrida claims, Heidegger’s project reasserts ‘a certain anthropocentric or even humanist teleology’.25 Derrida notes that Heidegger’s writing is not without complexity, but is adamant that from the outset Heidegger’s underlying conceptualisation of the animal is wanting: The Heideggarian discourse on the animal is violent and awkward, at times contradictory. Heidegger does not simply say ‘The animal is poor in the world [Weltarm],’ for, as distinct from the stone, it has a world. He says: the animal has a world in the mode of a not-having. But this not-having does not constitute in his view an indigence, the lack of a world that would be human. So why this negative determination? Where does it come from? There is no category of original existence for the animal: it is evidently not Dasein … (Being cannot appear, be, or be questioned as such [als] for the animal).26 What is most important about Heidegger’s reading of animal being is the ontological exclusion of animals. For Heidegger, there is no category of original existence for the animal. So while animals serve to make ontological categories possible, they do not themselves belong
28
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to any ontology, and it is this distinction that serves to define a fundamental difference between the animal and the human. In an earlier article about Heidegger’s approach to the subject and subjectivity, Derrida is explicitly critical of Heidegger’s view of a ‘world’ founded in absolute differences and hierarchies rather than some differences. In his essay ‘On reading Heidegger’, Derrida claims that Heidegger (perhaps unintentionally) reposits a classical and absolute binary opposition between the animal and the human simply by collecting all animals into one hegemonic entity: a non-human being.27 In direct response to Heidegger, Derrida himself describes animality as a realm of pure difference without distinction: ‘There is no such thing as Animality, but only a regime of differences without opposition.’28 For Derrida, the concept of Animality has the effect of effacing differences, to homogenise distinctions but preserve Difference: Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give … They have given themselves the word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept, ‘the Animal,’ they say. And they have given themselves this word, at the same time according to themselves, reserving for them, for humans, the right to the word, the name, the verb, the attribute, to a language of words, in short to the very thing that the others in question would be deprived of, those that are corralled within the grand territory of the beasts: the Animal.29 Derrida names a series of philosophers (Aristotle, Lacan, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas), all of whom recite a common refrain: that the animal is without language. Derrida suggests instead the need to avoid rendering the animal meaningful in human terms altogether. For theorists like Derrida, the animal does more than simply show the human how not to be a subject or how to operate other than in identity. Derrida’s purpose is to avoid reducing animals to an edifying function; to avoid recuperating the animal for human end(ing)s. Instead, for Derrida, the question raised by the encounter between humans and animals is itself as much a question of origins as
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one of endings: ‘The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.’30 The (naked) encounter between the animal and human is a foundational moment—a creative moment—a moment in which concept and conception are aligned; a naked nascent moment that stretches language and thought into uncharted territory beyond the discriminatory divisions of Heidegger’s ontological difference. For Derrida, the way to begin this reassessment of the philosophical animal is to reconsider our approach to language. In refocusing our attention towards the animal, Derrida insists that we must also consider our understandings of the operations of language: … [If ] one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly, from the inside, everything changes … These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human. It is not only a question of covering up ruptures and heterogeneities. I would simply contest that they give rise to a single linear, indivisible, oppositional limit, to a binary opposition between the human and the infra-human. And what I am proposing here should allow us to take into account scientific knowledge about the complexity of ‘animal languages’, genetic coding, all forms of marking within which so-called human language, as original as it might be, does not allow us to ‘cut’ once and for all where we would in general like to cut … And this also means that we never know, and never have known, how to cut up a subject.31 Derrida shifts the emphasis of Heidegger’s account of language as a determining factor in distinguishing the human world from the animal. For Derrida the question that might instead be asked of (human) language is: what are its limitations in any attempt to speak of the animal world? How do we begin thinking (the/an) animal? Is language reliable as a universal method of determining the relationship to being?
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Derrida proposes a threefold response to these questions that he encapsulates in a chimerical term: ‘animot’ (literally, ‘any word’). Animot represents Derrida’s attempt to expand language, to speak from an other place. Animot is, as Derrida puts it, an outlaw word—an invented word that commits various grammatical crimes and which also edges towards the idea of a language of the ‘outside’. Derrida intends his invented term to be more than just challenging to the (French) ear. With it, he means to suggest the plurality of animals heard in the singular (animot as a homonym of animaux): ‘Among nonhumans and separate from nonhumans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be homogenized, except by means of violence and willful ignorance, within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general.’32 Second, Derrida suggests that the suffix ‘mot’ in l’animot should bring us back to the word itself, and specifically the noun: It opens onto the referential experience of the thing as such, as what it is in its being, and therefore to the reference point by means of which one has always sought to draw the limit, the unique and indivisible limit held to separate man from animal, namely the word, the nominal language of the word, the voice that names and that names the thing as such, such as it appears in its being …33 And finally Derrida concludes that the problem of language encapsulated in his play on words (and animals) in animot is a question of thinking: ‘It would not be a matter of “giving speech back” to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than privation.’34 For Derrida, the encounter between animal and human is a creative moment that unleashes the possibilities for thinking ‘nothing’— for a type of thinking that does not link originarity to a single privileged position (‘the human’, for example). The challenge posed by this encounter is both how to think nothing of ‘the human’ and how to think nothing of ‘the animal’.
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Everything changes It wasn’t like today. Everything’s changed. People have twenty times more sheep but are twenty times more stupid. Adieu Monde (or Pierre and Claire’s Story)35
No more sheeps. Never again sheeps. Ang Lee on the set of Sense and Sensibility36
For Derrida and many post-Heideggarian thinkers, the question of how to imagine or think (animals) without resorting to originary thinking or representations is still an open one. Two theorists who have contributed significantly to the project of reconceiving the relationship between the human and the animal are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their joint work on becoming-animal can be seen as an important development in the project to ‘think nothing’ of both animals and humans. Their avoidance of the pitfalls entailed in originary thinking is premised on two moves. First, they attempt to imagine a mode of being in which originarity has no singular or privileged point. The second related gesture is their attempt to try to imagine animality (and the relationship of animals to the human) outside the terms of language. Instead, they turn their thoughts to other motivations for creativity. In these moves, Deleuze and Guattari claim they neither exile the animal to absolute alterity nor domesticate them to the human. Like Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari believe animality points to ‘ways-out or means of escape that the human would never have thought of by himself’.37 But unlike Derrida, who seems, at least for the moment, content to leave the idea of thinking animal ‘at the limits’ of thought, Deleuze and Guattari engage in a complicated speculation of what such a thinking might entail. They propose the idea of becominganimal, which they believe ‘replaces subjectivity’ altogether.38 Becoming-animal is a creative transformation of experience involving the sweeping away of identities—human or animal. Deleuze and Guattari propose an ontological dynamic that begins with a becoming that, they argue, is always ultimately a becoming-animal. For Deleuze and Guattari, ontological dynamics in this sense do not rely on language but on transitory ‘energies’ and ‘assemblages’. Being is crossed by the dynamic of becoming, and becoming encounters various states of being—both are inseparable.
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In their theory of becoming-animal Deleuze and Guattari explicitly set out to un-human the human rather than to humanise the animal or, for that matter, to animalise the human. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal is to experience interchange—to question the selfexplanatory and pure categories of humanism. In the act of becominganimal the human takes flight from individuality on its way to becoming imperceptible (a state of nothingness). Deleuze and Guattari go to great lengths to emphasise the constant activity of becoming-animal. Becoming is an infinite process of transformation and is not based on an opposition (let alone an exchange) between self and other. Nor is it as if something repressed returns or rises to the surface or is unleashed by becoming-animal (as many horror films might have it). Becoming-animal, according to Deleuze and Guattari, should be understood as part of an ‘event’, which is experienced as a swarm of sensations and intensities— outside the conventions of language: To become animal is to participate in movement … to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of non-signifying terms … There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted manner.39 As with earlier theorists who believed that the animal operated outside language, Deleuze and Guattari give further life to this idea by suggesting that becoming-animal is also an activity that gestures towards an event beyond the conditions of language. Becominganimal is a movement described best in terms of ‘lines of flight’ and should not be thought of as an activity that moves through the habits of language, such as metaphor: ‘Becoming is never imitating. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of intensities or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat welling up inside us.’40 Becoming is metamorphic, not metaphoric. It is neither substitutive nor atavistic.
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While Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to show how becominganimal is not a binary action, they do—at least at one point in their speculations—acknowledge that there are binary animals of a kind. For Deleuze and Guattari, animals can be principally understood as any of three kinds; Pets (Oedipal animals), Symbolic animals (whose representative forms are of use to humans) and Multiple animals (which they also called demonic animals).41 The first two kinds of animal conform to binary systems of identification. The third kind of animal, the Multiple, addresses Derrida’s challenge to philosophy: to try to understand animals outside the terms of summary or oppositional categories. Deleuze and Guattari use Multiple animals as the cornerstone for their theories of becoming-animal since in their view Multiple animals are furthest from individuality and the Oedipal subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘multiplicity’ defines the ‘being’ of animals (i.e. it is not just an empirical observation of animals): ‘Every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack … it has pack modes rather than characteristics.’42 Becoming-animal also therefore involves a relationship to multiplicity (‘A becoming-animal always involves a pack … a multiplicity’) and is not about the individual but about relationships—to each other, to kinds, to environments and to themselves.43 But Deleuze and Guattari find little to love in the first and second order of animals. The second order, Symbolic animals, they define in terms of fixed meanings. Symbolic or State animals lack the kind of mutability that Deleuze and Guattari find so fascinating in Multiple animals. It could be, however, that Deleuze and Guattari fail to consider the way State animals also fluctuate and flow, a failure especially pronounced in a post–Cold War political climate that is itself without clear definition (if it ever was). But it is the first category of animal— the Pet—with which Deleuze and Guattari have the most trouble and over which there is significant philosophical debate. It is easy to find a certain rigidity in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking about pets. At the heart of their complaint is the way in which domestic(ated) animals are recuperated to the human. These are ‘individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, “my” cat, “my” dog. These animals invite us to egress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation.’44 In their preference for multiples and packs Deleuze and Guattari dismiss cats and dogs as
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too individualistic. Pets stand in an almost dialectical opposition to State animals. The latter is an absolute, whereas Pets are finite (in that they are ciphers for human ‘individuality’) and ‘relative’ in the sense they are familiar (and perhaps therefore familial). As Steve Baker suggests, there is more to Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of the Pet. In his chapter titled ‘Fear of the familiar’, Baker locates the source of Deleuze and Guattari’s specific Pet problem within their overarching mission to expose the complacencies of psychoanalysis. Baker suggests Pets represent all the things Deleuze and Guattari seek to undermine in psychoanalysis, such as ‘family loyalty, obedience to the law and the possibility of a world made meaningful by well formed and exhaustive interpretations’.45 The Pet, it seems, is not distinct enough from the human—it holds an ambiguous status. In their animosity towards the Pet, Deleuze and Guattari share the feelings of John Berger. Berger’s influential essay ‘Why look at animals?’ describes pets as nothing more than ‘creatures of their owner’s way of life’, living in a dependent state of isolation and artifice that forms the basis for the resemblance between the pet and the human.46 Berger fingers the pet as an unnecessary complication in the otherwise unqualified distinction between humans and animals. For Berger, the pet is particularly defined by its lack of usefulness: The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping exactly, of pets (in the 16th century the word usually referred to a lamb raised by hand) is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit … which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies.47 Perhaps paradoxically, pets (unconsumed animals) arise in a culture defined by an orientation to consumption, an observation that should not pass without further comment. To begin his extended exegesis on the ills of pet-keeping, Berger takes as his starting point Levi-Strauss’s observation that ‘animals are good to think’ by which he understands Levi-Strauss to be identifying the role of animals as functional tools in the consideration of human identity. But there is also another sense of
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the phrase ‘animals are good to think’ in which Levi-Strauss might be seen to suggest that animals assist the production of thinking; that they serve thought (as much as they serve humans) in the way that Derrida identifies when he says that the encounter with the animal inspires thinking itself. Levi-Strauss’s full sentence provides some context: ‘We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen [as totems] not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think”.’48 In part, what Levi-Strauss is suggesting is that the function of human consumption (of the animal) is sublated by a larger need to make sense. Rather than understand animals in terms of their capacity to nourish humans, we might equally consider their capacity to inspire and assist human creativity (irrespective of their domestic status). It is not the culinary usefulness or uselessness of animals that is most important; it is their activity in relation to thinking that matters. Animals above all have a relationship to the conceptual, to conceiving.
Do electric sheep dream (of androids)? What animals dream of I do not know.
Sigmund Freud49
Some animals never sleep. Sheep never do, not that I could detect; whenever you look at them they’re looking back. Expecting to be fed.
Philip K. Dick50
The theorist Akira Lippit has speculated on the importance of the cinema to the ways we think (the) animal. His writings on this issue emphasise the way philosophy has traditionally denied animals both language and death and shows how an understanding of the mutually creative relationship between cinema and animal might also address these historical conceptualisations.51 For Lippit, cinema is itself like an animal.52 The cinema, he says, ‘may be the technological metaphor that configures mimetically, magnetically, the other world of the animal’.53 According to Lippit: There is no proper death of the animal and no death as such in cinema. Both media haunted by the shadow of death and
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the absence of language, stake a space beyond the conventions of language and death … [C]inema reconciles the paradox of animal death (animals die but are incapable of death) through a fantasy of reanimation, projected into and then outward from the apparatus.54 Cinema, then, is the method by which modern culture preserves animals. Lippit claims that animals, as ‘filmic organisms’, are transformed into semiotic facilities—and are thus granted the language they would otherwise be denied by philosophy. In this way, Lippit confers to animals (but also the cinema) an originary role. ‘Cinema, then, can be seen as the simultaneous culmination and beginning of an evolutionary cycle: the narrative of the disappearance of animals and that of the rise of the technical media intersect in the cinema. The advent of cinema is thus haunted by the animal figure, driven as it were, by the wildlife after death of the animal.’55 Lippit supports his theoretical speculations about the originary relationship of cinema and animal with the historical observation that the cinema has from the outset been aligned with the animal, based in its nascence on the entertainments offered by the fairground attractions and zoos that had arisen to prominence contemporaneously. He cites Hervé Aubron, who goes so far as to suggest that the animal inevitably questions the origins of cinema because ‘the animal was its first model. But also because cinema was fused with animals in its earliest stages.’56 Extending Aubron’s observation, it might be possible to argue that animals have asked questions of the cinema from the outset because any purported moment of origin is always about both production (genesis) and consumption, about presence and nothingness (but not as the opposite of presence), about identity and the continuum of differences. If this is so, then there is an obligation to look more closely at how animals are represented in the cinema—to uncover the axioms by which they are allowed presence and the ways in which they might simultaneously question them. Members of a particular Navajo community could have had something of this in mind when they first discussed the nature of cinema and sheep with the celebrated ethnographic filmmakers Sol Worth and John Adair. Visiting this community in 1966, Worth and
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Adair determined to teach a small group the skills of filmmaking in order to ‘get away from an examination of man as an object and try to learn more about him as a subject’.57 The two ethnographers published what stands as the most comprehensive chronicle of the sheep film written to date. Sheep were everywhere, grazing freely all over the landscape. There were so many sheep around the schoolhouse that we, half jokingly and half seriously, put a sign on the dormitory door, ‘No sheep allowed in editing room.’ Despite that, we would often come in and find the students working at their tables while one or two sheep from a flock outside were standing near them watching.58 Here, in this half-joking, half-serious anecdote, Worth and Adair admit the possibility that despite their attempt to make ‘man’ a subject, for the grazing, gazing sheep, man remains, above all, an object. In analysing the films produced by their students, Worth and Adair found a series of common preoccupations. They noted that across many films a ‘search for identity becomes a central theme. Other films show a deep concern for the general concept of the search for origins, whether of self or of their traditions.’59 Their description of their first meeting with several key members of the Navajo community is worth citing in full: Finally Adair felt that it was time to bring up the subject of our visit. Adair explained that we wanted to teach some Navajo to make movies and mentioned Worth’s part in the process several times. By the time Adair had finished, Yazzie was looking at Worth frequently, seeming for the first time to acknowledge his presence as legitimate. When Adair finished, Sam thought for a while, and then turned to Worth and asked a lengthy question which was interpreted as, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any harm?’ Worth was happy to explain that as far as he knew, there was no chance that making movies would harm the sheep. Sam thought this over and then asked, ‘Will making
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movies do the sheep good?’ Worth was forced to reply that as far as he knew making movies wouldn’t do the sheep any good. Sam thought this over, then looking around at us, he said, ‘Then why make movies?’60 Worth and Adair don’t proffer a reply to Sam, preferring instead to use the anecdote as an opportunity to question the value and effect of their own research on the Navajo filmmakers they encountered. But Sam’s question belies his concern for sheep themselves, something Worth and Adair have difficulty in admitting. They read his question symbolically on the basis that ‘as far as we could learn Sam Yazzie and his family owned no sheep at the time we were in Pine Springs’.61 Because he didn’t actually own any sheep, Worth and Adair presume that his real concern was ‘how the new method of communication that we were to teach his people could help the Navajo. How would making films support their values and their way of life?’62 But in this brief conversation, Sam identifies the underlying indifference of a human enterprise (filmmaking) towards the animal, which he counters with an equally weighted ambivalence towards cinema. The anthropologists think Nothing of re-presenting the sheep. Sam thinks nothing of a cinema that thinks Nothing of the animal. In a later sequence in their book, Worth and Adair do seem to recognise that their connection between value and possessive property might not hold true for the Navajo community. One of the filmmakers, Mike, who also did not personally own any sheep, needed a sheep image for his movie and so borrowed one from another filmmaker, Susie. Worth and Adair were shocked to discover that Susie had been providing sheep footage to many of the filmmakers unbeknown to the authors. In thinking about the incident, as we tried to reconstruct it, it became clear that the meaning of ‘borrow some film’ was understood by us in a totally different way from the way in which they used it. We ignored it when we heard it because ‘borrowing’ a ‘piece of film’ to a filmmaker in our culture means to borrow the celluloid, not the image on it.63
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It is the sheep, not the material by which they are re-presented or articulated, that is important to Mike. No other footage was ‘borrowed’ by the Navajo filmmakers. Only the sheep. To the self-appointed educators, Worth and Adair, the explanation is simple: ‘No self-respecting Navajo would want his home environment shown without sheep, and no apprentice Navajo filmmaker would want to deprive a relative of such a subject.’64 For Worth and Adair, the cinema is understood as an approach to the world that operates outside the terms of the animal itself. For the Navajo filmmakers, the animal is in the world (without privation). The Navajo filmmakers feel a keen kinship with the sheep—not just as the subject of the filmmaker’s gaze, but as participants in a cultural economy of consumption that includes a role for sheep as audience. As Worth and Adair noted themselves, it is the sheep that stand about watching the filmmakers (not just the other way around). There appears to be a particular affinity between the Australian cinema and sheep, in which sheep are important not simply for their repeated presence as exemplary figures (or as State animals, as Delueze and Guatarri would have it). Sheep accompany us in our explorations into the dimensions of an Australian ontology: If I crudely suggest that the Australian sheep films address Australians as animals, I don’t intend to deploy a disparaging metaphor (although in attending some Australian films it might feel as if one is being led like a lamb to the slaughter). Instead, I mean to point towards the way in which the encounter between the national cinema and its audience suggests an understanding or even an assumption of a supplementary subjectivity, a sense of being as an audience that exceeds and questions the everyday experience of identity. There is a hint of this potential relationship in a recent popular Australian film. The Dish is a film about a video transmission device set in the middle of a sheep paddock. The year is 1969, just before there was wide support for an Australian film industry: ‘A nervous security guard is heard off camera challenging a possible intruder: “Halt who goes there?” Eventually a tentative answer emerges from the dark: “Baaaaaa.” ’
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Thinking nothing: National and notional origins I’m lambed out. Prime Minister John Howard66
There are no animals ‘as such’, rather only the extraordinary variety that in the animal alphabet would begin with ants, apes, arachnids, antelopes, aardvarks, anchovies, alligators, Americans, Australians … David Wood65
It should be emphasised that sheep films do not solely occur in the Australian cinema but can be found in a number of national industries, although they tend to accumulate in the early American and French cinemas and most predominantly in the Australian cinema (although not especially the New Zealand cinema).67 We can surmise from this observation that the films do not simply arise as a direct expression of a particular country’s prevailing economic organisation. Indeed, the vast majority of Australian sheep films were made during a lengthy period of declining prosperity for the Australian wool industry. Furthermore, in the case of the Australian sheep films and as further complication to this question of their own origins, the films themselves have a complicated ‘national’ genealogy—at various times the product of Australian or British or American or Belgian directors and financiers. This matter of the origin of the sheep films pervades critical discussion of the films—particularly as it pertains to the question of nationalism. Is the preponderance of sheep in the Australian cinema simply the exercising of a national reflex? Is the repeated image of sheep in this cinema an iconic or at times a (typically Australian) ironic expressiveness? It is my contention that the repeated use of sheep in the Australian cinema should be understood not merely as a transparent metaphor or cinematic device in the service of the national but that it bears its own materiality—that these sheep can draw meaning to themselves and to the terms of their rhetoricity and not just to their place in the national imaginary. It would be circumspect to assume, as William D. Routt does, that films do not merely represent contemporary ideas about nationalism but are also able to comment on them.68 In this sense, the sheep films might also speak of representation and representativeness, drawing up from their own
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rhetoricity and image-histories to make comment on the ‘question of origins’ itself. Underlying the Australian sheep films is a constant irritation: a worrying at the problem of origins that pervades the theory and practice of national cinema per se. The sheep in these films harbour a representational crisis—not as an emblem of a wider national ‘problem’ (sheep as allegory or metaphor), but in terms of a fundamental quandary in the matter of representation itself. Sheep are literally—not merely metaphorically—an instance of critical mass in the matter of Australian national representations; a momentous mise en abyme that overwhelms with more than metaphoric weight to lure the viewer from narrative momentum with the promise of lofty thoughts. They simultaneously underwhelm—drawing the audience into a spiral of conceptual emptiness—a woolly ‘nothingness’ that is equally the condition for national representation. There is an internal tension between the nationalising project (with its aspirations of finitude and differentiation) and the repetitive magnitude of passing sheep. This uneasiness perhaps makes the sheep films a likely place to begin a search for the ‘national’ in the Australian context; to ask whether it is possible to designate an absent, unpresentable totality. The sheep films can be seen to contemplate how national difference can be defined within the context of repetitive sameness, hinting at misgivings and anxieties about the nationalising project so often celebrated in the Australian cinema. It would be easy (although not unwarranted) to suggest that the Australian sheep films simply proffer their images of flocks as an allegory for national plenitude and prosperity. These seemingly boundless images of woolly synthesis promise a type of wholeness that is also, in narratives that link ‘pure merinos’ and national wealth, a decided wholesomeness. The power of animal imagery such as that found in the sheep films lies in the capacity of these animals to draw the ‘world-building’ subject towards its limits; to a metaphysics of metaphor. The sheep films question the capacity of the cinema to contain animality. Their most successful moments are those in which there is a fluid relation between physicality and figuration. What we must ask ourselves, in the face of an overwhelming presence, is how might the sheep of the sheep films give cause for us to question the mimetic basis of Australian national representation?
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Does the graphic meaningfulness given to these nation-sheep precede their articulation as signs? As in Slavoj Zizek’s wondering at the avian massing of Hitchcock’s The Birds, we might ask: is the function of these sheep, if they can be said to have one, to use their emphatic presence to make us forget what in the end we are dealing with?69 To make us forget about function, perhaps? Does an account of these massed sheep induce a kind of somnambulism where difference is concerned? To what extent can we understand these sheep as simply sheep and nothing (more)? Can we, as Derrida suggests, think animality and at the same time think nothing of sheep? In the company of sheep, we are drawn by their repetition to the apprehension of textures, the ‘vanity of appearances’. What connects the sheep films is the film of semblance, not alone the conventional generic ‘rules’ of similarity and type. It is not just their lexical use of sheep as a function or operation of metaphor but rather the materiality of the sheep as sheep themselves that draws the eye. As ‘the deep is all in surface effects’ (Lingis), so might the surface yield depths of one kind or another. In deep with sheep. The sheep that feature so prominently in the Australian sheep films might be not only a metaphor for a type of national achievement (nation-sheep) but also a condition for that representation. On one level, their massive presence serves to obstruct and dissemble a film’s ‘signification’ rather than simply function as an automatically understood ‘symbol’ whose significance can be easily pocketed. These sheep (even as/especially as metaphor) point to ‘something prior’—something to be deciphered. The sheep themselves ultimately signify this state of the impenetrable. The point, however, is not in the face of incomprehension to think something (of them) but rather to think nothing. Even the Australian filmmaker Ken G. Hall, who expressly sought to depict the full symbolic weight of the nation’s sheep, concedes a conceptual emptiness, a ‘headlessness’ at the heart of his project, when he describes the process of filming sheep for The Squatter’s Daughter: ‘When you see great flocks of sheep and they look marvellous—with a backlit sun and all that—and you’ve got a good outdoor cameraman like Hurley—you let your head go.’70 Hall outlines the contagious effect that occurs in the encounter with massed sheep as an experience of delirium, a reverie that reveals the possibilities of
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woolly-mindedness for any understanding of the consuming national productiveness to which he aspired.
Notes Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, Vintage, London, 1991, p. 178.
1 2
The Bureau, Only for Sheep, WEA Records, 1981.
3
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1983, p. 52.
4
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1988, p. 66.
5
ibid., p. 67.
6
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Seabury Press, New York, 1978, p. 357.
7
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p. 14.
8
Alphonso Lingis, ‘The rapture of the deep’, in Excesses: Eros and Culture, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983, p. 10.
9
ibid., p. 13.
10
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1992,p. 22.
11
Serres, Genesis, p. 2.
12
Charles and Elsa Chauvel, Walkabout, W. H. Allen, London, 1959, pp. 66–7.
13
Jacques Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore I am (More to follow)’, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002), p. 407.
14
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 73.
15
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, p. 58.
16
ibid., p. 57.
17
Gregory Fried and Richard Polt acknowledge the conventional definition of Dasein in English as ‘Being there’, but prefer to describe Dasein as ‘a being who inhabits a Here, a sphere of meaning in which beings can reveal themselves as meaningful, as significant’. Dasein, then, is a being for whom Being itself is at issue or in question. See their ‘Translators’ introduction’ to Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000, pp. xi–xii.
18
Martin Heidegger, ‘The origin of the work of art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, pp. 44–5. In this essay, and in his ‘What are poets for?’, Heidegger considers in some detail the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. As if in counterpoint in his own writings, Rilke also notes, ‘The animal is in the world’, but he qualifies the assertion by adding, ‘we stand in front of the world’. For Rilke, humans are spectators whereas animals are not. The animal is therefore open to the
44
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world from within, unencumbered by frames of vision or habits of speculation. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Random House, New York, 1982, p. 329. 19
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on humanism’ in Basic Writings, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray; David Farrell Krell (ed.), Harper, San Francisco, 1993, p. 234.
20
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1989, p. 49.
21
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 88. Original emphasis.
22
I do not mean to reduce the important differences between Herder and Heidegger’s understandings of language and human ‘being’ at this point, but rather to point out that Heidegger’s thinking was in many respects a response to Herder. For a more detailed account of the relationship between these two thinkers see George Kovacs, ‘Heidegger in dialogue with Herder: Crossing the language of metaphysics toward Be-ing-historical language’, Heidegger Studies 17 (2001), pp. 45–63.
23
Herder, op. cit., p. 89. Original emphases.
24
Jacques Derrida in ‘ “Eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Points…interviews 1974–1994, Elisabeth Weber (ed), Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p.267. Original emphases.
25
Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, p. 55.
26
Derrida in ‘ “Eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida’, p. 277. My emphasis.
27
Jacques Derrida, ‘On reading Heidegger: An outline of remarks to the Essex Colloquium’, Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987), pp. 171–88.
28
ibid.
29
Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore I am (More to follow)’, p. 400.
30
ibid., p. 397. The article’s translator, David Willis, notes that Derrida intends his title to reverse Descarte’s definition of the human as the thinking animal (and therefore as the one that ‘thinks’ up the animal in the first place) and might also be read as ‘the animal that therefore I follow after’. Willis, trans. note, p. 369.
31
Derrida in ‘ “Eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject’, p. 116. There is something apt about Derrida’s link between origins, animals, language and cutting for the analysis of sheep in Australian cinema. Derrida’s comments are particularly telling for an account of The Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall, 1933), which struggles quite literally with matters of cutting (editing) and narratives about origins and knowledge, or a film like Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), which is explicitly concerned with partial subjectivities.
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32
Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore I am (More to follow)’, p. 416.
33
ibid.
34
ibid.
35
Adieu Monde (or Pierre and Claire’s Story) (Sandra Kogut, 1997), France, 27 minutes.
36
Ang Lee, cited by Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, Newmarket Press, New York, 1995, p. 229.
37
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 35.
38
ibid., p. 36.
39
ibid., p. 13.
40
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 305.
41
ibid., pp. 240–1.
42
ibid., p. 239.
43
ibid., p. 239.
44
ibid., p. 240.
45
Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 168–9.
46
Berger, ‘Why look at animals’, pp. 14–15. Deleuze and Guattari go a little further, describing anyone who likes cats or dogs as a fool (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 240).
47
Berger, ‘Why look at animals’, p.14.
48
Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, Beacon Press, Boston, 1963, p. 89.
49
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, standard edn, vol. 4, Hogarth Press, London, 1953, p. 131.
50
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Harper Collins, London, 1996, p. 149.
51
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 25.
52
ibid., p. 196.
53
ibid.
54
Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘The death of an animal’, Film Quarterly 56:1 (Fall 2002), p. 12.
55
Lippit, Electric Animal, p. 197.
56
Cited in Lippit, ‘The death of an animal’, p. 12.
57
Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1972, p. 26.
58
ibid., p. 188.
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59
ibid., p. 42. James Leahy takes issue with Worth and Adair over this claim and suggests that, ‘with the possible exception of the most highly educated Navajo, Al Clah, from outside the community, this “search for identity” is far from obvious whilst the “search for origins” seems as much … a desire to designate a process in its entirety, and a space for that process, as a search for origins as white (and now black) Americans normally understand it (a trip to Europe, or Africa, as the case may be!)’, in James Leahy, ‘Notes on the Navajo films’, Film Form, vol. 1, no. 2 (1977), p. 85.
60
ibid., p. 4. There is a moment in a more recent Australian film that echoes Sam’s thoughts about the importance of sheep to decision-making. It occurs in Nirvana Street Murder (Aleksi Vellis, 1990) as two characters discuss the difficulties immigrants have in finding work. Luke tries to explain by drawing on an analogy (Australian shearers trying to find work in Tokyo): Luke: ‘They can’t speak the lingo, and they get bum jobs.’ Boady: ‘Why don’t they get jobs as shearers?’ Luke: ‘Cos they can’t, mate. Cos there’s no bloody sheep in Japan.’ Boady: ‘Why go there if there’s no sheep, you dick?’
61
ibid., p. 6.
62
ibid.
63
ibid., p. 187.
64
ibid., p.188.
65
David Wood, ‘Comment ne pas mange—Deconstruction and humanism’, in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life, H. Peter Steeves (ed.), State University of New York Press, New York, 1999, p. 29.
66
John Howard, quoted in ‘The weary silence on the lambs’, Age, 14 July 1999, p. 1. Uttered in the context of an ongoing debate with the USA over agricultural tariffs.
67
For a discussion of the French sheep film see my ‘Fragments: French sheep and early melodrama’, Australian and French Connections: A Century of Cinema, Jane Warren, Colin Nettelbeck and Wallace Kirsop (eds), University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 93–104.
68
William D. Routt, ‘Are you a fish? Are you a snake? An obvious lecture and some notes on The Last Wave’, Continuum, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994) p. 216.
69
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, p. 106.
70
Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce (Dir: Mark Sanders, Prod: AFTS) 1983. Videotapes held by the National Film and Sound Archive, ID No. 9843.
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Part 2 When our clips speak together: The Squatter’s Daughter, national origins and cultural continuity Two souls with but a single thought, Two hearts that beat as one. Theatre broadside for the stage-play of The Squatter’s Daughter (c. 1915)
Abstract Ken G. Hall’s exemplary sheep film The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) is characterised by the observation of ‘lost origins’ at almost every level—textually, narrationally, contextually—in tales of missing films and stage plays unseen. Part 2 undertakes an analysis of the various nationalist discourses within and around The Squatter’s Daughter in relation to contemporary and subsequent understandings of continuity and reproduction, particularly as they pertain to changing ideas about (cultural) likeness, origins and intertextuality. And, of course, sheep.1
Figure 1: The Squatter’s Daughter lobby card
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The Squatter’s Daughter: the plot The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) tells the story of ‘twin sheep stations’, Waratah and Enderby. With small assistance from her hapless brother, the limping Jimmy, Joan Enderby battles the skulduggery of Waratah’s Clive Sherrington who, with his unscrupulous foreman Fletcher, has been poisoning her sheep and sullying Waratah’s pure merino stock with cross-breeds. Their ulterior motive is to force a financial crisis that will cause Joan to forfeit her property. Problems come to a head when the enigmatic Wayne Ridgeway appears on the scene shortly followed by Waratah’s patriarch, ‘Old Ironbark’ (‘Barky’ to his friends), back from a brief sojourn in the mother country. On his return to Waratah, Barky is suddenly blinded by the glory of its sunlit paddocks. It is only with the timely confessions of the Afghan trader Jebal Zim that matters are eventually resolved, and with confusing alacrity. Barky’s blindness turns out to be a ruse. The stranger, Wayne, is revealed to be the rightful heir to Waratah. The scion, Clive, is found to have some noble qualities but they are not his by birthright—he is really the son of Fletcher, the villainous hired hand. The flames of romance (not to mention a spectacular bushfire) overwhelm the remaining characters. Jimmy is free to court Jebal Zim’s daughter, Zeinah, when his dutiful (but misunderstood) canine companion Bidgee dies a martyr’s death in the fire. The imposing Enderby housekeeper, Mrs Ramsbottom, can continue her fruitless pursuit of the skirted Scottish shearer: ‘Trying to dodge women is like swimming with sharks. If one don’t get you, another one will. It’s bloody futile.’ And lastly, thanks to Joan and Wayne, the ‘twin’ sheep stations, Waratah and Enderby, are joined by marriage in a tale of sublimated pastoral incest that rivals anything an Ancient Greek tragedy (or high Victorian melodrama) might have on offer.
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Chapter 2
A gathering of sheep is the scene of a decapitation or, How Ken G. Hall lost his head
Anyone who attended the Ken Hall ‘hysterical’ programme at the last Sydney Festival must remain eternally grateful that the Australian feature film has died a natural death. Letter to the editor, Film Digest2
[In delirium] (I feel that) I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogable and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son. And all the criminals … Deleuze and Guattari3
Cultural conception(s) 1 The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) begins propitiously, with a slowly unfurling preamble signed by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. Lyons had assumed parliamentary power a year earlier as leader of the conservative and explicitly national United Australia Party: I believe that Cinesound in producing ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’ has created a picture that will redound to the
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credit of Australia wherever it is shown. The picture breathes the spirit of the country’s great open spaces and romance, adventure and opportunity in the lives of those who in the past pioneered, and are today building up our great primary industries. Australia, scenically, is unparalleled—it has the breadth and atmosphere of health, optimism and progress—and I sincerely hope that viewing this picture will create in the minds of its audiences added interest in the Commonwealth and the great future that undoubtedly lies before her. The Prime Minister declares right from the very beginning the film’s national purpose—encapsulated in what he describes as its thoughtprovoking primary spaces and scenes; open, but mind-full; spaces that link Australia’s pioneering past and pastoral present to an undoubtedly prosperous future—a common wealth, no less. Lyons’ parliamentary preamble is in keeping with Hall’s own declared intent. Hall’s version of The Squatter’s Daughter was determined from the outset to ‘wave the flag’. His film does not so much ‘breathe the spirit’ of the nation as hyperventilate it. Hall, who boasted of winning a gold medal at primary school for an essay on patriotism, remembers his nationalistic plans for The Squatter’s Daughter in his memoirs: ‘I wanted the wide horizons and beauty of the country to show through on the screen and to suggest in the opening shots the vast size of the wool industry. Even then there were well over 100 million sheep in the country.’4 From the eight-minute opening sequence in which thousands of sheep swirl majestically, if not a little aimlessly, around a paddock to a rousing rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (a tune that seems shackled to the image of sheep in 1930s Australian cinema), The Squatter’s Daughter is unquestionably a film with national ramifications.5 By the film’s end, in their closing speeches, and clearly overcome by the sight of the bulging wool bales sinking slowly into the west, the romantic couple radiantly promises to ‘build the nation to the greatness our fathers dreamed of’. Others were struck by the film’s nationalistic spirit. The sheer success of The Squatter’s Daughter triggered the introduction of Australian-only programs at Sydney’s Civic Theatre for a short time.
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On the occasion of its British release the film was descriptively retitled Down Under. At the time of the film’s release, most critics (although with some notable exceptions) voiced a keen appreciation of its patriotism. The Bulletin, searching for something kind to say, conceded: ‘It might not be great art but its [sic] certainly great national publicity.’6 The Sun News-Pictorial was unabashed in its praise: ‘A picture to fill Australians of all ages with pride and pleasure’.7 The Argus agreed, describing the film as ‘essentially Australian in spirit and letter’, a picture of which the producers ‘have every reason to be proud’.8 Smith’s Weekly thought the camerawork achieved an Australian atmosphere, although the narrative was found wanting: Where the camera has been allowed to dwell on the sweep of hill and valley, the slow tide of sheep moving on the plains, the grace of men and horses on the skyline, something truly and peculiarly Australian is achieved. But these are mere interpolations; the narrative itself paints a false and tinselled picture of the Australian bush which insults the scenery it is set in.9 Film Weekly found the film’s nationalism (and cinematography) promised good publicity both internationally and locally: Such splendid camera work should serve as the most effective propaganda for Australia abroad, and will do more to draw favourable attention to our country than will anything else of its kind we know of … In other respects, too, the production possesses considerable ingenuity in construction, whilst its general appeal will undoubtedly be found in firstly, the story itself, secondly the fact that it is Good-Australian, and thirdly in the splendid selection of publicity which the distributing organisation is putting behind it.10 Hall’s more captious critics, such as the Chief Censor, W. Creswell O’Reilly, were less impressed by his national vision (although all apparently agreed that he had one).
A gathering of sheep
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By the 1970s a group of later critics found particular fault with Hall’s claim to a kind of representative model of national productivity, especially where the cinema is concerned. For these critics, looking forward to a nascent Australian production industry and back to its pre-war antecedents, Hall’s nationalism is at best questionable and at worst not apparent at all; his films being more recognisable for their American rather than for their Australian attributes. This chapter explores some of the reasons for this critical shift and how it reflects differing ideas about the relationship between cultural lineage, parthenogenesis and nationhood, outlining the ways in which particular ideas about breeding, parentage, birth and (national) identity imbricate the writings of these critics—ideas with which the sheep films (and particularly The Squatter’s Daughter) are already thick. There exists a distinguished literature examining the ways in which family rhetoric has characterised discourses of colonial relations in the cinema. Sylvia Lawson extends and deploys the family theme to her analysis of the industry itself, in which she argues that Australian films are viewed as the ‘long lost cousin of dominant families’ intersecting and modifying Hollywood-based codes.11 William D. Routt’s account of familial and colonial relations as a characteristic theme of Australian cinema of the 1920s and 1930s is another such study.12 Routt particularly focuses on the specific ways in which the British Empire can be understood in terms of the metaphor of the family and the ways in which the family of Empire might be fruitfully used to understand the political dimensions of family tropes in early Australian cinema. Empire relations are also drawn in the image of other metaphors. Henshaw Jackson, writing in 1910, saw the Empire linked not by the bonds of family but by woolly threads: ‘Someone has said that the bond of Empire is a silken thread … but there is no denying the fact that the threads which connect the far corners of the earth with Australia are made of wool.’13 For The Squatter’s Daughter both wool (especially in the form of sheep) and family are prescient tropes for understanding the film’s preoccupation with origins, within which also rests an enquiry into cultural and political identity. Certainly The Squatter’s Daughter draws on the idea that parturition per se might be cause for fascination, thwarted speculation, failed hopes and future promise. The importance of conception and
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childbirth to the film is evident in the narrative alone. The film weaves a complex narrative from the combined stories of changeling babes, frustrated and unexpected inheritances, and untrammelled couplings and doublings. Joan (who has no living parents) must negotiate the legacy of a conditional inheritance. Her brother embodies this ‘condition’ with his protracted limp. Wayne arrives in search of his father. Clive (the supposed heir) departs in search of his identity. Jebal Zim prepares, but is not permitted to, return home. Barky returns home only to find everything unsettled. And the very sheep that dominate the landscape prove to be of uncertain origins and ownership. The theme of troubled origins and frustrated returns might be seen to reveal a fraught longing for political union that can be traced back to a questionable colonisation performed in part by convicts. Indeed the repeated question of origins that so preoccupies the sheep films in general and The Squatter’s Daughter in particular suggests this. However, identity in The Squatter’s Daughter is also bound up in the contemplation of a birth that never ends: the incessant reproduction of the sheep flock. In its thematic and rhetorical organisation, the film might on occasion go so far as to suggest that identity itself is ‘birth’—in the sense in which the philosopher Jean Luc Nancy describes ‘the coming of a world to the world’, in which the relationship between genesis and creativity is posited as a matter of doubled or twin productions—an inseparable relationship between production and reproduction.14 As The Squatter’s Daughter takes up the theme of national reproducibility, it opens up the question of the existential to the aesthetic or rhetorical, revealing an ambivalence at the core of the representation of the nation. This understanding of national texts inflects not just the film but also the context in which it has circulated—prior renditions and readings of The Squatter’s Daughter seem restimulated by the questions of origins it raises. The Squatter’s Daughter has been repeatedly read in terms of its repetitiveness, its sameness or its similarity at a textual and cultural level. Chapter 3 will return to this question and examine in detail a range of critical responses to Ken G. Hall and The Squatter’s Daughter in terms of understandings of reproduction and representation in matters of national identity. The Squatter’s Daughter poses the question, ‘Who am I?’ (occasionally articulating it as simply as that) in the stories of the various
A gathering of sheep
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characters who have cause to question the certitude of their identity. Identity crises abound: Jimmy, Zeinah, Wayne, Clive, Barky (and even Bidgee) all suffer existential doubt or are doubted in course of the narrative. Their questions, initially driven by personal anxiety, become a philosophical preoccupation with ontology: the contingency of being, understood as the implication of being born in Australia. At other times this preoccupation appears as a quasi-religious abstraction: a question or questioning of faith. But even as these characters cast their questions, the ‘I’ they suppose is implicitly erased; the vestige of identity threatening to fade in the face of the familiar, in the confounding comparisons of likeness. In The Squatter’s Daughter the very problem of cultural reproduction itself is posited as an anxiety around the relationship of form to conformity. In confusing its terms, The Squatter’s Daughter proposes the problem of origins as a moment of ‘unknown-ness’ or ‘uncertainty’: as a problem of knowledge. The Squatter’s Daughter posits an ostensibly existential crisis at the heart of Australian national identity, describing it equally as a problem of knowledge and the mimetic such that the desire to find or know originality, to find one’s origins, turns on the obsessive search for ‘reality’.
Cultural pregnancy Dad said he was an accident and he thought that one day [Ken] might be the Prime Minister of Australia because he had such faith in him. Dorrie James, Ken G. Hall’s sister15
The Squatter’s Daughter returns repeatedly to the problem of origins— as a moment of upset filiations and discomfiting classifications—a delirious, amniotic moment that gives rise to a ‘becoming national’. Conceptually, The Squatter’s Daughter seems to move effortlessly from rural mise en scène to primal scene, with ‘Australia’ literally little more than a swollen paddock acceding to a perpetual cycle of pregnancy and parturition. The film circles around this preoccupation, finishing with a disquisition on its beginnings, a schoolmasterly conversation between Joan and Wayne about how to grow (lots of ) sheep. The film begins with fulsome images of sheep and ends evoking its beginnings in an exchange between the two principals that seems intended to
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serve as its ‘moral’ or didactic reason-for-being. That exchange, with its ambition to summarise and legitimise what has gone before, warrants detailed attention. In the concluding moments of The Squatter’s Daughter, the two leading players engage in romantic riposte of (agri)cultural significance (see figure 2). Together, Wayne and Joan radiantly promise to finish the ‘big job’ of ‘sending wool to the world. Hoping to build the nation to the greatness our fathers dreamed of.’ Wayne’s idea of the ‘big job’ is a little more personal than his grand rhetoric at first indicates, and he coyly suggests, ‘I’ll be needing some … young chaps to help me.’
Figure 2: The Squatter’s Daughter—Wayne and Joan ‘sending wool to the world’ (frame enlargement)
Joan, a woman who has proved her independence of action in the previous ninety minutes of twisting plot and subplot, is not fooled by a mere turn of phrase and quickly responds, ‘Well, I suppose you could advertise for them, couldn’t you?’ This rather surprising exchange concludes the film. In the end, reproduction is allayed by mass production, Wayne’s demand for maternity tempered by Joan’s appeal to modernity. Interestingly enough, it is a passing reference to the arena
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of overproduction and repetitive sameness, the brave new world of marketing and mass culture, that affords Joan the last laugh (and an excuse for continuing to sleep alone). What is at stake for Wayne and Joan is not the question of enumerating the landscape but how precisely to populate it—which is conceived in this exchange precisely in terms of the debate between, on the one hand, a reproduction understood in terms of a vertical precision of lineage and, on the other, in terms of a sprawling mass production. It is a small matter of origins that provides a counterpoint to Wayne and Joan’s playful interchange—a matter that drenches the film at almost every level. In this sense the film is interested in the question of generation itself—not generation as an act that occurs to or from something (as in the way meaning might be generated by representation, or wealth generated by labour) but simply the mystery of generation. The Squatter’s Daughter, in seeking to attribute a value to, or address a disavowal of, origins at both a narrative and a cultural level, rests as a matter of necessity on a largely unstated theory of the maternal. One reason, although not the only one, for the film’s interest in motherhood, ‘birthing’ and the national good, is contextual. At the time of The Squatter’s Daughter’s production, the birthrate in Australia had fallen alarmingly, and debate about the role of women in the nation-building process raged widely.16 Jocelyn Howarth, the film’s major star, pitched into the debate with a forthright interview published to promote the film’s release. Her views on her employment in the film industry rest on wider notions about cultural repetition, reproduction, marriage and cabbages (itself a vegetable with a sometime proverbial relationship to matters reproductive): Possibly the most interesting thing about myself that would interest readers is what actually impelled me to make a move out of the rut … Thousands of girls go along from year to year in the same avenue, treading the same commercial or professional path of business from day to day, securing the same measure of enjoyment from the same things until woman’s greatest vocation, matrimony, takes them by the hand and leads them to their fate … What impelled me to
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get out of the rut was the fact that one day I discovered that whilst I was young and healthy and received a considerable amount of enjoyment out of life I felt there was something missing. It was not long before I discovered that what I required to get the full value out of life was some interest with sufficient purpose to take me out of myself. In other words I needed expression. It’s all very well for some people to deride the idea that humans don’t require some selfexpression but I believe that unless one is a human cabbage completely void of what is going on in the world as that vegetable, one must have a definite purpose, to express oneself.17 For Howarth the point is to express oneself rather than submit to the ‘fate’ of repetition followed by reproduction (i.e. both as a form of expressing another). By her reckoning, reproduction is simply an extension of the repetitious patterns of the modern woman’s working life: both reduce women to machinistic repetitions of mass culture and its orientation to manufacture. Howarth proposes a different approach to the twin ‘problems’ of repetition and reproduction: the expression of oneself. Howarth figures maternity as inevitable—very much like the standard end of a movie at the time. She also puts it in a series involving mass reproduction, also a feature of movie production. In this she claims a type of eccentric path, a deviation from the ordinary story. However, the question of whether she is also deviating from the inevitable ending is open. To some extent, Howarth continues to position the family as an ending, a destination. What is interesting is that she resists the idea that it might also constitute a departure, a point of origin. In making a distinction between a future based on ‘a definite purpose, to express one-self’ and being a ‘human cabbage’, Howarth proposes the idea that modernity (including the cinema) and maternity are fundamentally similar and imbricated. Neither represent a choice in the sense of being an alternative to each other nor in the sense that they are elected but are instead both stages in a woman’s fate or destiny. On the other hand, Howarth also recommends an alternative to the overvaluation of lineage: self-expression. This apparent
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‘alternative’, however, shares with modernity the aim of suppressing relationships with others (of descent or pedigree). Howarth understands her work in the cinema to be a matter of a-voidance, of becoming something other than (a) void. The opposite of self-expression for women is a series of acts that are vegetable-like—lacking in thought or feeling. Even when young, ‘healthy’ and happy, it is possible to recognise that there is something missing, that something incomplete needs to be filled. It is not clear whether for Howarth self-expression fills the loss or impoverishment of a self-abandoned ego (the rejection of the conventional social script oriented towards reproduction) or whether self-expression is the remembering, the recounting of prior originary moments, the re-enactment of a dispossession. And there are further confusions. When Howarth says that there is both ‘something missing’ and that she has to be ‘taken out of herself’ she appears to be thinking in a manner that is contrary to common sense. What is missing is not ‘herself’. Rather ‘herself’ is what she needs to escape from. ‘Self-expression’ is literally a pushing out of the self, a way of getting rid of the self. In this sense Howarth is figuring the social self—the woman—in extremely strong terms. And she is opposing a familiar self-effacing sacrifice that gives rise to a moral fullness with something altogether different. Rather than advocating fullness as against a social emptiness, she seems to be advocating expelling/voiding the self as a solution to the cramped fullness of existence. What is missing is the loss of self: the paradoxical fruitfulness of a fundamental emptiness.18 In the modern world of the mob (characterised by rampant reproduction in the form of repetition), Howarth finds herself only in losing her ‘self ’. Like another, albeit brighter star of the 1930s (I’m thinking here of Greta Garbo), to be noticeable necessitates a plaintive request to be alone. In Excesses, Alphonso Lingis proposes an enmity between systems of reason and solar systems—systems of stars. For Lingis, reason or rational calculation constitutes a closed system centring on the regulated activities of production, circulation and conservation. Stars, on the other hand, are characterised by expenditure without recompense: ‘The sun destines all its forces to annihilation; it is burning itself out as fast as it can. It squanders its enormous energy most of which is lost in the emptiness.’19 For Lingis the energy of the stars is purely phenomenal; it has no ‘terminal entities, subsistent causes or goals, whose
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value would lie in their being, their coherent and self-conserving presence’.20 Energy is expended without the expectation of something in return. Men and animals alike share, in their greed for force and affluence, a compulsive nostalgia for solar glory. This is visible in the compulsion to intoxication, which Lingis defines as ‘the superfluous and unproductive intensification of energy’.21 For Lingis, intoxication and delirium are not instances of malfunctioning or failure but are ‘the force of life itself’. There is a particular suitability of solar economic theory to Australia, the ‘sunburned land’, and a particular suitability of stellar economic theory for movies in the depressed 1930s and for those who, like Jocelyn Howarth, were aspirant stars at this time.22 Lingis himself identifies the traces of solar economics in a range of activities: It is visible in the construction of monuments and the cults and in the frenzied waste and the wars, the games, especially those involving competition and gambling, where ruin of health, status and fortune are at stake, the high noon dreams fixed plastically in visual arts and the nonteleological periodicity of music and dance, and the voluptuousness of perverse sexual activity, that detoured from genital and reproductive finality—the unproductive expenditures for which the resources of an immensely burdensome social order are squandered, and which contradict and at times ruin the productive and conservational values of the special economy of reason.23 Traces of Lingis’s solar economy are also visible in Howarth’s own assessment of the value of stars (and stardom) as the unmotivated but necessary expulsion of the self, her own sense of isolation from social scripts; it is visible in the logical incoherence of Howarth’s arguments, their lack of reason. And it is visible everywhere in The Squatter’s Daughter: in the charge of unproductive sexuality, in the evident indulgence in sheep, in squandered inheritances and the ostentatious prodigality of its populations. Despite the film’s desire to demonstrate the evidence of wealth ‘captured’ in its images of engorged sheep, The Squatter’s Daughter also details, graphically, and often in those very same moments, a compulsive inclination for expenditure. These are
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also images of sheep that, just momentarily, lose all relation to an encapsulating narrative and that are consciously wasteful in their numbers. It is in these moments of largeness and excess that The Squatter’s Daughter seems to hint at a relationship between the transcendant and the tangible ‘this-worldliness’ that it never quite resolves. This proximity between the absence and presence of ‘this world’ is captured nicely in the party conversation between Barky (from this world) and his friend Cartwright (visiting from another) in which Cartwright misrecognises an oncoming bushfire for the rising moon in the night sky. Barky himself had earlier cause to comment on that same night sky, linking them to a personal and collective quest: ‘I’ve lain out there, a stone’s throw from the stars, searching behind the veil to find what makes this country.’ For Ironbark, there is a thread linking the solar system, the unknown and the (excessive) origins of the nation. Barky’s existential doubts are echoed later by Clive, who links the losses of immersion in the abstract (wide and big and clean no less!) with his own personal quest: ‘… out there it’s wide and big and clean. A man can lose himself—and find himself—I’m going there!’24 These quests are foreshadowed by Hall’s repeated deployment of vast sheep mobs in The Squatter’s Daughter. The mass is oriented to reproducing itself, enlarging itself, but not in a linear progression. A mob, whether constituted of humans or sheep (or of stars), is constantly pointed towards both consumption and (re)production. The cultivation of the mass, the mob, the nation (as a particularly ‘solar’ activity), simultaneously offers not only the possibility of unity but also the dispersal of identity (which, in the words of Jocelyn Howarth and Clive Sherrington, might just be what is needed to articulate themselves).
The Squatter’s Daughter’s seduction With animals, seduction achieves its purest form. Jean Baudrillard25
Hall’s spectacular linking of mobs of sheep and Australian patriotism in The Squatter’s Daughter was certainly not novel to the cinema. Australian sheep films, such as A Girl of the Bush, preceded The Squatter’s Daughter by more than a decade with their graphic depiction of national largesse. But by 1933 the connection seemed so
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obvious that a stylish promotional prospectus for the share listing of British-Australasian Talking Pictures Ltd (BATP) could cheerfully exhort potential investors to consider the appeal of the Australian pastoral sector in the familiar terms of a film industry adage in use in both Britain and the US at that time: ‘Trade Follows the Film.’ The company took as its logo a grinning Aboriginal visage, embedding its initials BATP in an upturned boomerang. On the opening page, an illustration of Australia occupied by sheep, indigenous Australians, kangaroos and emus, and surrounded by abstracted cities and spotlights declares: ‘THE WORLD’S A STAGE.’ It continues, ‘The most effective method by which Australia can occupy the spotlights of the world is by the medium of the film.’ Additional subject matter considered by the pamphlet includes the Australian bush, dairy lands, mining industries, (enormous) cattle stations, wheat lands, wine country and sporting achievements (including pig-sticking, buffalo and crocodile shooting, and kangaroo hunting). Australian film producers, the BATP brochure argues, should consider Australia’s successful primary industries as opportune subject matter: THE GOLDEN FLEECE Wool, of which Australia produces the finest in the world, is the Commonwealth’s most important primary industry. Wonderful stories of our great out-back can be built into films showing how Australia provides more than a quarter of the world’s requirements, although its flocks represent less than a sixth of the world’s sheep. TRADE FOLLOWS THE FILM26 Rather than using the cinema as a way of opening up new markets by promoting a type of consumer lifestyle (as the maxim advises), sheep films like The Squatter’s Daughter centred directly on a major (although declining) agrarian industry and were expected to be distributed along the same trade routes as this most primary of Australian products. In a curious inversion, it seemed that Australian film followed trade, no matter what the brochure declared. Still, as if inspired by BATP, Ken Hall furnishes his pastures with a thick, luxuriant carpet of sheep. Directly following the Prime Minister’s
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preamble, The Squatter’s Daughter unleashes the most magnificent of sheep montages—truly an ‘unparalleled’ sequence, flooded with frame after frame of eddying, overflowing sheep. Hall’s woolly colossi assemble, accumulate and finally inundate through sheer repetitive indulgence. This is the kind of overproductive excess on which Australia’s primary industries once thrived (at least before the advent of stockpiling) and which underpin the film’s claims to rhetorical expressiveness. Hall went to great trouble to secure the number of sheep he needed to ensure what he considered to be an adequate representation of the ‘vast size of the wool industry’. In his memoirs he recalls a discussion with one of Australia’s most highly regarded station owners, Fred (later Sir Frederick) McMaster: When I told McMaster we wanted to photograph a vast mob of sheep, say ten or twenty thousand, he reared up like one of his 5000-guinea rams. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said politely, ‘no-one’s going to box even five thousand sheep for you.’ Then he was quick with the advice—having no doubt read a fan magazine on making movies. ‘Why don’t you do what they do in Hollywood when they’re making cowboys and Indians? They only have about twenty Indians,’ Freddy explained knowingly, ‘and these fellows ride round and round the camera and you’d think there were hundreds. We’ll muster you a thousand sheep and that way you can make ‘em look like twenty thousand.’27 But Hall was resolute and would not brook anything less than absolute verisimilitude (to the size of his vision rather than to actual pastoral practice), which he believed would be appreciated by an international (read ‘English’) audience. It was as if, in order to accommodate a (suitably international or ‘empirical’) vision, and one that was substantially greater than that of the individual filmmaker, The Squatter’s Daughter demanded a conspicuous ostentation of aesthetic: And so we … came to make The Squatter’s Daughter locations on a station called Goonoo Goonoo (an Aboriginal name pronounced Gunny G’noo) … It ran 100,000 sheep
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and its wonderfully co-operative management was willing to box 10,000 or even more sheep for us. Hurley and I found a hill looking down into a beautiful valley and that was where later on we set up our cameras. That huge mob of sheep seemed to float like a long white cloud down the valley, stirred by the rising sun. The purely photographic sequence still stands vividly in my memory as a projection of Australia with which I am glad to have been associated. I used it at some length in the feature and the rest went into the Cinesound library for use on innumerable occasions.28 This preference for the evident, for a notion of production oriented to spectacular but measurable excess, marked the Cinesound ‘show business’ philosophy at a number of levels; from its decided predilection for ‘saleable’ films (i.e. films that generated palpable audiences); its taste for a type of verisimilitude as a measure of quality (the size of a mob, the injuries sustained by cast and crew in filming stunts and so on); through to the film’s shooting ratio of 10:1, which was considered quite wasteful for its time but which Hall believed to be a good ‘investment’ given its recurring use in the Cinesound newsreels.29 The film itself turns to the uneasy fit between a focus on secondary application or doubled purpose and the reductive selfexpressions of ‘modern’ fashion in one particularly ironic scene in which a prosperous wool-grower sits poolside, ogling an assortment of bathing beauties clad in woollen swim suits. Introduced to one of the swimmers, he dryly remarks: ‘I’m shearing twenty thousand sheep and that’s all the wool you wear!’ He sums up the contrast nicely: more might mean more to the farmer, but less is more for a sleek modern gal. But this wool-grower’s failure to ‘get it’ goes further—he ‘doesn’t get it’ certainly, but what he doesn’t get is the spectacle itself, which is very much what Hall gets. In this sequence (as elsewhere, but most notably the later bushfire) Hall replaces the film’s opening sheep with other spectaclular elements, pragmatically illustrating their interchangeability, their obliteration and their inevitable return. Like the philatelic sheep mentioned in the introduction to this book, Hall’s sheep are both ‘interchangeable’ and ‘native’.
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Hall characterises his opening sheep sequence both as ‘purely photographic’ and as abundantly repeatable (‘for use on innumerable occasions’). In his remembrance the sheep appear to ‘float’, unfettered, down the hillside. Here, Hall alludes to a kind of looseness that recalls his earlier description of the shoot (quoted at the end of chapter 1) in which he recounts how, faced with the overwhelming presence of a mass of backlit sheep, he couldn’t help but ‘let go’ of his head. He understands his work as a type of delirium in which subject and text appear unbound and unbounded; the figuration of a kind of incoherence or unreason. Hall’s own feelings of headlessness are attributed, in a moment of delirious liminal blurring, to the image of unbounded sheep that affront him and vice versa. Here, in this woolly moment where nothing appears original or derived (or contrived or ‘caused’), there is simply a generalised mobilisation or ‘drift’. The excess of sheep testifies to Hall’s engagement in a certain type of ‘spatial’ freedom, and the effect appears to him to be ‘uncontrollable’. Hall’s memory is certainly not of a respectful or even voyeuristic ‘distance’ but rather an ardently felt intimacy, and he wavers between appreciating these sheep in terms of an intense corporeality and as an image of an image—a floating ‘devivified’ non-being. So, the filmmaker is oriented both towards the object (as a phenomenal and abundant presence) at the same time as declaring his rhetorical interest in the subject (as an abundant presence of images, a representation of a fiction of plenitude or, better, a presentation of presentation, since there is nothing to re-present). Writing about discourses of delirium in 1930s Germany, the historian Klaus Theweleit argues that delirium is not simply a chaotic irrationalism nor the eclipse or destruction of reason. Instead, it has an internal structure that points to a range of material processes, to productions that cannot simply be reduced to economic explanation or perhaps even mathematical concept. In delirium, things do not always ‘add up’.30 Michel Foucault has specifically speculated on the mathematical consequences of an encounter with sheep. In Language, CounterMemory, Practice he notes: ‘Underneath the ovine species, we are reduced to counting sheep.’31 According to Foucault, we might encounter (sheep), we might count (sheep), but underneath the ovine we do not amount (to anything). For Foucault (discussing Deleuze)
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there is an arithmetical impetus to the way in which narrative equations allow the play of equivalences—the operation of difference and sameness. Yet the arithmetical impetus itself always remains outside the specifications of the sums. Addition, multiplication, repetition, something Foucault calls ‘swarming’, elude specification themselves. The comments of both Foucault and Theweleit point to the way in which Hall’s images of swarming sheep might themselves be understood phenomenally rather than operationally: as an aimless (anti)production or movement, an excessive expenditure, a ‘something more’ (an ostentation, an accumulation, a swarming) rather than ‘something else’ (a semantic or narrative function). For Hall, all this excessive productiveness is not without loss. Indeed, there is a piacular basis to this moment of national feeling: as something is felt something else is felled. Something has to give, be let go. In Hall’s words, there is a decapitation. And so, for Hall, as for other populists, there is a critical relation between being without a head and the nation as ‘the people’ (the relativistic, nihilistic motion of politics—as distinct from the absolute totalitarian idea, which is hierarchised).32 The Squatter’s Daughter does not present a patriotism premised on ‘heads’ or rulers but on purity, which is also understood as an abstraction. Hall’s nationalism is a feeling that searches for expression without limits; it strives for limitless flow. But it is also a feeling that sets limits, that says I belong here, this defines me (and you). In claiming or naming a ‘place’, nationalism produces a designation that implies a restriction, but it is also at the same time premised on a condition of abstraction and unboundedness. With these observations we come close to understanding something of the complexity of Hall’s nationalist excesses, his (canny) headlessness. In The Squatter’s Daughter, the production of a nationalist reality is a continuous process that has a whole array of sites (not the least important of which are relationships of gendered and racial difference and similarity), which are also contested relations of production and anti-production. In The Squatter’s Daughter, nationalism is also a production that escapes its own logic or conceptual economy. Nationalism is, as the swirling mob of sheep implies, a matter both of movement per se and a movement (i.e. one organised in formation). Hall’s depiction of immense animal movement corresponds to his feelings of headless-ness, wherein it is implied that such
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animal movement is a movement without thinking; without an obvious conceptual or ‘productive logic’. And so Hall’s sheep form a critical stellar mass; a figurative abstraction in which differences, disparities and divergences (the conditions of classification) disappear; an impossible, amniotic moment. But this is also a moment of socio-narrative conceptualisation; a constitutive moment in which the national and notional are mutually imbricated, in which the conceptual and the unthinking are equally possible, and where the productive and the anti-productive are both present. In volunteering what the nation would feel like (rather than how it would be organised), The Squatter’s Daughter suggests how ‘redundancy’ in the form of non-representational signs (texture, rhythm, movement, energy, intensity, community) might be (paradoxically) present as a rhetorical device (as tense and number, for instance). Consequently, Hall’s nationalism of canny excess lends itself to both hyperbole and to canalisation. It is even possible to see this struggle between ‘channelling’ and ‘outpouring’ in the precise way Hall constructs the opening sequence.
Nation: Likeness and nothingness You’ll go to direct an animal and you say I’ll make it do this. You’ll make it do NOTHING. You can con it into doing some things by trickery but most of the time you’ve gotta be patient and wait. Ken G. Hall33
They’re funny animals, sheep … I been around them for years, you know. You never know what they’re thinking, you know. Right out of the blue they’ll give you a nip. Sometimes they do what you want, other times they’re real bolshie. Les, The Lamb of God (Costa Botes, 1985)
Hall’s opening sequence is in fact made up of two distinct phases. The first, which accompanies the credits, describes and inscribes the sheep, fencing them in a representational economy that foreshadows their role in the farmyard economy. As the credits gather on the screen so do the sheep. Closely massed sheep appear to move in an uncoordinated way until a foreshortened camera perspective widens to reveal
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their actual removal to an enclosed paddock. As the opening titles depart so do the sheep, making their exit behind a closed gate. The camera tilts slowly upward to give us a traditionally composed pastoral vista replete with distant mountains watching over the now neatly penned sheep standing beside a framing tree. But, just as the unsuspecting viewer relaxes to contemplate the classical composition, the music steps up a beat and so does The Squatter’s Daughter. A peeling wipe reveals that beneath and beyond this pastoral scene lies the muster at Waratah. Further woolly images are pared away, each disclosing in ascending intensity a crowding of sheep culminating in a veritable orgy of fleece, weaving itself indiscriminately in an unending circle. Then, with an uncertain pan and an audible thud (signalling the untimely end of Elgar and the beginning of the dialogue track), the circling sheep are commanded to a standstill. In this uneasy convulsion, The Squatter’s Daughter imparts an awareness of its seams. It is an uncomfortable transition from a splendid amorphous figuration to the beginnings of a narrative of contested representations. Or perhaps the jerky thud is less a matter of passage—the hyphen that ups the ante from the diluvian—than an opportunity to dwell on what follows. In any case, Hall’s nationalist inebriation gives way to a painful sobering, a return from a magnificent formative abstraction to the worldly particulars of the mimetic. In Levi-Strauss’s studies of originary myths, their narratives are invariably shown by the anthropologist to begin with this very same mise en abyme; an originating absence of order from which an element is removed to provide the necessary narrative space for differentiation. This act or event of evacuation sets in train the process of ordering that determines the myth’s structure. Levi-Strauss’s spatial/topological allegory of differentiation privileges a narrative process of factors removed or totalities reduced. To be numerically poorer is to be narrationally (and perhaps logically) richer.34 In the Oedipus myth, for example, the narrative works to focus and domesticate (in Freud’s terms, to bring back to the father) a repetition that otherwise might seem indefinite, rhetorical, puzzling or intractable. In The Squatter’s Daughter, it is true that the sheep are being removed (duffed) from one paddock to another. But the sheep are also the basis for a narrative about the national benefits of productive excess (not numerical reduction). In a sense, on the verge of beginning its narrative, the
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sheep sequence—with its stress on the weight of numbers—hints at how the narrative will also enumerate its meanings. While elements of the film’s opening montage exceed the limits of a structural reading, it is certainly still possible to elaborate The Squatter’s Daughter in structural terms, such that its opening images of undifferentiated plenitude are seen to give way to a Levi-Straussian ordering. Twin sheep stations—Waratah and Enderby—produce sheep that to all intents and purposes are indistinguishable. But not to those who know them well. Certain sheep are being removed—poisoned and rustled. We learn this from the very moment the dialogue track interrupts Hall’s wash of wool. Characters from each sheep station make claim and counterclaim to the ownership of these sheep, setting in play a motif of contested possession that recurs throughout the film. A narrative space is opened, and what was once undifferentiated (a pair of twin sheep stations) becomes defined (and in a sense affiliated) in opposition. But something more is happening, and something that, in contrast to the structural operations of the narrative, is more certainly cinematic and populist insofar as it is partly a matter of moving visual imagery and partly a matter of confounding logic with affect (with what ‘works’ or ‘feels right’). The spaces opened (on the screen, in the story) are being filled with masses of sheep; that is, to plug conceptual gaps with a type of unspecified, woolly confusion and thus to return, as nearly as possible, to a pure amniosis (amnos (Gk) = lamb). In this sense, the film is able to preserve a constant orientation to a certain unknownness or confusion. Rather than a strictly structural logic, the film seems to prefer a sacrificial mode (itself a position historically identified with sheep and lambs—at least in religious texts) in which representations supplant presence, paradoxically evoking the very thing they erase. Substitution and equivalence or adequation are the defining terms of a sacrifical logic, which is also an algebraic logic. As one thing is removed its value is represented by an abstraction (which is simultaneously both its absence and presence). The operative presence and absence of sheep in The Squatter’s Daughter is paralleled by the presence and absence of parents (or ‘heads’) in the film. Each narrative thread reiterates the absence of (and correlative curiosity about) the past or memory (of origins). Where there are ‘histrionics’ there is most probably a problem of
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‘history’ presented by the narrative as a problem of knowledge. In The Squatter’s Daughter, the figuration of this narrative labour is the tautologous image of woolly confusion. These images, in their hyperbole, might be read in contradiction to Hall’s intention to overwhelm with a display of representational wealth, to foreground the phenomenal as an end in itself. In Hall’s images of sheep, the excessive theatrical gesture might instead be the sign of an inability to be definitive, to adequately locate his meanings as contemporaneous, as here-andnow, as tangible and present. But The Squatter’s Daughter does not dwell easily with the past either, as this chapter will explore further. There is a similar slippage at work in the Prime Minister’s introduction to the film, in his making compatible through a careful elision the terms ‘Australia’ and ‘Commonwealth’. Lyons hopes that in looking at the ‘image’ of Australia, the film’s viewers will turn their deliberations to the lofty abstractions of the Commonwealth; the particular and the general and the ‘great open spaces’ between.35 Lyons seems to deliberately confuse a particular Commonwealth (Australia) and the British Commonwealth so that his rhetorical move is both hypernationalistic and transnational—a movement into Empire once again. For Lyons, the idea of space, of spacing out, leads not (in the LeviStraussian understanding, for instance) to a process of differentiation but to an interchangeability of terms. Continuity does not give way to discontinuity. The aggregate does not yield to a field of separation (or even a separation of fields). For filling those ‘open spaces’ between Lyon’s conceptual leaps is an undifferentiated mass of swarming sheep, flooding the screen from side to side, absorbing and absolving as they go (and underlaid with British patriotic music). The deployment of sheep in The Squatter’s Daughter is remarkable for many reasons. It is not difficult to agree with Hall and Prime Minister Lyons and view this opening sequence of sheep as an unabashed image of national fecundity—a notion that is thematically pursued throughout the film. But perhaps the greatest interest of Hall’s sheep lies not so much in their image of fecundity but the fecundity of the image(s) per se. An eight-minute sequence encapsulates the movement of the entire film—propelling us from a studied pastoral into the headless intoxification of a massed culture. Instead of a traditional representation of artfully isolated sheep, a harking back to an earlier agrarian era, Hall’s early scenes of bursting paddocks imagine their
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Figures 3–50: The Squatter’s Daughter—opening sequence (frame capture)
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sheep in robustly urban terms—as a reference to the modern(ist) activity of massing. In this way, and despite its otherwise evident proclivity for thundering announcements, The Squatter’s Daughter secretes the city rather than announcing it as an explicit theme.36 In his opening gambit, Hall moves emphatically from the static pastoralism to a prenarrative figuration of a kind of representational mobility. This shift prefigures what also proves to be a narrative preoccupation with circular movement. The film contrasts a linear social mobility premised on name with the sort of circular biological mobility first demonstrated graphically by the sheep and later echoed in the narrative by an Afghan trader (‘life moves in circles’) and a comic Scotsman who is constantly characterised in terms of a futile and circular motion (as well as other less obvious instances). What is conveyed in the opening shots (see figures 3–50, pp. 72–4) is a gathering, a swirling, a confusion of spaces, of animal movement and closeness that erases all delineation between subject and object, self and other, national prosperity and common wealth. Sheep are figured as a bland substrate that unites all textual differences (class, ethnicity, gender, perhaps even the difference between primary and secondary products); a formative mise en abyme upon which culture might work its variations but which constantly promises to spill out and overwhelm with excess. Not only is the accumulation of sheep that Hall amasses in The Squatter’s Daughter the representation of an assembly but also, more importantly, it suggests the ways in which we might think of that representation as an ensemble—an image achieved and yet to be fully consolidated. As a prologue, the sequence sits both inside and outside the narrative in contradictory and perhaps impossible ways. It is both a preface (since it is not narrative) and it is not (since it is contained within—‘made sense’ of—by the narrative). So rather than merely submit to a structural reading of the kind suggested by Levi-Strauss, the film’s opening sequence also musters itself in an economy of the demonstrative. These opening scenes depict an event marked by a phenomenal rather than strictly narrative unity. Individual shots could just as easily be rearranged or removed without really disturbing the overall sense of the sequence in narrative terms. And at the same time the sequence derives its power from the sheer weight of repetition. Without the promise that the next shot will
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complete things, each shot must be viewed as a sort of specificity, as a fragment—complete, but not quite fully achieved. At the level of the national, we might read the film’s figuration of identity in similarly ambivalent terms. Perhaps we might read it in terms of a negation; as mercurially producing unity and identity out of apparent non-identity—a comforting process of totalisation and comprehensiveness; or, alternatively, we might look to those delirious, ‘headless’ moments and images and narratives and find instead a process of doubling and mediation without ostensible outcome except an intense incommensurability—a thickening of the film’s complexities. Here, instead of identity there is a not non-identity—a double(d) negation in which no whole is restored, where no individual can rescue logic (let alone misplaced sheep). In a state of headlessness we are powerless to think whole and therefore to think One-self. Without recognising this, those in search of the purely national in The Squatter’s Daughter will always be frustrated; an unsatisfied expectation for a ‘national’ cinema remaining a tantalising (im)possibility. This defeatism at the level of the image can also be seen in Hall’s delving use of wipes in this scene, which act as a palimpsest—revealing
Figure 51: The Squatter’s Daughter—Barky parts the fleece (frame enlargement)
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Figure 52: A Girl of the Bush—Lorna parts the fleece
the sheep beneath the sheep beneath the sheep and so on. The film promises to get to the bottom, to find what really lies ‘down under’. It seems to suggest that if we scratch the surface we will find the source or wellspring of all this national fervour—but what we find are simply more sheep. This sequence presses a constantly frustrated intent towards the question of cultural origins at the basis of national representation. Hall’s sheep provide a kind of representational or figurative
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Figures 53–56: The Squatter’s Daughter—the gumleaf band (frame enlargements)
thickening—a conceptual weightiness and the circular emphases of tautology. Australia rides down under/on the sheep’s back. There is something of an echo of these wipes in a later scene in which Barky parts the fleece of a sheep (see figure 51, p. 76)—inspecting the surface for, and finding, a purity of origins (i.e. discovering a merino sheep rather than a cross-breed); an image that itself echoes another parting of the fleece in A Girl of the Bush (Franklyn Barrett, 1921; see figure 52, p. 77). And again, in the film’s most arduous scene, two doors glide to either side of the frame like a wipe to reveal an unhappy Aboriginal gumleaf band (see figures 53–56)—perhaps the film’s most telling moment in the search for, and elision of, origins.37 But the wipe is not only a revelation (for that matter any shot is a revelation). It also implies a non-linear, all-at-once time in which events occur simultaneously ‘behind’ one another in series. What is ‘revealed’ in the wipe (unlike what is revealed in shot-reverse-shot sequences) is always already there. Thus the wipe (like the parting fleece or the sliding door) points clearly to a co-existent past, a time before, and to a future when the wipe is complete and has effaced
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itself—which is its entire purpose as an action. A more detailed discussion of the critical reception of Hall’s wipes occurs in chapter 3. In its unfolding, The Squatter’s Daughter participates in an inevitable forward movement of story. But the film’s evident interest in ‘productive redundancy’ (not only at the level of the image but also as a thematic concern) causes it to also fall back upon itself. The Squatter’s Daughter’s narrative circles about, reflexively enfolding its own discourse of origins, and in so doing it creates a doubled purpose between its claims to the worldly (mimetic) and to textual reference. Although seeking to maintain a hold on the mimetic, its specific narrative and formal strategies (while maintaining this worldliness) also emphasise its own materiality in terms of a narrative economy that rebounds redundantly off any type of linear flow. The film’s repetitions and doublings deflate and suspend directed movement, at the same time suspending a simple and direct indexical relation to the everyday world, demanding readings that recognise textuality. It is a contention of this chapter that these strategies bear a direct relationship to the thematic problem of origins that appears to be at the heart of the sheep film. Not only is this especially apparent in terms of their refiguring of the notion of the mimetic but also it bears consequences for the understanding of authorship in the (national) cinema, a consequence evident in the subsequent and frequently dismissive assssment of Ken G. Hall’s status as a father figure of the Australian cinema.
Notes Apologies to Luce Irigaray for tampering with her redolent title, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ for the heading of this section. 2 Kevin Evans in Film Digest 4 (October 1965), p. 17. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983, p. 85. 4 Ken G. Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, Summit Books, Melbourne, 1980, p. 60. On his prize-winning essay, see Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce, (Dir: Mark Sanders, Prod: AFTS) 1983. Videotapes held by the National Film and Sound Archive, ID No. 9843. 5 For sheep and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ see also Heritage (Charles Chauvel, 1935) and A Nation is Built (Frank Hurley, 1938). Hall returned to the same tune to close Dad Rudd MP (1939), although with fewer sheep. Arthur Benson’s lyrics for Edward Elgar’s composition emphasise the connection between England’s colonial expansion and the swelling of familial 1
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reproduction: ‘Land of Hope and Glory/Mother of the Free/How shall we extol thee/Who are born of thee?/Wider still and wider/Shall thy bounds be set’, etc. ‘Shadow shows’, Bulletin, 4 October 1933, p. 18. Sun News-Pictorial, 23 October 1933, p. 10. ‘Australian success: The Squatter’s Daughter’, Argus, 23 October 1933, p. 5. Ken Slessor, ‘Telling the truth about “Squatter’s Daughter”—When critics must be cruel to be kind’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 5. ‘ “The Squatter’s Daughter” at Sydney Civic’, Film Weekly, 5 October 1933, p. 22. Sylvia Lawson, ‘Towards decolonisation: Film history in Australia’, in Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends, Susan Dermody, John Docker & Drusilla Modjeska (eds), Kibble Books, Malmsbury, Vic., 1982, pp. 18–32; see p. 25 on ‘poor cousins’. William D. Routt, ‘The fairest child of the Motherland: Colonialism and family in Australian films of the 1920s and 1930s’, in The Australian Screen, Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989, pp. 28–52. Henshaw Jackson, Broken Fleece, William Brooks, Sydney, 1910, p. 107. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993. Dorrie James, appearing on Ken G. Hall: This is Your Life, episode 3/023. Produced and directed by Ron Way. Co-produced by Bud Tingwell. Written by Tony Scott. Held by the National Film and Sound Archive; AVC 005317. VA 032343–005. 23 June 1977. See Patricia Grimshaw, Creating a Nation, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Vic., 1994, pp. 205–29. Jocelyn Howarth, ‘How I came to star in Australian films’, Film Reporter, 1 June 1933, p. 17. William D. Routt has noted that the social critique is far more radical in this interpretation—but the implied politics has been replaced by a radical religion—even by a radical ‘ethnically different’ religion like Buddhism— although much Christian mysticism is also about loss of self—from the Fall onwards. Pers. comm. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983, p. 72. ibid., p. 73. ibid., p. 74. The Squatter’s Daughter includes a sly reference to Cinesound’s attempts to establish Howarth as a Hollywood-styled star. When her character Joan first encounters the injured Wayne she challenges him: ‘What are you doing here?’ Wayne looks up at Joan and replies with a ponderous pun: ‘Seeing stars, mostly.’ Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture, p. 74. Lingis’s ideas owe a great deal to the economics outlined by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Zone Books, New York, 1988–91.
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Charles Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, NSW Bookstall Company, Sydney, 1933, p. 145. Clive’s written speech is a slight variation on the one he makes in the film. The same description; ‘it’s big … and clean … and overpowering’ is instead offered by Cartwright (p. 106) in reference to the Australian landscape/spirit. The question of the Australian spirit recurs throughout the various versions of The Squatter’s Daughter, reaching something of a climax in Melaun’s stirring rendition of Barky’s Sydney Harbour speech. 25 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, St Martins Press, New York, 1990, p. 88. 26 British-Australasian Talking Pictures Ltd, Trade Follows Film, Sydney, 28 June 1933, n.p. 27 Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 60. 28 ibid. 29 In fact the footage was not limited to Cinesound and can be seen in the following Pathe newsreel titles: Just Wool (9 March 1933), On the Run (22 February 1934) and The Golden Fleece (11 November 1935). 30 Karl Theweliet, Male Fantasies vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. 31 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977, p. 182. 32 Hall’s nationalism is populist in direct contradistinction to, for instance, the Chauvels’ nationalism, which is hierarchised. Charles and Elsa Chauvel’s racism, for example, is directly about who rules, but Hall’s is about what is purest—which is why the Chauvels can directly tolerate miscegenation in a film like Jedda, whereas Hall cannot bring himself to show it. It is no small coincidence that the Chauvels’ rural dramas are all centred on cattle rather than sheep. 33 Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce (original emphasis). 34 Levi-Strauss covers this aspect of originary myths in The Raw and the Cooked, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990. 35 Publicity cards for The Squatter’s Daughter plagiarised the Prime Minister’s description, calling the film ‘Cinesound’s epic of Australia’s Great Open Spaces’. 36 A similar sentiment arises at the conclusion of Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986). Mick Dundee likens a mass of commuters in the New York subway to the sheep mob, clambering over their heads in order to make his last-minute romantic declaration. 37 A detailed discussion of this scene occurs in the final section of chapter four. 24
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Chapter 3
When familiarity breeds: Contempt, disability and national cinema
There’s nothing new in filmmaking … Whatever you think of has been done before. You can’t say there’s anything original. Ken G. Hall1
Cinema is always inextricably bound up with its point of origin. Sylvia Lawson2
Foundling fathers Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan Traditional maxim
Ken G. Hall counts as Australia’s most prolific feature film producer, being responsible for eighteen features between 1932 and 1946, as well as innumerable documentaries and newsreels and Australia’s first Academy Award. Hall was much admired by the industry’s number crunchers for his enviable record of apparently never losing money on a picture.3 Their admiration was made evident with a successful series of television screenings of Hall’s work in 1971.4 In this same year the entire forty-fifth anniversary issue of the exhibition and distribution
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industry journal Film Weekly was devoted to toasting ‘KG’s’ success. At one point in this edition, a selection of industry luminaries describe Hall as a man who ‘rightly deserves the title of the founding father of the Australian film industry’.5 Cinesound Studios is similarly remembered, ‘thanks to Ken Hall’, as ‘the cradle, the institute which nourished, encouraged and developed the men who found their mark in Australian film production’.6 The magazine’s cover editorial puts these countless descriptions of Hall’s ‘vitality’ and ‘vigour’ in candid terms: ‘The Salvation Army in 1899 produced Australia’s first motion picture—but it took Ken G. Hall to produce a motion picture industry in Australia.’ There is much to admire in Hall’s achievements. For more than a decade his work dominated and defined Australia on screen. His films spanned several genres and subgenres and were in continuous, regular production during a difficult period for Australian producers. Indeed, some of the difficulty that other producers experienced during this time was occasioned by Hall’s continuing production. The consistent popularity of his films in Australia is an unmatched accomplishment in the annals of the Australian cinema. This singular success, however, did not translate to other audiences. Hall’s work enjoyed only modest British export success, and he had little luck in the American market. Depite his evident success, film historians and custodians since the 1970s film ‘renaissance’ have not dealt with Hall’s work kindly. For instance, the name of Australia’s most prolific pre-war director/ producer was not recognised by the organisers of our national film awards (who reserved their favour for the posthumously rediscovered Raymond Longford to name the award for lifetime achievement).7 And Hall has, over the years, been the subject of some less than flattering critical assessment. For the most part his critics latch on to his admitted fondness for popular American cinema (‘I was encompassed by the glamour of Hollywood’) and his attendant attachment to the American affectation of a middle initial.8 Post-revival readings of Hall’s work seem to be fuelled by a mix of intellectual and moral contempt. Among Hall’s most vociferous critics is the filmmaker Albie Thoms.9 Writing in response to the release of Hall’s autobiography in the late 1970s, and giddy on the sweet success of the Australian film revival, Thoms fired off a cruel dis-missive at Hall. ‘Their considerable historical significance aside’, he says, ‘Hall’s
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films have little to recommend them to anyone interested in film as a creative art.’10 And what is worse, Hall himself is apparently ‘blind to their artistic shortcomings’, expert only at ‘misreading his own work’.11 At pains to explain such bad art and self-delusion, Thoms feigns understanding: ‘In view of the times one can understand some of Hall’s obeisance to Hollywood, but cannot admire him for it. Had he gone to France and observed the work of Jean Renoir, he might have become aware of the different options open to him and the Australian film industry.’12 Thoms was not alone in his criticism of Hall’s failure to originate (let alone genuflect in the correct direction). In a lengthy interview with Hall conducted at around the same time, Philip Taylor repeatedly questioned his undervaluing of ‘originality’ (read ‘art’ or ‘creativity’) and overvaluing of ‘formula’. He accuses Hall of an absence of camera technique (meaning signature style), and Hall quickly counters, ‘The fact that there’s no noticeable camera technique in my pictures is because I strove to get an absence of technique.’13 Hall continues insistently: I believe the camera is a recording instrument through which a story is told—smoothly, and without bizarre effect. You are not conscious of the rushing pencil or crackling typewriter, when you read a book. Or the way the author parts his hair. Your interest is the story. And its exactly the same thing with film. Having the cameraman hang by the heels from the chandelier to get a better look at a woman’s cleavage does not impress me. The more I see a director straining after ‘effect shots’ the more I recognise his immaturity. He has to get attention somehow. Artistically framed, beautifully composed shots in abundance—yes of course. But I have always believed that the audience should not be conscious of the camera. And I will go on believing it.14 Earlier in the same interview, in response to a similar set of accusations about the lack of deliberate artistry in his work, Hall declared; ‘What is on the screen naturally comes out of the direction. This is the way creation has got to be.’15
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The object of his affectation Little Lamb who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? William Blake, ‘The Lamb’, Songs of Innocence
Taylor’s laboured alliance between Hall’s commercial inclination and his apparent lack of artistry had been foreshadowed by the film historian John Baxter, who noted that ‘most of his films are remarkable more for their economy and professionalism than for artistic merit’.16 Even an admirer, John Tulloch, attributed Hall’s ‘economy’ to the fact that his films were ‘unashamedly American’ and that he sought to ‘imitate the Hollywood model in every detail possible’.17 ‘Hall’s films’, he says, ‘had the Hollywood “punch”.’18 Filmmaker Michael Thornhill denounced Hall as ‘a man who earned his living by promoting popular culture from other countries; in fact helping to create a demand (giving the public what it wanted, Mr Hall would have it) for foreign products’.19 In even the most complimentary of cases, Hall’s critics felt compelled to offer an explanatory remedy for something that has gone awry, as if some innate debility or flaw had caused Hall to lapse into error and incoherence. Writing in 1968, Alan Seymour begins a lengthy article about the state of Australian theatre by taking a resounding shot at Hall, focusing on his conception of art and entertainment: ‘And still the enshrinement of mediocrity. Embodied once again in the shibbolethic Ken Hall and his dinosaur’s view of films … Mr Hall’s concept of entertainment seems in any case to be that of an illiterate Hollywood producer circa 1917 who equated that mystery “the public taste” with his own idiot delusions and threadbare values.’20 ‘ “Art” in films’, Seymour disingenuously reminds us, ‘is now no longer the self-conscious business of strikingly composed photography and lighting and an over literary script.’21 Rather it is composed of a specifically cinematic but anti-Hollywood language (‘I used to think anti-Americanism old fashioned but today it is the most necessary sentiment in the world’). Seymour finds even the very debate in which he engages Hall tedious and repetitive: ‘All this has been said so often one wonders why it has to be rehearsed again at so late a stage.’ As it was for Thoms, it is the question of Hall’s derivativeness that is at issue for Seymour, both personally and more generally for the
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possibilities of a local film industry at large. He blames Hall for the apparent difficulty in conceptualising and realising a local cinema: The difficulty remains because of the confident ignorance of the old-timers [i.e. Hall] evidently unaware of (or totally prejudiced against) the drastic changes which have come over the film world in the last decade, and especially because Australian film, and television, are dominated by ageing aunties and illiterate business-men, trapped in outdated ideas which were pretty thin and derivative in the first place, and unlikely to finance projects they still, God strike them dead, consider ‘highbrow’, ‘experimental’, ‘uncommercial’.22 Seymour, along with Thoms, was equally concerned with the object of Hall’s affections. For Seymour, the future lies in films that have ‘thrown aside the pat formulae of Hollywood and have evoked their own wild world, recognisably related to their national life’.23 Hall’s imitation of American cinema imperils the recognisably national: ‘We don’t want heavy self-conscious epics of the soil or hymns to the Australian humanist spirit. But it would be good to see some light, bright, fast, insight-catching, life-capturing movies gradually winning a reputation which Australian cinema trying to follow the old stereotypes has never won. Fortunately there are few new stereotypes to be aped.’24 Film critic Ken Quinnell, reviewing Hall’s performance at the 1976 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, was equally frank in arguing Hall’s (unsatisfactory) deference to Hollywood. ‘Hall’, he says, ‘is a stooge for the vested interests who want to either control or destroy cinema in this country. Fortunately, a clip from one of Hall’s vulgar (and thankfully forgotten) films was screened which cancelled out any serious consideration of his remarks.’25 In criticising the AFI awards, Quinnell explicitly longs for a future in which Ken Hall will be ignored, in which ‘the industry’s terrible fear of being poor by overseas standards’ will be overcome and when ‘Australia, as a cultural entity, finally leaves its childhood behind’.26 Quinnell’s article prompted a swift reply from a group of indignant film historians (Ray Edmondson, Andrew Pike, Graham Shirley and Ian Griggs) who took particular exception to his comments about
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Hall: ‘The tendency to knock past achievements is one of the saddest signs of the lingering cultural immaturity which Mr Quinnell so abhors.’27 However, in a more considered assessment of Hall’s films (in particular his strand of action films) written only a few years earlier, Hall’s would-be defender Andrew Pike found, like Quinnell, a common ‘overt debt to Hollywood, not only in the details of Ken Hall’s direction, but in the narrative structure of each film’. Describing these films as ‘exercises in Hollywood genres’ and as particularly ‘derivative’, Pike argues his case by comparing in detail Hall’s Lovers and Luggers (released in the USA in 1939 as Vengeance of the Deep) with the Hollywood B feature City Beneath the Sea (Budd Boetticher)—the latter made many years after Hall’s film, in 1954.28 Pike distinguishes Hall from his contemporaries: ‘Unlike Chauvel and Efftee, Hall attempted to satisfy audiences at home and overseas with an increasingly efficient imitation of Hollywood methods, accompanied by an automatic muting of purely local elements.’29 Hall seemed all too aware of these latter criticisms, suggesting on more than one occasion that he had been ‘accused of aping Hollywood’.30 In response to a question about whether he had been inspired by Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin when making his first film The Exploits of the Emden, Hall reacts a tad defensively but makes an interesting distinction between visual style and production style, which his interviewer does not take further: I hadn’t seen it, and I never have seen it up to now. I don’t want to be influenced by these things. When I do something I’d rather go off on my own bat and if I make a mess of it, then that’s me. At least I did it myself. I wasn’t in a halfbaked way copying somebody else. In all my films I used the American style, the American style of making films and I’d try and get them as slick and as fast as I could.31 In Hall’s estimation it was an American style of behind-the-scenes production (‘the American style of making films’) rather than an onscreen visual style that inspired him. In a sense here he admits to one of the criticisms made of him. In overtly denying that he imitated objects or models, he (covertly) admits that he might be the site of an
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Figure 57: The Squatter’s Daughter—Ken G. Hall directs
imitation; that is, that he styled himself after American producers. What Hall acknowledges in this concession is that imitation might not be located in the completed films themselves but in their method of (re)production. According to some critics, the explanation for Hall’s popular success (and, for them, his simultaneous failure as an artist) is that he does not adequately overcome his model. Repetition as restaging might be admirable, but cultural repetition that is dogged and formulaic and obedient is not. The replay, it seems, should transcend (rather than degenerate), and it must assert its difference from the original. For the even more sceptical, the reason for Hall’s success lies precisely in this lack of originality—in his imitations. It would be easy to suggest that these criticisms of Hall stem from an urge to distinguish the foundling national cinema of the 1970s from that of the 1930s by way of a symbolic parricide or two. Having been ‘reborn’ aesthetically, and to some extent popularly, Australian filmmakers and commentators sought their antecedents retrospectively, far from the questionable parental practices of a ‘founding father’ like
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Ken G. Hall. Industry architects like Barry Jones and Phillip Adams, for instance, turned to European art cinema for their creative inspiration.32 But the palpable embarrassment over Hall’s inadequate reproductions was evident well before the Australian film revival was even a glint in Phillip Adams’ eye.
Of issue I have nothing against critics as a race except that they are so very often wrong. Ken G. Hall33
Writing as early as 1965, Bruce Chandler reported at length on the reasons for a surprisingly poor attendance at a Hall retrospective held by the Sydney Film Festival.34 Chandler outwardly wondered how many festival subscribers were tempted away ‘by Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Nine Days of One Year, Peter and Pavla, or some normal Saturday night activity’ (my italics). The rest of his article discusses the rationale behind the programming of excerpts of Hall’s work rather than full features: If Let George Do It is not true Hall [its success attributed instead to George Wallace] it was at least not made to be laughed at, and in these terms it was judged the only one of the eight films which could be shown in its entirety to festival audiences without provoking ridicule—as much a reflection on the inability of modern audiences to look at films in their historical perspective as it is on the quality of Hall’s films themselves.35 ‘Festival audiences’, Chandler surmises, are not interested in films that are ‘frankly commercial in aim’. And so, although Hall might be described as a filmmaker who ‘is not concerned with artistic masterpieces which nobody would see’, it appears this was his fate on one particular Saturday night.36 And clearly Chandler relishes Hall’s comeuppance. According to Chandler, Hall laboured under a misconception about his actual success. ‘Cinesound’, he almost apologises, ‘could not beat Hollywood at its own game.’ And in failing to ‘beat’ their
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Hollywood competitors, Hall’s films also failed to achieve a standard of artistic merit.37 The ‘logic’ of Chandler’s argument is so tightly wound that it’s worth quoting at length: It’s easy to find explanations if not excuses for this falling away in the creative content of Hall’s films. The strain of being solely responsible for the profit and loss of Cinesound Studios, of being the only continuous producer of feature films in Australia, of being to all intents and purposes the one person on whom the Australian industry depended— all no doubt contributed to a continuous and increasing emphasis on safeness and economy … Another drawback to being a one-man industry is that it is tantamount to working in a vacuum. A glance at the credits for the [films discussed] reveals how self-enclosed, not self-sufficient Cinesound Studios had become … [T]he Cinesound set-up can be compared with the sort of in-breeding that contributed to the decline of more virile production companies such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Ealing Studios.38 Chandler accuses Hall of producing ‘in-bred’ progeny, films that are congenitally disfigured, that fail for paternal conceit and a resultant autogeneration. In order to make his allegation stick, Chandler collapses the culturally procreative (Hall’s industrial status as a ‘sole’ producer) into his incapacity to be creative (in aesthetic terms). Throughout all these critical assessments of Hall’s career as a filmmaker there seem to be a number of common features and terms. First, there is the evident way in which the theme of ‘disability’ is embedded in the language of accusation and criticism. And then there is the way these critics map this overwhelming attention to ‘disability’ on to other doubts about Hall’s status as a fit ‘originator’. It seems Ken Hall’s reproductive prowess, his evident capacity to propagate, is tempered by the quality of his progeny. Hall’s critics tease out, unravel and tie up again a dubious relationship between (cultural) reproduction and disability such that ‘disability’ becomes embedded in the (misshapen) presence of the films themselves. Thoms and Thornhill reproach Hall for what they see as an inappropriate exogamy—of sleeping with the ‘enemy’ (American and specifically Hollywood
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cinema) yet at the same time failing to distinguish himself adequately. The resultant incestuous amour propre produces the less than perfect offspring they are at pains to disavow. Chandler goes further, finding an explicit correspondence between Hall’s rhetorical inadequacies and his cultural failings as a father figure—in his production methods, no less! What is of particular interest is not just the way ‘disability’ infiltrates the discussion of Hall’s films but that it retrospectively provides evidence and reason for the way the films fail to articulate for his critics. Hall’s critics repeatedly focus on two anxieties that they underscore with disability tropes—the problem of (cultural) origins and the problem of (national) representation—wherein difference is perceived in terms of a ‘failure’ rather than as a threat or a model of success. Perhaps ironically, these are the very issues that Hall’s films, like The Squatter’s Daughter, anticipate and explore. There is something specifically revealing about the slip these various critics make between being mistaken and being the subject of a mistake. In sharing the view that Hall’s formal strategies represent a ‘genetic’ error they decline to approach them ambivalently as historically contextualised practices or perhaps even as cognisant choices on Hall’s part. They impose on Hall a blindness—a blindness to his own duplicity. Hall not only issues imperfect, flawed films, he also misconceives himself. The moment of conception is fraught with the prospect of disability in the form of a type of blindness, which in turn is defined by a partiality and self-interest. In the course of this circular argument we might then also look to the partiality of Hall’s critics—to their critical blindnesses and oversights, their failure for example to see the ways in which Hall’s films anticipate and interject in these very debates about cultural reproduction, disability and national origins; also their blindness to their own inheritances, to footnote their debt to Hall’s earliest critics, in particular his contemporary and censor, W. Creswell O’Reilly.
Nation and narcissism Disfigurement is the flip side of narcissism. Stanley Kwan (Yang and Yin in Chinese Cinema, 1996)39
Throughout his career, as a publicist and as a producer, Hall waged a continuous battle with the Chief Censor, Walter Creswell O’Reilly. When familiarity breeds
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O’Reilly was a Methodist minister with a zealous ability for getting to the bottom of a metonymy or two. Where there is excessive washing, for instance, there must also be impurity; the traces of filth and pollution; and so O’Reilly chastises the English cinema generally for ‘too many bath scenes’ (he mentions them in his reports of 1932, 1933 and 1935) and similarly protests the outpouring of Hollywood gangster movies (‘Why should dirty American linen be washed in the presence of Australian audiences?’). Hall in later years described O’Reilly as the product of a mistake—a man ‘whose name still lives as an example of what might be truthfully called miscasting …’40 In 1933 O’Reilly issued an annual report that included a discomfited comment on the state of Australian film production and a thinly disguised swipe at Hall’s first feature film, the bucolic comedy On Our Selection: Attention was drawn last year to the fact that productions were being made showing Australians as ultra simpleminded and mentally childish. Since then there have been other glaring cases infected with the same blight. Such films are doing much to harm the prestige of Australia abroad, and if any more are presented to this censorship for export it will be necessary to take drastic action.41 It is difficult to determine exactly to which films O’Reilly attributes subsequent infection. The censor’s comments for the previous year, 1932, complained: ‘Some Australian films, much vaunted for their Australian atmosphere, make other people wonder if outback settlers are ultra-simple minded and mentally childish.’42 Here O’Reilly can only be referring to one or any of the three feature films released in that year: On Our Selection (Ken G. Hall), The Sentimental Bloke and His Royal Highness (both by F. W. Thring), and it is obvious that O’Reilly’s comments are squarely aimed at Hall’s On Our Selection as the only narrative to centre exclusively on ‘outback settlers’. In 1933, however, it seems O’Reilly is aiming wider—perhaps again at Hall with The Squatter’s Daughter, but also Waltzing Matilda and Diggers in Blighty (both by Pat Hanna) and definitely The Hayseeds (Beaumont Smith). The trade journal Everyone’s, noting the censor’s evident lack of humour, pointed out in an editorial that O’Reilly had ‘misrecognised’
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films that were patently intended as comedic burlesque, not social realism. In doing so, however, the journal ‘forgets’ about a drama like The Squatter’s Daughter, which presents physically ‘afflicted’ characters, but within a narrative with some ‘realist’ aspirations. Everyone’s does go on to concede that, ‘If people take them as true pictures of ourselves, then there is justification of censorship before export’; a confident assertion which perhaps implies that Hall’s ‘high-brow’ melodrama is about as credible or ‘believable’ as his ‘low-brow’ burlesque. O’Reilly’s comments waver uncertainly between the idea of the audience’s viral susceptibility to verisimilitude (that these representations of Australians as ‘mentally childish’ might somehow be construed as ‘true’) and the perils of allegory (wherein he sublates images of ‘disability’ to national destiny). Like a post-modernist (or any latterday critic of media dominance), he wants it all—to take films literally and symbolically. And as such they serve dual functions for him, as a source of both shame and solace. It is through our evident failings that we know our difference. We might not be smart but at least we’re ‘special’. The basis for this faltering between national distinction and representative shame is not altogether obvious. O’Reilly plainly plays upon a popular anxiety: that ‘simple-mindedness’ might be a symptom of a lack of worldliness, the direct result of global isolation that furnishes an unarguable differentiation and an unavoidable inbreeding. These are the evident risks attached to identifying ourselves as a nation of ‘self-made’ men and women. Disability (in the form of simple-mindedness) reveals itself to be an anxiety around (national) origins. Or, to put it another way, images of disability are a symptom of the ‘problem of origins’ at the heart of the nationalising project. A distinct Australian identity—that is, one that can be delineated or isolated from others—rests precariously on a suspect, incestuous cultural reproduction. And the censor reveals himself to be someone who is engaged in a type of national stirpiculture—a social genealogist who uses the cinema as his argument and his conclusion. Like Hall’s later critics (particularly Chandler), O’Reilly holds the view that the films themselves are diseased, ‘infected’ with a ‘blight’— a contagion that only a ‘drastic action’ in the form of imposed selfcontemplation can be certain to cure. This belief, that certain
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Australian films stutter, are blind, are impeded, and are mentally ‘defective’, resonates in the thoughts of Thoms et al. almost fifty years later. Even a contemporary review of The Squatter’s Daughter describes the film in terms of the atavistic, claiming that its mimetic failings signify its evident status as a ‘throwback’. In his ominously titled review, ‘Telling the Truth about “Squatter’s Daughter”—When critics must be cruel to be kind’, noted writer Ken Slessor despairs for the future: ‘Smith’s Weekly hopes that “The Squatter’s Daughter” and similar throwbacks will soon be forgotten, and that the day is not far distant when Australian picture-goers will be able to take a real pride in the achievements of their own film-studios.’43 The corrective quarantine that O’Reilly proposes is an isolating action that sanctions a type of national separation and accordingly absolves the nation of its incestuous guilt. Indeed, his threat to isolate the films is itself a microcosm of the contemporary social strategies employed for apportioning difference, wherein indigenous Australians, the disabled and other select minorities were commonly subjected to institutionally sanctioned segregation. And by putting himself in the picture, as it were, the censor moves attention from the affliction itself to the context in which it circulates (or not). It is the censor himself who is disabling, not the ‘blight’ or the films that display it. Martin Norden, in writing about the representation of the disabled in the cinema, argues that the cinema has historically reiterated the social isolation of the disabled, isolating them even at the level of the image. ‘The most severe difficulty encountered by a human being is that isolation from the flow of events … the isolation of the handicapped from the flow of events resulted in precisely this devolutionary situation, wherein the actual handicap became a minor and subsidiary problem in comparison to being cut off from the avenues and possibilities of future experience.’44 Films, the disabled and the nation all share a structuring parallel relationship for O’Reilly.45 Both disability and the national cinema that represents it share a mode of being in the world that is characterised by partition—a not-quite-there-ness. This shared partiality is more than the idea of a cultural indigence in the sense of a ‘lack’ or absence of worldliness (although this is where O’Reilly stops himself short). The partiality of the Australian cinema, its not-quite-there-ness, also
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hints at a crisis of reproduction—of troubled origins and of progeny that are not-quite-perfect or ‘not the full quid’. The ‘simple-minded’ film characters O’Reilly is so ashamed of are figurative tropes for a cultural anxiety around matters that are equally concerned with reproduction and representation. It is still possible to hear the echo of his uneasiness in worried assessments of the Australian cinema as a ‘poor copy’ (or perhaps even ‘poor cousin’); a cinema that never really seems to arrive at its destination; a repetition not quite fully achieved (yet deserving of recognition nonetheless). And this partiality serves to remind us that national representation is always rhetorical; that it need not locate anything beyond its boundaries; that it operates on the materiality of the text alone. The not-quite-thereness of the national cinema can be understood in terms of a partial self-reflection that is as fluid, yet just as finite as the surface waters that once dazzled and overwhelmed a mythic Greek beauty. Perhaps the local popularity of these ‘simple-minded’ characters reveals a fascination for what it might mean to inhabit a culturally partial position based on some wider cultural wish for apprenticeship and incompleteness. What if national success was not simply the illusion of wholeness or cultural coherence but was always founded on a partiality and a-part-ness? Perhaps for an Australian subject the fantasy is one of shared particularity and completeness? Disability or affliction, as conceived in these terms, is written within and constitutes identity—‘the national’. In likening images of the disabled to an ‘unfit’ Australian cinema, the censor partially conceives of national identity; he admits an understanding of identity in terms of the permanently partial. To the extent that O’Reilly’s fear is export (and the filmmaker’s dangerous disregard for the critical gaze of the other), Thoms’ fear is import (and the filmmaker’s indifference to the value of the local). For those critics riding the crest of the 1970s film revival, Hall’s ‘crime’ was his uncanny ability to imitate—to the extent that he himself becomes indistinguishable from that very practice. He is characterised in terms of a type of cultural autism—as if confined by a fascination he can’t rise above or move beyond. Hall is charged with an inability to differentiate himself from the ‘imitative’ as a modus operandi. A muchquoted echo of this idea appears in the writings of American
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anthropologist Eric Michaels some years later: ‘Australians have no idea: they think they’re watching the same TV as the Yanks … They imagine they’re becoming Yanks. And you’re not allowed to tell them that they’re actually becoming something much more like Filipinos.’46 Despite—indeed because of—the Australian cinema’s desire to be ‘like’ its idols, it repeats not the specific cinematic models it chooses to admire (Europe, Hollywood and so on) but rather a state or practice of repetition itself, a ‘colonial’ state (inferred by Michaels’ reference to the Philippines). Chandler, on the other hand, writing only moments earlier in the 1960s, offers a slightly different position from his critical heirs in the 1970s. For Chandler (in the tradition of O’Reilly), Hall’s deficiencies are directly measurable in terms of the paucity of his progeny (i.e. his films). The sins of the father are indeed revisited upon the ‘heads’ of his simple-minded children (the legacy of Hall’s voluntary decapitation perhaps). It is Hall’s inability, his lack of success at reproduction rather than his imitative exactitude, that is the problem. All these critics see their nightmares in the same films. And all deploy tropes of disability (blindness, simple-mindedness) to elaborate their positions. At the heart of their respective complaints is an anxiety about cultural reproduction—about endogamy and exogamy at the level of national representation. Although they differ in their understanding of the mechanics of national origination, all resort to a figurative disability, each in a sense ‘theorising’ the Australian cinema and the question of cultural reproduction in terms of the permanently partial—as incomplete, yet already completed. Not surprisingly, Hall’s films provide their own approaches to national representation in tales of troubled origins and partial reproductions, and each within the rhetorical terms of an operative ‘disability’.
Reproduction in the animal romance A narrow gate opens up an entire world. Gaston Bachelard47
Parturition is a different proposition for human females than for quadrupeds such as ewes, whose infants have the same average birth weight as humans. Beischer and Mackay, Obstetrics and the Newborn48
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The films W. Creswell O’Reilly alludes to in his sweeping criticism of Australian cinema, the popular backblocks farces like the ‘Dad and Dave’ comedy On Our Selection (1932), themselves tell a story of selfperpetuating inbreeding. O’Reilly found Selection to be so threatening in this regard that some years after its release he could still be heard worrying that it might have been considered ‘prejudicial to the interest and reputation of Australia’.49 Even earlier, the theatre critic for Table Talk had described the stage play of On Our Selection in precisely the same terms O’Reilly had grown to fear and reproach: the glowing prose of national representativeness: On Our Selection is an Australian play not only in its setting but in its story and whole environment. Joe Rudd (Dad of the story), the settler ruined by drought and misfortune and in the hands of the moneylenders … his slouching rather lubberly sons … the daughters who, typical of Australia, are smarter and more refined than their brothers; and the fine mother who is also typical of the women who have helped to make our land.50 On Our Selection takes up the problem of reproduction and differentiation in comedic fashion as in the scene in which one character mistakes his own image in the mirror for that of his father. The inability to ‘know’ or recognise a difference verifies Dave’s naivety and witlessness. Dad’s Dave might be a few sheep short in the top paddock, but that’s a problem easily solved by simply removing the railings that separate neighbouring properties; that is, hitching up with the similarly ‘lacking’ girl up the road. It’s not just the ‘simple-minded’ husbands but husbandry itself that is at issue in these rural romances. In these comedies—filled to the brim with characters who fall short of the normative—the reproductive hazards created alternatively by distance and proximity are allegorically mapped on to a national narrative. Like a Levi-Strauss myth, these films (and their critics) ask, ‘Are we born of one or two?’ As William D. Routt has noted, the films do reserve a selective exogamy for a number of privileged (i.e. fully sentient) daughters who are permitted to marry imported visitors—if only from the ‘mother country’.51 In this scenario the minimum conditions for difference are
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established within a wider economy of the familiar. And so a figurative incest (between mother and/or father and their daughters) might be disguised as an apparent outward-ness. This ‘logic’ also pervades The Squatter’s Daughter. Like On Our Selection, this film began its long life as an incredibly popular stage play before being committed to film and print. Hall’s version of The Squatter’s Daughter is a film explicitly about matters of breeding and disability and the establishment of difference in a narrative economy based on ‘likeness’ and similarity. In The Squatter’s Daughter, this explicit interest in doubling and ‘doubled purposes’ finds its apotheosis in the romance between the ‘twin’ station owners that is represented as the closest thing to reconciling self-generation with the minimal requirement for sexual difference in structural(ist) terms.52 The film’s problem is to establish the least difference necessary for the two to be reproductively coupled. In order to do this, The Squatter’s Daughter hangs its narrative around a sequence of axiological variations and valorisations; between the narrative’s simultaneous drive to reproductive excess and the demand for a pithy resolution; the differentiation entailed in the nationalising project and a cultural predilection for indistinction or anonymity; a moral compulsion for personal self-sacrifice and a national demand for self-aggrandisement; the loss of totality entailed in partial identifications and a larger faith in a type of seamlessness. The Squatter’s Daughter plunges headlong towards these variations concurrently. Characters move towards strength and weakness, difference and sameness at precisely the same time, and many apparent narrative resolutions are undermined. The film is filled not so much with contradictions as with ‘crossed lines’—an interesting enough occurrence in a narrative that accommodates both the anticipated achievements of pure breeding (those famous merinos) and the unpredictable effects of cross-breeding. This sense of ‘accommodation’ and narrative largeness pervades the film at the same time as it makes an argument for the virtues of minimal differentiation in matters of reproduction. The drive to narrative simplification is a constantly contested process in The Squatter’s Daughter. The film is marked by a tension between the (economically desirable) production of excess and the (politically desirable) processes of domestication. This textual ‘conflict’
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produces an inherent wavering between, on the one hand, the desire for unlimited repetition/multiplicity and, on the other, the need for Oedipal narrative resolution. Here perhaps lies one basis for The Squatter’s Daughter’s ambivalent relationship to the classical Oedipal narrative. Where the Oedipal narrative privileges monogenesis, in which numerical excess or disarray is converted into identity, and an indefinite sequence is resolved at whatever sacrifice, The Squatter’s Daughter turns its energies to the production of a kind of productive redundancy (at almost all levels: as a narrative theme, in its extravagant performances and formal indulgences). This disregard of the Oedipal is most plainly manifest in the narrative. The Squatter’s Daughter moves along as fathers are erased. From the outset it’s really a story about fathers who have literally ‘died in the wool’. Dead dads and an absent mother’s plans for her daughter become entwined with a wider ranging inquiry: how are ‘we’ constituted politically, culturally? The conventions of Oedipal narration are further undermined in the film’s ambivalent depiction of an operative incest in which the fortunes of the nation appear to rest on the successful union of ‘twin’ sheep stations. In the context of these variations, The Squatter’s Daughter can claim from the outset to celebrate the ‘health and optimism’ of a nation, yet be curiously populated with myriad characters who possess neither. The film’s advertising trailer boasts that it has ‘everything a great Australian picture should have’, but it shows us at precisely the same time vivid scenes of blind and so-called ‘crippled’ characters.53 In The Squatter’s Daughter disability is everywhere: from Joan’s accusatory opening address in which she claims to have been crippled by Clive (‘And now you’re trying to break me so I’ll come crawling to you and surrender’), to her filial love for her lame brother and her romance with the mysterious and similarly limping Wayne. The screenplay makes direct allusion to the relationship between the romance and the spate of disabilities in a penultimate scene (which didn’t make the final cut): Joan:
… Life will be wonderful, Wayne.
Wayne: Don’t be too sure. You’ll have to take me like trouble on the installment plan—one catastrophe down and a disaster every week.
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(Laughing and pointing to his foot.)
Broken foot (pointing to his shoulder).
Broken arm. But you almost deserve them both, honey— She draws his face down to hers and kisses him fondly, rubbing her hands through his hair as she does so. Joan:
Because you nearly left me with a broken — heart.
The characters of The Squatter’s Daughter are notable for their lack of universality, and even the most normative among them, Joan, points to the possibilities of life outside the humanist inclination of classical narration. They are both human and non-human, national and partial, characters and characteristic. They are human in the sense that we speak of being ‘only human’ as if to explain our deficiencies or mistakes. In being decentred they find meaning and feeling only when they reach out and touch an other, a part-ner or perhaps an even more evident ‘other’, such as the animal, as in Joan’s completion of Wayne’s sentence above, or the blind Barky’s bent for tenderly parting the fleece of his favourite sheep, or perhaps Jimmy’s devoted fealty to his canine chum, Bidgee. In The Squatter’s Daughter characters ‘make sense’ in terms of their interrelationships and elaborate genealogies, as both characteristic and as counterparts.
Joan I want to feel I’ve done it all myself Joan, The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933)
In the midst of this prodigious disablement The Squatter’s Daughter also moves towards the promotion and symbolic production of the normative. The central character of Joan might be the universal (i.e. fully abled) character upon whom the demand for normativity rests, but as convention demands, Joan’s narrative destiny is to become another’s part-ner, his ‘better half’. The Squatter’s Daughter leans on a logic of addition and subtraction: at any moment a character’s eyesight, sheep, mobility, even identity might be taken away, then just as suddenly restored. Joan, who at the end of the film is ‘added’ (i.e.
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coupled), is simultaneously subtracted and decentred. Even the normative, wholesome (whole-sum) Joan is at risk of a ‘partialising’ activity. We see a portent of Joan’s eventual dependence on another for ‘completion’ demonstrated graphically after the bushfire. In an uncharacteristically hysterical state, the once proudly capable Joan staggers out of the bush unable to even walk without assistance. And so the film suggests that it is not Clive who has finally succeeded in crippling her, but it is in ‘nature’ itself (nature at its most ‘raw’ or undomesticated) that Joan uncovers a disturbing presentiment of her own partial-ness. Joan herself is the direct successor of Lorna, the eponymous ‘Girl of the Bush’.54 Indeed when Ken Hall first began pre-production for The Squatter’s Daughter he actively considered the same sheep station that provided the backdrop for A Girl of the Bush (Franklyn Barrett, 1921)—the merino stud property of Fred McMaster.55 Like The Squatter’s Daughter, A Girl of the Bush locates its heroine at the centre of the production and display of Australia’s ‘wealth’ of wool (see figure 58). A lengthy sequence featuring the transformation
Figure 58: A Girl of the Bush—the shearing shed with the heroine at centre-stage
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visited on paddocks of teeming sheep as they are mercurially converted into wool bales is preceded by an intertitle that boasts of the ‘658 million pounds’ of Australian wool produced annually. John Tulloch describes the way this scene is composed of ‘wealth shots’, based on an opposite movement to The Squatter’s Daughter’s opening shots. Rather than a composed pastorale giving way to an orgy of fleece, A Girl of the Bush is centrally concerned with the establishment of systems of directed movement and wealth ‘captured’: The sequence begins with the profile of a proud ram leading a multitude of sheep over a creek, with cuts to further wealth shots which strongly emphasise multitudinous movement across and within the picture frame. The sequence continues with sustained shots that are emblematic of cultural control, as men force that ‘wealth’ into enclosures through the narrow hole of a nearby closed gate, next to where Lorna is standing.56 This last shot echoes a preceding one in which Lorna divides sheep by running them through a narrow enclosure. In this earlier scene Lorna’s evident participation in all the activity is in stark contrast to her degenerate cousin Oswald’s laziness; he is particularly defined by his passivity. But whereas Tulloch suggests Lorna simply stands (passively), the camera instead shows Lorna as predominantly an active participant in the station’s labour, pausing only to give graphic momentum to the sheep. The sequence continues circuitously beyond Tulloch’s description to show further images of shearing, classing, dipping and finally the packaged wool bales slowly heading back out across the very same creek the sheep crossed at the beginning of the sequence. Again, Lorna is an active participant in many of these images (see figure 59, p. 103). Tulloch returns to this same scene of the sheep and the gate later on, in order to explicate the ways in which the film relocates ‘woman’s sexuality’ through the image of sheep. As Tulloch would have it, the question of the production of meaning in A Girl of the Bush is not unlike the questions posed by the film’s representation of the production of wealth. It too is a contest for control over the threat of disorder: ‘The counterpointing of vigour (power, labour) and female passivity
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Figure 59: A Girl of the Bush—Lorna works while Oswald shirks
(voyeuristic spectacle)—contained, for instance, in the single shot of Lorna, sheep and the constricted gate opening—is a tension the text never resolves, despite the conservative narrative closure … [my emphasis].’57 Tulloch, in finding Lorna’s alternate passivity and activity to be a defining and unresolved dualism, then widens his ambit to suggest a broader ‘meta-passivity’ for women in the film. For Tulloch, it is the relationship between women and the mise en scène that ultimately ‘explains’ the position of women as passive, something he seems bent on emphasising: The naturalistic discourse is dominated to an unusual extent by women, and it is the power of the mise en scène rather than physical features, idiosyncrasies or mode of performance of the actress which provide the ‘independent women’ with their potency (as is shown again by the shots of Lorna and the milling sheep). The effect of the covert introduction of active female sexuality (via displacement and the mise en scène) is a considerable subversion, in so far as sexual excess is associated
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with social and economic success. The virile woman stands visibly at the heart of the 658 million pounds of Australian plenty … It is, in particular, the potency of the sequences of women working in the stockyard, the emphatic moments of men being dominated by women, which attain an almost metaphoric presence, holding us out and away from the linear narrative development. They are iconographic moments, perhaps of women as spectacle, but if so as working spectacle.58 In other words, no matter how successful the historical labour of the women (and that includes Vera James the actress), her individual efforts will eventually be undermined by the representational system of the film, which privileges women ‘only’ as spectacle. Women’s power is textual (iconographic, spectacular, aligned with the mise en scène) rather than physical or performative. It is not women themselves who are powerful; it is the mise en scène (with which Tulloch concedes women are associated). Here Tulloch takes up and employs something of the logic he attributes to the film itself, applying a conceptual constriction, a system of explanation to contain any possible potency of women. In removing the physical fact of women’s labours, Tulloch renders them vulnerable to a process of comparison and contextualisation; a type of abstraction. Simply for being located with sheep, women become sheep (potent through collective association, but metaphorically passive). Tulloch continues the association of passivity and femininity with the mise en scène in a later discussion of the reception of the film. Here, Tulloch claims that the combination of verisimilitude and melodrama that characterises A Girl of the Bush would not have been seen as a contradiction to contemporary audiences already familiar with stage conventions in which ‘naturalistic spectacle was no more than a passive mise en scène, a supposedly neutral background for heroic male protagonists’.59 For Tulloch, there is a hierarchy of film elements such that the narrative functions like a ‘narrow gate’—to make sense of, to ‘contain’, the mise en scène. The power of the phenomenal is always limited by the operations of the narrative. Lorna derives her potency from her association with the mise en scène, which is ultimately no power at all.
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In The Squatter’s Daughter Joan’s potency is measured from the outset in her (albeit threatened) economic independence. It is her ownership of the sheep station and specifically the sheep, her economic control of them (not to mention her occasional control of a cutting put-down or two) that makes her powerful and earns her Clive’s enmity. In capably exercising control of her capital, Joan is her own head (Latin = caput). Joan’s economic power can only be matched by her romantic shadow, Wayne, who secretly purchases her sheep at an inflated price (so that she might maintain her economic independence). When Wayne is revealed to be the rightful heir to Waratah, his proposal of marriage to Joan represents both a preordained closure (it was always her mother’s wish that the properties be united) and the opportunistic merging of two financial interests. In a sense, it is only through marriage to Wayne that Joan’s sheep will actually be returned to her. Here the film considers Joan’s dilemma (individual power versus the cultural potency of the couple) in terms of its overriding interest in potency as a type of numbers game (one, two … many). The sheep for example have their own potency; one that is not necessarily restricted to their economic role in a contest of ownership. Hall’s opening sheep sequence for The Squatter’s Daughter operates in direct contrast to Tulloch’s reading of the mise en scène in A Girl of the Bush. Hall’s massed sheep are produced by the film in a ‘space without properties’, a space that is not ‘owned’ by anyone, that is neither Waratah nor Enderby. The more they are not, the more capable, the more productive the sheep are. This same logic might be applied to the film’s human characters as well. The character who first alerts us to this possibility is Joan’s injured brother Jimmy.
Jimmy Joan Enderby: ‘I’m sorry for all lame things.’ Wayne Ridgeway: ‘What about lame excuses?’ The Squatter’s Daughter (Melaun, 1933)60
The character who best articulates the film’s interest in a type of partial identity is Joan’s brother Jimmy. An overstated limp prevents him from joining Joan in her station duties and leads him to a lengthy and dispirited self-deprecation witnessed only by his loyal dog, Bidgee. ‘You know, Bidgee, you should have been a human. You’d have made a
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better man than me. Why, you can run and jump—yes—and fight. But I … I’m only half a man.’ And a little later, sotto voce to Joan: ‘It’s always the same. You fight and I have to stay behind. Hide away like a mongrel. Because I’m only half a man.’61 In the novelisation of Hall’s film, Charles Melaun toys with this comparison between the disabled and the animal in a version of the same scene (only the name of the dog has been changed …): ‘Always the same. She goes. I stay … limping, slinking back, like a dog.’ Then remembering Pal, he quickly added, ‘No, not a dog like you, Pal. You’re a fighter … I’m just something left over.’62 Bidgee (bit-sey, bitch-y, murrum-bidgee) is described in publicity materials as ‘Australia’s first dog star’ (see figure 60). Despite these originary claims, Bidgee was of a complex pedigree. He bears little resemblance to his progenitors, and is unrecognisable in the nondescript bulldog that makes a cameo in the stage-play of The Squatter’s Daughter. By 1933 the bulldog had become a (measurably less British) kelpie. The film’s novelisation names him Pal, in keeping with the screenplay and the various publicity events that coincided with the release of the film. Even more generously, it allows him to live, rescued by ‘Jeff’ (Wayne being the only other character to undergo a name
Figure 60: The Squatter’s Daughter—Bidgee (frame enlargement)
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change). Instead it is Jebal Zim who perishes in the fire’s ‘licking flames’. By the film’s end it is only the resonance of the canine suggested by ‘Barky’s’ name that perpetuates Bidgee’s memory. The larger role of Bidgee in the film version of The Squatter’s Daughter brings it into contact with the sheep-dog film: from Owd Bob (Robert Stevenson, 1938) to Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox; 1943 in which Lassie is actually a male dog called Pal) to Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995). These are usually films of misrecognition in which, typically, a sheep dog is suspected of being one thing (most usually a ‘killer’) but proves through altruistic, self-less deeds to be another thing altogether. The film’s name for the dog, which must have occurred quite late in the piece since it is not even listed in the script, is uncannily suggestive of indigeneity—as in Murrumbidgee.63 In this sense Jimmy’s partners, Bidgee and Zeinah, are both culturally ‘othered’. Continuing this thread, it might be argued that Bidgeee seems to textually replace the Aboriginal character of Nulla Nulla as the hero who saves the day in the stage version of The Squatter’s Daughter. The alignment between Bidgee and Zeinah is reiterated in the film by Jebal Zim in a disingenuous query. After Bidgee is accused of sheep-killing, Jebal Zim comments of Jimmy: ‘He loves his dog but will not fight for it. What could he do for a woman?’64 To add insult to Bidgee’s injuries it is revealed that Fletcher’s dog is the killer and Bidgee is simply misunderstood. Each dog is a proxy for its owner, a fact emphasised in the screenplay, which has Pal also limping (having been beaten by Ironbark, who ‘does not understand what the dog wants’).65 For Jimmy, ‘disability’ is the condition of the permanently partial, the left-over. Jimmy believes his disability likens him to the animal— that to have a disability is to be close to, if not possibly a part of, the other. And Jimmy is not just any animal; he is a ‘mongrel’, a hybrid, a cross-breed. His disability is marked out as a congenital difference, a matter of crossed origins in a film ostensibly about the virtues of pure breeding in sheep and the search for ‘true’ sons and ‘proper’ heirs. In this sense Jimmy is clearly distinguished from the temporary partiality of his narrative counterparts: Wayne, his competitor for Joan’s affections, who is symbolically injured in what he himself describes as the ‘fall of man’; or the patriarch Barky, whose sudden blindness (caused by the familiar glare of the Australian landscape) is
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later revealed as merely a ploy. But he also shares common spaces with them. Both Jimmy and Barky experience a highly sentimental bond with animals. Indeed Barky’s stirring paean to his merinos has never been equalled in the cinema. And, as if the thematic incest (between Joan and Wayne) wasn’t already enough, Jimmy is deliberately confused with Wayne right from the start. In a fade-up cum cut-onaction Joan makes as if to waken Jimmy (by gently kicking him) until he is magically revealed to us as her unrealised love interest, the comatose Wayne. The confusion between lover and brother continues, and at certain points of the film their rivalry (as to which of the two has the first call on her compassion) becomes explicit. In declaring to Jimmy, for instance, that ‘if you were any different [i.e. if you weren’t so different] I wouldn’t love you so much’, Joan infers that her attraction to Wayne is somehow premised on his similar difference: his limp. Wayne is derisively described as ‘Joan Enderby’s big beautiful cripple’— a designation that could belong to Jimmy. Jimmy’s limp is also implicitly suggestive of the virtues of cross-breeding (an otherwise maligned activity in the film), provided its outcome is a higher purity; that is, that Wayne’s presence is somehow necessary in order to breed out the ‘disability’. But in the context of a story about untrammelled sheep-breeding and its correlative, nation-building, Jimmy’s romantic and hence ‘reproductive’ status is complex. With his absurdly shortened tie and evident hobble, the audience is consoled by the thought that Jimmy’s capacity for reproduction has been severely curtailed. Even still, Jimmy is permitted a romance or two of his own—not only with Bidgee but also with the exotic Zeinah, daughter of the nomadic Afghan hawker Jebal Zim. Bidgee’s death has the function of ‘completing’ Jimmy’s partiality: ‘Your brave life for mine is going, your strong body for mine, is twisted … Goodbye, Bidgee.’66 Along with Bidgee, the exterior embodiment of Jimmy’s masculinity (and humanity) departs, opening up a space for new partnerships, with another similarly ‘incomplete’ companion, Zeinah. The romance with Zeinah is permitted, since like Jimmy she too is ‘impotent’—unable to escape or fight back when threatened. Zeinah also must battle the persuasive attractions of Joan in order to secure Jimmy’s affections, proclaiming in full-throated accent,
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‘What is a sister when blood calls to blood? Your people shall be my people, your God, my God.’67 In the draft script, the scene ends with the insertion of a ‘SYMBOL’, which a handwritten note specifies should be a stockwhip. In this confusing declaration, directly inspired by the biblical story of Ruth, Zeinah seems to be dismissing Jimmy’s ‘blood’ relationship to his sister and instead suggesting that it is their own affiliation that is actually a case of ‘blood calling to blood’, thereby both romantically and genetically linking the immigrant and the ‘cripple’ (see figure 61).68 Their love, then, is the love of tvillingelov, the ‘twin-love’ found in Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon classics—an uncanny bond between two partners who do not exhibit as individuals the necessary strength to act alone. And as twin lovers they are the direct narrative correlates to the approved romance between Joan and Wayne. In the film script, Zeinah finds in the possibility of eternal correlation the beginning and the end of an arithmetical impulse: ‘We shall be together always. Nothing matters—nothing counts.’69 As combined ‘partial’ characters, she and Jimmy add up to … Nothing. And Nothing matters (i.e. it produces or makes a Difference), whereas less than Nothing does not. Together their difference might amount to
Figure 61: The Squatter’s Daughter—Jimmy and Zeinah ‘blood calls to blood’ (frame enlargement)
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something (generic) rather than signify an operative ‘failure’ (a difference that does not add up to a Difference). In Foucault’s terms, Zeinah’s wish is that they will find themselves ‘underneath the Ovine’, where nothing can be made ac-countable. Zeinah’s wishes, however, did not make it to the final film, which prefers to ‘think nothing’ of nothing. Instead, Jimmy attributes the quality of nothingness to his first love, Bidgee. As he cradles the dying dog he weeps, ‘You asked for nothing … [long, overly dramatic pause] … and you gave everything in return.’ Through the character of Jimmy The Squatter’s Daughter wants to link the permanently partial with the non-reproductive—or, more specifically, with a kind of non-linearity or interrupted continuity. Without the option of progression through lineage, it is not so much Jimmy who is ‘broken’ but the (blood) line. And so perhaps it is of little surprise to see that Jimmy is subject to a number of formal continuity ‘errors’ throughout the film (see chapter 3). Not that Jimmy’s impotence doesn’t have its own antecedents. Jimmy’s namesake, Jim Keane in A Girl of the Bush, is similarly afflicted. According to John Tulloch, the character of Jim Keane is crippled so as to enable the bush heroine, Lorna, to appear comparatively strong from the start.70 Tulloch links this observation to his reading of the film in terms of its valorisation of productivity and labour. According to Tulloch, ‘Jim Keane is a pioneer cripple, a working cripple, not a cripple from birth. In contrast, his nephew Oswald is a moral cripple who does no work.’71 Tulloch’s interpretation is supported by the film’s explanatory intertitles, the text accompanied by the vigorous image of a bucking horse: ‘Keane had been thrown from a young horse—though crippled he still controlled the work of the station.’ But it is possible to extend Tulloch’s arguments and take the film’s interest to be equally invested in re-productivity. Not only is Lorna is strong but also she is (assumed to be) fertile. In A Girl of the Bush we are simply told by an explanatory intertitle that Jim Keane is a ‘cripple’, but throughout the film he appears unimpeded—pacing about his room with no sign of affliction. We can more than suspect, then, that the term ‘cripple’ is actually intended to account for his status as a ‘bachelor’ (which we are also told by intertitle). Jim Keane can produce (and his activities as a station owner do not appear to have been disadvantaged), but he can’t (or chooses not to) reproduce.
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There is much at stake here for the sheep films. In these films, characters are found to have inherited their probity, position and property through genetic connection. But in The Squatter’s Daughter it is also possible to inherit much more. One might inherit a propensity for the temporary nature of an affliction (Barky and Wayne) or a type of permanent partiality (the so-called blood relationship between Jimmy and Zeinah). And, in a film centrally concerned with a drama of changelings, inheritance bears a confused relationship to parentage and origins. Characters like Fletcher hope inversely to inherit through their children (Clive), not to mention the film’s overt argument that culturally we all benefit from our woolly offspring; that is, the unhindered (although quality-controlled) begetting of sheep. In this regard the character of Clive is particularly instructive.
Clive Blood will speak—though society may drown the conversation. Intertitle, The Lamb (Christy Cabanne, 1915)
As a changeling, Clive is the product of an ‘original’ inversion: the swapping of babes and a (double-) crossing of paternity that is also a crossing of classes. Clive’s destiny is best understood in terms of a congenital compulsion to repeat, whereby identifying his acts as acts of repetition provides the key to unlocking his identity—or at least a part of it. Clive’s character can be understood within the terms of a structuring eugenics, in which ‘bad blood’ is shown to ‘stain’ one generation after another. But The Squatter’s Daughter also moves Clive beyond the argument of heredity, making a claim for the fact of his upbringing alongside his apparent predisposition to the unseen workings of biology. In one of the film’s more poignant scenes, Clive is confronted with his own ambiguous status as a sort of human ‘cross-breed’: ‘Where can I go? Without a name, without a future, without a damned hope.’ In the draft script, this same plaintive question is given precedence, and it is to the image of Clive (and not wool bales) heading into the ‘glorious sunset’ that the film turns in conclusion.72 Clive’s own unquestioned surety of identity is suddenly cast into doubt and, paradoxically, in learning the truth of his own origins, Clive is ‘estranged’.
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In biblical terms, Clive is a ‘stranger in his own house’. In this movement, The Squatter’s Daughter gestures towards the idea that ‘home’— the basis for the real—is in fact a question of the ‘right’ pairings, the right parents. Clive’s doubts actually rest on an earlier ‘originary’ doubt for, although Clive knows who his father is, it is the quality of his paternity that is ‘doubtful’. For both Wayne and Clive an inappropriate parental relationship results in a necessary nomadism, a homelessness that cannot be shown to the audience, which falls outside the strictures of the film’s representational schema. The closest we come to a representation of a type of nomadism falls in the film’s most lyrical and flamboyant sequences: the opening shots of sheep being duffed and the later movement of sheep between ‘homes’ that dissolves catastrophically into the bushfire sequence. The word nomad itself derives from the Greek ‘nomas’, a word for feeding or pasturing. Nomadism is to be at home (to eat) in any place (as distinct from exile, which is to locate the ‘home’ elsewhere). Technically, the sheep in these two sequences are not lost or exiled but simply between homes—literally between Enderby and Waratah in the opening sequence, for instance. Like Clive, they are of dubious parentage—an inchoate mixture of ‘pure’ merino and cross-breeds. Clive moves from the position of nomad to exile—his retrospective recognition of the home he no longer has is evidence of his redemptive losses: Clive: To lose a home and a friend … is to die. Wherever I go I’ll never have another. And if I stay … Barky:
We’ll still make this your home
Clive: But I couldn’t. There’d be too many ugly ghosts of myself. The man I’m trying to forget. Well—goodbye … (voice quavers) Ironbark. Jebal Zim represents the prospect of Clive’s future—as an exiled itinerant on the verge of (an ultimately frustrated) return; a return that never arrives at its destination and which ends in sacrifice. Jebal Zim is clearly distinguished from the globe-trotting Barky, who not only returns (albeit in what seems to be less than the perfect condition in
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Figure 62: The Squatter’s Daughter—the fall of Wayne (frame enlargement)
which he left) but also is permitted to wax fat about the virtues of his home without fear of penalty. So when Barky finally recognises his home (i.e. when he can finally ‘see’ it), he is rewarded with a newfound son and the promise of reproduction. For Jebal Zim, on the other hand, home can only ever be ‘magically potent’, a catalyst or cause that never achieves its destination.73 Until he is there, not only is he incomplete but also the promise of linear progression is denied to his family. In the film’s script, for example, Jebal Zim shares his hopes for his daughter’s reproductive future in his homeland, declaring that once there she shall ‘wed an emir—a chieftan [sic] worthy of our blood’. He continues by predicting: ‘You shall bear men, dark of eye, stout of heart, true of Faith. These shall be your sons, blessed of Allah.’74 The film’s options for Zeinah, on the other hand, seem to suggest that the partiality of exile might be aligned with non-reproductive self-expression. Clive’s self-imposed isolation is directly contrasted to the collaborative partnership between Joan and Wayne. His fall from grace is pre-empted and counterpointed by Wayne’s fall (from a horse) early in the film, both tumbles motivated by a question of knowledge of origins. But whereas Wayne is permitted to complete his journey at the place of his birth, Clive’s eventual banishment (as a separation implicit with a want of existential knowledge) completes a narrative compulsion, a textual retelling of a biblical story of origins. Like Adam (or Eve), Clive’s fall coincides with the end of (Barky’s) blindness to his existence. What changes for Clive is his knowledge of himself and of others, of what contstitutes knowing and being known. The fall, in Clive’s instance (although not in Wayne’s), alerts us to imperfection. Clive suspects, above all, himself. In falling, Clive finds he is fall-ible. Through the characters of Wayne and Clive, The Squatter’s Daughter demonstrates how the value of knowledge is always contingent. Clive (doesn’t want to know and so) is punished with knowledge. Wayne, on the other hand, wants to know and is rewarded for his thirst for knowledge, which founds a wellspring that is both within himself and given to him (i.e. it involves others). In falling, he is able to ‘raise’ himself both in the sense of ‘bring himself up’ (without parents) and in the sense of elevating or rising to his (sheep) station. Clive has not only fallen, he has also fallen short. Unlike Wayne, he is posited as weak, having been watered down; as such, he might
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also be read as an example of the risks (and possibilities) of fluidity. And so Clive’s continuity problems are of a different order, tied to the idea of being a mistaken identity, whereby to be mistaken is aligned with being the product of a mistake. But in particular, Clive has misrepresented himself and is in a sense as much the result of an error of representation as he is the end result of problematic parentage. Where Wayne and Clive are concerned, identity is a destination rather than a departure point. It is possible to see Clive and Wayne as occupying different parts of the historical process. Birth does not give rise to identity: identity is not a ‘birthright’. Rather, birth is the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other(s). By the film’s conclusion, Clive is a character who wants to forget rather than know. This is echoed in Clive’s screenplay declarations. When Wayne and Joan try to persuade him to stay, Clive nobly replies: ‘Thank you, Joan, but I’m not fit to. Everything would remind me of the man I’m trying to bury. Out there [indicating the west] it’s wide and clean and big enough for a man to lose himself—and then find himself … goodbye.’75 In this declaration Clive encapsulates the paradox of The Squatter’s Daughter. Only the ‘man without qualities’, only in being without properties or specificity, the subjectless subject (absent from himself, distracted from himself, deprived of self) is able to present or produce in general. The more malleable (fluid), the more he is ‘not’, the more capable he is. This is exemplified in other sheep films, such as The Sundowners (Robert Mitchum’s drover as the romantic ‘man without properties’) and Babe (in which Babe evacuates his identity in order to be more productive around the farm). This is also the difficulty around Hall perhaps. The less certain his identity, the more he is perceived to be an object and agent of assimilation; the more productive he seems to become such that his productivity and reproductivity become interchangeable to his critics. Wayne is also a ‘man without properties’ for much of The Squatter’s Daughter. His nomadic status is founded on partial memories, which in turn belie a larger ‘forgetting’: Joan: … You haven’t explained yourself. You’ve told me your name—nothing else. What are you? Who are you?
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Wayne: I don’t exactly know.
Joan laughs in disbelief.
Wayne: That’s a fact. I suppose I was born somewhere. You’ve got to have a father and mother for that to happen. I don’t know who mine were. The first thing I remember was riding after cattle with an old chap out near the Never Never. He died when I was twelve. Since then I’ve kind of made every new horizon my home.76 In this screenplay admission—and in the final version of the film— there is an extraordinary omission, for Hall chooses to avoid completely any reference to the circumstances that are emphasised in all previous versions of The Squatter’s Daughter: that Wayne was raised by Aborigines. It might be that having argued the virtues of nurture over nature, as Hall does in the case of Clive, he cannot then bring himself to recognise the participation of indigenous people in Wayne’s upbringing. In Hall’s Squatter’s Daughter, whiteness is preserved as an unquestioned, innate characteristic. ‘Home’ for Clive and Wayne (and possible Barky) is constructed in the terms of an ‘origin story’—as something created retrospectively—and as a problem of memory and representation. The Squatter’s Daughter also suggests (albeit silently) that the sheep station is the Australian Eden. But this image of an originary idyll is based on a particular ‘absence’ of knowledge, another layer of denial. The Squatter’s Daughter, in suggesting an edenic location for its story of lost or unknown origins, suppresses a larger notion of history, a history that would of necessity have to confront an (ab)original presence. What is unthought or ‘forgotten’, what cannot be represented or remembered, is a primordial presence lacking either a transcendent or an immanent centre—quite simply the presence of ‘original inhabitants’. The Squatter’s Daughter’s problem of existential knowledge— which is a problem of origins—is also a colonial problem. So if, as in The Squatter’s Daughter, the encounter with the past doesn’t really take place, then past is always still to come and the present (as well as presence) is forever deferred. In The Squatter’s Daughter, re-presentation is a compulsion directed to avoid a
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confrontation with the past. This is ‘acted out’ in Clive’s story, which is the story of an ‘unrepresentable before’—which renders the ‘original’ to an always already past. Without a home—without even the memory of a home—Clive (and the film’s Aboriginal ‘boundary riders’) cannot enjoy presence in the present (the ‘here and now’) and are instead caught up in the inevitability of ‘error’ that is represented in the film as a ‘nomadism’ where the real is concerned. Wayne’s success, on the other hand, is premised on his evident capacity to forget to remember the matter of his origins.
Wayne If we had a formula it was movement—speed and pace and action. And it didn’t have to be nationalistic action. Ken G. Hall77
We are first introduced to Wayne in a playful riposte. On being discovered by Joan groggy and limp he is asked to identify himself, and his answer is both suggestive and elusive: Joan:
Who are you?
Wayne:
Adam recovering from the fall of man?
Wayne’s arrival in the narrative is overlaid with symbolism—an unnamed figure floating into view with the sunrise and hence bringing into visibility a spatially indeterminate zone, neither Waratah nor Enderby. In this sense The Squatter’s Daughter establishes a series of identical focal and narrative inversions (where time and space are, in a way, interchangeable). Wayne is introduced to us as a nomad—already aligned with the sheep that are in a process of being displaced (duffed). He is ‘found’ by a Squatter’s Daughter in search of ‘lost’ sheep. He is already in the fold even as he attempts to insert himself. In a sense, he is ‘neither here nor there’—not necessarily in the spatial sense of the phrase, but in the detached sense that he somehow doesn’t really matter (yet). This is emphasised by Jebal Zim’s recollection of Wayne’s story, when he intimates to Barky, ‘Now that little baby has come back—from nowhere’, as if Wayne has been in a narrative limbo while his story circles back to its beginnings.
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Wayne’s reference to the fall of man is particularly illuminating. The ‘fall of man’ alludes to the discovery that we exist; what the fall gives us is not ‘knowledge’ as some sort of vessel-filling presence but a type of mindfulness, a sensitivity to the incessant want of knowledge. To some extent, this is in contrast to Hall’s senstitivity to a type of headlessness. Wayne, unlike Hall, needs to find his ‘head’—in the form of his father. His headlessness—shown to us in a subjective shot after falling from his horse—reveals a blurry formless world, but this world, the film assures us with a focus pull, will be temporary. It is possible that Wayne hobbles under the weight of his symbolic burden as a ‘stranger’ plucked from the earth by Joan. Wayne’s limp is unique to Hall’s filmed version of The Squatter’s Daughter. Previous versions of the narrative also gave Wayne evidence of a mother (a photograph in a locket), a representation of origins that, like her indigenous surrogates, Hall dispenses with. Instead, Wayne is, in a classical sense, autochthonous, a heroic figure born at sunrise, exiting at sunset and first encountered in a no-man’s land somewhere between the ‘twin sheep stations’, Waratah and Enderby. He is, in the terms of the film, a ‘man without properties’ or specificity, a position he later exchanges with Clive. Wayne’s injured ankle belies his quest to find a home—it is literally a figure for his ‘dislocation’, a dislocation that the film works hard to ‘re-pair’. Wayne’s quest then is to find his footing, land on his feet and so on. He is a character without (stable) foundations (see figure 62, p. 113). The conversion the narrative must exercise upon Wayne is his movement from an enunciative or primarily ‘theoretical’ character to being instead a figure of athletics, of movement itself. This conversion is further represented by Wayne eventually replacing Joan’s other textual pairs—Barky and Jimmy—who remain to the end characters associated with speaking. The Squatter’s Daughter is a narrative in which the capacity for action is eventually privileged (although the film covers its bets with a wordy conclusion). Its own momentum proceeds from a preoccupation with lameness to able-ness. Interestingly, at the end of the screenplay Wayne’s left arm—the screen direction is specific—is depicted in a sling.78 In seeming contrast to Wayne, the sober, admonitory Barky is driven to long speeches (although by the film’s end it becomes evident that he has passed his propensity for grand policy statements on to
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the younger generation). In direct counterpoint to Barky’s verbosity the plot centres on the performance of a type of muteness, each character containing knowledge or a truth that can’t be stated and must remain hidden and silent. Individual characters keep each other in the dark, but for the most part the audience (in order to monitor this web of silence) is kept enlightened. We know that Wayne is really Barky’s son, but Wayne and Clive do not. We know Clive is a ne’er-dowell, but Barky, it seems, does not. Joan conspires to keep Barky in the dark about Clive’s nefarious crimes to preserve the old man’s partiality for this person they all believe to be his son. Similarly, Jimmy accuses Joan of being ‘blinded by love’ in refusing to speak out against Wayne. And then, when Jimmy accuses the latter of poisoning Joan’s sheep, it is Wayne who remains strangely silent. Jimmy:
He won’t answer. He can’t.
Joan:
Can’t you say anything?
Apparently not. Strangely enough, the object of silence is blindness and the consequent preservation of partiality (in the sense of a fondness or bias or ‘one-eyed-ness’). In this context, Wayne discovers that he has an added disability—a narrative one. Narrative events in The Squatter’s Daughter are offered to spectators and characters alike in fragmentary episodic form, as glimpses passing beyond his or her directorial control. The ‘whole’ is understood as a spatial and temporal collection of discrete but cumulative vantages. So although Wayne might rediscover himself as a figure of athletics, he is not a figure of agency. The Squatter’s Daughter produces a type of larger disabling, in which the film itself reserves the right to apportion enlightenment and darkness; in which the ‘wheel of events’ might at any given moment, in the most arbitrary of circumstances, the most chance of encounters, ‘pull the wool’ over (some) one’s eyes. It is particularly through Wayne and his existential quests and confusions that The Squatter’s Daughter presses the question about a subject’s interest in knowledge—a wanting to know (where from? who from?). The Squatter’s Daughter from the beginning sets Wayne’s quest for knowledge in a larger ‘unknownness’ around parentage and origins—the unknown squatter of the film’s title, and the unknownness of the film’s absent mother(s). Indeed it might be that all parents
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are unknowable—Jebal Zim and Barky are characters of deception. The Squatter’s Daughter in this sense might be seen as an example of what Cavell has called the ‘melodramas of unknownness’.79 But the problem of origins for Wayne is both a parental and an agricultural one (and ultimately a national one). His narrative quest is framed in terms of which originary conditions are the most productive, invoking questions about breeding and coupling—questions that already abound in the writing about sheep in Australia: Every breeder will certainly breed his most perfect ewes with rams of the most perfect type possible. In other words he will carry on homogeneous pairing. This only can be called ‘high breeding’ in the true sense of the word, and will warrant positive ‘breeding constancy’, and transmission, and only animals possessing all the qualities necessary to constitute a particular breed can be paired.80 In The Squatter’s Daughter, the narrative device of ‘twin’ sheep stations Waratah and Enderby circumscribes the film’s evident interest in the repercussions of constitutive homogeneity as a paradigmatic form of ‘high breeding’. The script of The Squatter’s Daughter reiterates the familial proximity of the various characters in the film, and not just Wayne and Joan. In the face of Joan’s impending journey into the flames, Barky declares: ‘She won’t stand a chance. I’ve lost a son I never knew. But the little one is almost my daughter, and by God, I won’t lose her.’81 Given The Squatter’s Daughter’s preoccupation with origins, its opening reference to twins is not particularly surprising. Twins play a crucial role in countless origin myths. As totemic doubles who beget human offspring, the ‘First Parents’ are often represented as ancestor clones (as in the massive torsos of Easter Island). Judeo-Christian myth reduces the feat of perpetual generation to the single creative act of God twinning the clone-wife Eve from Adam’s own substance. In the dyadic strictures of Egyptian origin myths, the ram-headed god Khnum, in spinning the potter’s wheel, creates the human being and its double simultaneously.82 Innumerable other examples of this same treatment of originary twins exist. Claude Levi-Strauss, writing about the history of representations of twin-ness in The Story of the Lynx, notes the way in which Western
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understandings of gemellarity repeatedly focus on an overarching sameness: In the whole of Europe, popular ideas pertaining to twins embroider on the theme of their complete identification: they are physically indistinguishable from each other except through recourse to clothing or to cosmetic means; they have the same tastes, same thoughts, same characters; they are either in love with the same woman or are so identical that the woman confuses one with the other; they are sick at the same time, incapable of surviving each other, and so on …83 The Western appreciation of likeness is premised, according to LeviStrauss, on hyperbolic discourses that focus on the overriding claims of sameness in the face of evident differences. Twins possess a characteristic difference (as twins) premised on their overwhelming sameness, their complete identification. In this sense they can be seen to share the same type of constitutive difference that distinguishes other minorities (for example, racial and gender minorities) whose difference is paradoxically articulated in terms of characteristic orientation towards gemellarity or similarity. The popular belief that suggests ‘all Aborigines [or all Asians or all women] are the same’ is an example of this movement from difference to sameness in which diversity is purchased for the purposes of an overriding valorisation of similarity. This same ‘logic’ might also be seen in the ways myriad differences are suppressed in order to formulate a distinctive national identity. The potency of national character would be evident only by the fact of the differences it is able to override. But those same differences then do not completely disappear, and remain themselves a potent reminder of the price of a totalising nationalism. In The Squatter’s Daughter, the complexity of the relationship between the ‘twins’ Wayne and Joan cautions us that sameness and difference are not easily recuperated to the parenthetic needs of national sentiment. In the case of incestuous twins where the twins are of a different gender (as in The Squatter’s Daughter), the question an originary narrative presses can be thought of in Levi-Strauss’s terms as ‘… how can duality be produced (that of the sexes and subsequently that
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which is implied in marriage) from unity, or, more exactly, from an image of unity, ambiguous enough so as to be able to conceive of the diversity emerging from it?’84 No matter how tempting it might be, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the apparent similarities between Wayne and Joan implicate them in a relationship of sameness. In Western thinking, twins of a different sex are fraternal, which is what they are ‘biologically’ speaking. The Squatter’s Daughter, where twins are concerned, is a drama of biology (rather than appearances). This is the strong implication of the twinness of the sheep stations Waratah and Enderby: they look different, not the same. Biology in The Squatter’s Daughter, especially in the form of family relationships, means eventual reconciliation. Wayne’s quest, then, is to find both his identity (as a form of familiarity) and his difference (from Joan) in a world of sameness (sheep). Through Wayne, The Squatter’s Daughter takes up the idea of making a demonstrable difference (as a way out of originary sameness or twinness) to such an extent that demonstration and difference come to mean more or less the same thing. The question then posed by the film is: how is the productive (the demonstrative, the different) formulated or reformulated in the film as the reproductive? Or, to put it another way: how might reproduction be a significant option for imagining an ‘Australian race’? And can the film provide an answer outside the terms of an operative parthenogenesis? In the novelisation of the stage-play, the plot turns on a question of identity and recognition, which is only hinted at in the play itself and in the later film. Harrington senior learns belatedly to recognise his feelings when he is confronted with the truth that Wayne’s precursor, Tom Bathurst, not Clive’s precursor, Dudley, is his real son: ‘I believe you to be my son, I feel it! The love I have for you goes to prove it—for I never Loved [sic] Dudley.’85 These feelings of love that Tom stirs in Harrington have an antecedent. For Harrington, it is not Tom’s similarity to himself but rather ‘little tricks of manner and gesture that reminded him of his beloved wife’ that give rise to (and perhaps explain away) his paternal passion.86 The point for Harrington is not whom Tom resembles (in terms of appearances) but that he moves in a state of resemblance. Tom is similar without being specifically similar to. He inspires the ‘sense’ of familiarity in Harrington.
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The heroine Violet, on the other hand, learns to recognise resemblances to ascertain the same truth: ‘Violet, looking on, wondered that never before had the likeness between the two men attracted her notice. She saw the same blue eyes—Dudley’s were grey—the same tall, strong figure and clear sun burnt skin, the same look of honesty and courage.’87 Harrington is in a sense blind, unable to see (although well able to feel)—his own capacity for resemblance. And in this regard Barky is his true descendant.
Barky Barky to Clive: I love the feel of it all, son. The Squatter’s Daughter (unpublished screenplay)88
The Squatter’s Daughter hesitates between the idea that nothing can be taken at face value and a concomitant certitude in things unseen and the insistent intrusions of ‘this worldliness’ (represented as a secular conviction in verisimilitude, a predisposition for a vocabulary of substance and presence). As if to underscore (and simultaneously undermine) a conception of ‘faith’, the film makes several biblical references, particularly to Genesis. For instance, in a comic interlude, Mrs Ramsbottom and Scottie act out a scene of sly romantic knowing and refusal, replete with an edenic snake and a bucolic haystack. In this context, The Squatter’s Daughter demonstrates an interest in the peripatetic collusion between visibility and blindness. Jebal Zim ‘sees all’. Joan recoils at the horror of Barky’s blindness: ‘Not blind, Barky. Not blind!’ Wayne tells Joan, ‘I’m here to see you through.’ Wayne is simply described as ‘someone I want to keep an eye on’ by the mistrustful Fletcher. Barky is ominously advised by his solicitor, ‘If you don’t keep your eyes open when you get back, you’ll find that you have to close them to a lot.’ The climactic fire scenes act as a ‘smokescreen’, blinding and disabling everyone. And finally, when resolution is near, Barky plays his trump card, revealing to an astonished gathering, ‘I’ve seen it all from the moment I got back.’ Throughout the film we see Barky’s blindness as a phenomenon in its own right, but at the moment of his return to sight we are suddenly made aware of our own orientation to blindness. Barky, with his game of blind man’s bluff, has been literally ‘playing the part’, apparently in order to achieve a higher ‘impartiality’.
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In the pursuit of clarity or insight one could deploy the performance of blindness to advantage one’s ability to see things as they are; that is, to distinguish between statement and meaning. The route to Barky’s eventual integrity involves a type of ‘creation’ figured as a metamorphosis, a fundamental change of character. Charles Melaun’s novelisation of the film captures the exclamatory intent of Barky’s scheme: ‘Then a sudden idea struck him. Why not be blind—or let them all think he was? … The old man had decided. Yes! He would be blind— and yet would see!’89 Driving through the Australian countryside, Barky feigns a sudden blindness. Dazzled by the overwhelming glare of the sunlit exterior, he turns inwards. If Barky is ‘blinded by love’ it is his (apparently dangerous) love for the Australian countryside, a love he is at pains to promote at every other opportunity. Earlier, on Sydney Harbour, returning from England, he spies a magnificent sight: not the newly completed Harbour Bridge, but the view of wool ships setting off in the direction he has just traversed. Here, Barky is also struck by a sweeping national feeling, and the scene foretells of that later fateful sunlit moment in which nationalism and blindness are imbricated: ‘Look over there, Cartwright!’ There was pride and deep feeling in the old squatter’s voice. ‘Wool—wool! The spirit of this nation is interwoven with it. To me my friend, it’s life.’ He paused, stirred to the depths. Then he said, ‘Even if I had come home blind, the very feel of it would have filled my eyes with a thousand pictures. The sweat and the glory of it. The despair of drought when your sheep die in thousands; the thrill of the big years when the great wool teams sway over the roads or plough axle deep through the blacksoil plains.’90 For Barky, blindness is a state of intensely felt but nevertheless interrupted national representations invoked as an effect of memory only. Barky’s blindness points to the central place of memory as the ‘origin’ of his representations. Unable to view the present, without direct access to presence, there is only representation. It is the ‘memory’ of what cannot be seen that ‘fills the eyes’ and which overflows and blurs with feeling. In the Australian cinema, national feeling is simply a compensation for representative losses: for a
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dislocation, a ‘not-quite-there-ness’ at the heart of the national image. There is a type of blindness, a sacrifice at the basis of all (national) representation. Mikael Iampolski captures something of Barky’s position when he suggests that sight without memory is blind and therefore that blindness is always a problem of knowledge and sources or origins. It is no accident that blindness has become a sign of superior vision. It is the very darkness of memory that allows visual images to come loose from their contexts, forming new combinations, superimposing themselves on each other or finding hidden similarities. Metaphoric blindness becomes the condition of reading and insight. It allows us to break away from the persistent presence of the visible text, in order to raise what is known out of the depths and plunge the text back into its sources.91 Without memory (hindsight), spectacle will remain a meaningless collection of disjointed fragments, a permanently partial vantage. But it is this very partialising activity, this loosing of images from their context, that allows blindness its insights. Barky’s quest is to use his blindness to defamiliarise his sense of place and family in order to better remember it. Barky’s physical ‘blindness’ actually precedes its enaction—he has been blind to Clive all along—perhaps distracted by his romance with the mother country. It is as if he is covering for his previous lack of insight with another layer of self-deception. Barky’s self-imposed blindness is paradoxically motivated by his willing desire to ‘find out’, to expose and fully face up to Clive, but it is also indicative of an unwillingness—the need to close one’s eyes—to avoid what might be found out. It is this unwillingness that Joan acknowledges when she explains why she will not ‘tell’ on Clive. Barky’s reluctance to face up to, to fully see, is emphasised in the script in a scene that was later deleted. Joan competes in a rodeo that threatens personal injury. Barky explains to her after it is over: ‘I wanted to see you but I just couldn’t look.’92 Ultimately in the film there is a deeper denial at work in terms of Barky’s blindness, for while Barky is busy denying himself a ‘true’ son, he is in fact being denied a true ‘son’. Barky’s sentimental blindness to familial differences and similarities
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points to a similar affliction where his larger sentiments, those of national proportions, are concerned; where a singular national entity is produced as the effect of an operative ‘blindness’ to other differences and similarities. In directing its story so pointedly at a patriarch who, unlike his biblical predecessor, is not deceived by a sheep pelt but who still manages to misrecognise his son, The Squatter’s Daughter hints at another blindness: its own blindness towards the maternal (and despite an evident interest in reproduction per se). The biblical association between misrecogntion, fathers, sons and sheep goes beyond the story of Abraham and Isaac. The story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 3 has similar thematic concerns. In order to gain his twin brother’s inheritance, Jacob covers his arms with a fleece to impersonate his more hirsute brother. Their nearly blind father duly confers his blessing on the wrong son. Then Jacob does it again—to his own grandsons. It’s no coincidence that The Squatter’s Daughter makes several references to the book of Genesis; the most obvious being a comedic rendition of the ‘edenic’ snake during a thwarted Scotty–Ramsbottom seduction. The Squatter’s Daughter takes blindness to be the origin of the mimetic: the (self )sacrifice that is directed to making (a more truthful) representation. In making himself blind, Barky also presumes to make himself trans-parent, not unlike the film’s other invisible father, the titular squatter, who is present in name only. Through the character of Barky, The Squatter’s Daughter links a crisis of cultural reproduction with another crisis: a crisis of cultural representation (which is also a crisis of national implication).
Continuity and culture These are things that have to be thought about … keep your action flowing one way. If the sheep are being driven over the mountains keep them going in one direction. Ken G. Hall93
Ken, you provided the vital spark which gave life to the motion picture industry in this country … unfortunately it’s time to call ‘cut’, but for you, I’m sure the action is continuous. Roger Climpson94
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Hall saw his role in directing The Squatter’s Daughter as one of giving a new vision to an audience already familiar with previous stage versions. He openly admitted, ‘The play was very old and pretty bad from a filmmaking point of view.’ According to Hall, ‘It needed to be greatly strengthened dramatically, needed action and spectacle that was talked about on the stage but never seen.’95 Hall’s insistence on vision is most apparent in the film’s opening delirious sheep montage. If read purely in terms of a visual metaphor, the ovine opus that opens The Squatter’s Daughter bears the trace of a type of incoherence, of the film’s unconsummated literary origins. The novel, for example, completely fails to articulate this moment, opting instead to refer us back to a cinematic metaphor—pictures: ‘At Waratah forty thousand sheep were being mustered for shearing, which was to commence the next morning. The home paddocks were crowded, and in the late afternoon sun presented a stirring picture.’96 But it is possible—indeed, it is imperative—to read these images as something less than metaphor, as a type of (woolly) materiality. When later commentators came to criticise Hall for an absence of technique they failed to appreciate the simple technical splendour of sequences such as this and the later bushfire spectacle that were particularly appreciated by Hall’s contemporaries. And so, although Hall admired the naturalism of Hollywood cinema, his films, as we have already seen, are often criticised for their failure to meet an American benchmark. The observation of apparent aesthetic and continuity ‘lapses’ in Hall’s films has in particular contributed to the widespread belief that they are inexpertly made. Ken Quinnell, writing not long before the film revival, reiterates this belief in a dismissive two-paragraph summary of Hall’s work: Two major elements contributed to Hall’s demise as a director: his blatant bad taste and his inability to pace and structure his stories. Hall has no personal style or unique vision as a filmmaker. Nothing is detectable through his formless visual structures and his lugubrious images except a certain literary sentimentality. Even this is an element of the scripts which Hall simply reinforces … Hall isolates big sequences and treats them with care but, in most cases, his talent does not rise to the occasion … Ken G. Hall’s contribution to
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Australian cinema remains one of quantity rather than quality.97 Quinnell attributes the ongoing success of a film like On Our Selection to its ‘lumbering simple-mindedness—a characteristic of our popular radio and cinema of the ‘30s and ‘40s’. He continues nostalgically in the manner of someone who would rather have something imperfect than nothing at all: ‘We have lost it now (along with our radio and cinema) and, however painful and embarrassing it may have been to sophisticated Australians, we are the poorer for having left it behind.’98 The film theorist William D. Routt, in an extended examination of the ‘colonial naïve’ in the films of Charles Chauvel, also makes reference to Hall’s On Our Selection in terms of its simplicity, innocence, incompletion, dislocation and crudeness: The simplicity and innocence of naïve cinema arises from its unquestioning acceptance of denoted meaning (not of reality); in this acceptance, it declares a commitment to and a responsibility for a common world … Ken Hall’s On Our Selection (1932) includes incomplete shot/reverse shot patterns and a dislocated ‘expressionist’ sequence in what is not a reading or revision of Steele Rudd’s text (as Raymond Longford’s 1921 version was) but a representation, via Bailey and Duggan’s stage play, of the popular consciousness of that text. Without duplicity it displays its stereotyped characters, stock situations, and crude emotions that celebrate and disparage a certain colonial identity.99 In flouting the formal conventions of classical narration and editing, and in their frequent use of obvious and distracting rhetorical devices such as the wipe, Hall’s films lend themselves easily to accusations of ‘bad art’. Philip Taylor for example accused Cinesound editor Bill Shepherd of ‘glaring continuity errors’.100 Chandler claims that his study of eight Hall films produced between 1934 and 1944 ‘shows quite clearly a steady decline in their filmic quality, both absolutely and by comparison with contemporaneous overseas productions’. Chandler continues: ‘too often in his
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later films … Hall was content to plank [sic] his camera in front of his characters and record their conversations, with no constructive selection of material and no building up of detail’.101 There is an evident contradiction in some of these critical assessments that would have Hall possessing no style (by which they perhaps simply mean bad style) and simultaneously too many stylistic flourishes. Certainly The Squatter’s Daughter is notable for the camera’s consistent failure to observe the thirty-degree rule, its occasional wayward crossing of the 180-degree line, and deliberately doubled shots such as the restated handshake between Clive and Barky at the end of the film or Mrs Ramsbottom clutching repeatedly at her bosom as she contemplates life with Scotty the Shearer.102 But what at first might appear imprecise and mistaken emerges on closer inspection as something else. Almost every scene in the film follows a typical pattern: an overarching establishing shot followed by closer vantages in which Hall tests the thirty-degree ‘rule’ by staying uncomfortably adjacent to or almost exactly on the camera’s axis. Hall’s disregard for the thirty-degree rule has the effect of bringing the audience constantly closer, as if we have suddenly been given ‘closerin’ sight, or perhaps closer insight. These cuts are often accompanied by a soundtrack cut to dialogue, which has the disruptive effect of causing the characters to lurch forward into speech, a common enough occurrence in films of this period. Were we in France, Hall’s editing style might have been retrospectively described in terms of the now-celebrated ‘jump cut’. But Hall’s particular editing strategies are so consistent as to work against any description of this effect in the contemporary sense of a ‘jump cut’, however soft, since it lacks the element of ‘surprise’ or Brechtian self-knowledge that would disrupt continuity in the first place. In his article ‘Jump cuts and blind spots’, David Bordwell argues that the jump cut is recognised only at particular junctures in the history of the cinema but that otherwise there is a critical blindness to its presence.103 The failure to appreciate Hall’s use of expressive discontinuity appears to be one such instance of a ‘critical blindness’. I am not attempting to set up an either/or approach to Hall’s visual style here, in which it is viewed as either a failed attempt to imitate an American or French benchmark or such that it is a deliberate attempt to express something differently. On the contrary it is
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possible to see these formal strategies as both (and more). By period standards it might even be possible to suggest that Hall’s films represent successful attempts to emulate Hollywood (and British) cinema, especially in his use of a device like the wipe. His achievement is all the more remarkable given the financial and technical constraints placed on Australian producers in the years in which he worked. John Tulloch in Australian Cinema, his examination of the silent and early sound period, discusses the distinctions between notions of continuity in film criticism of 1920s and 1930s Australian films.104 According to Tulloch, directors working in the 1920s who were noted for their continuity were particularly praised for their ability to blend different diegetic worlds into one storyline. However, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, this very same multi-vocality could also be criticised as a failure of continuity when the critic intended the term to convey such concepts as ‘density of psychological characterisation, historical verisimilitude and generic consistency’; in other words, concepts taken from ‘high art’.105 Tulloch uses Hall’s Squatter’s Daughter as an exemplary text, comparing it to Beaumont Smith’s film The Hayseeds, also made in 1933. He argues that The Hayseeds is a formal ‘hotch-potch’, not because it contains manifold spectacle (which it does), but because it is unable to position these in relation to a meta-discourse. According to Tulloch, The Squatter’s Daughter presents its disparate drama and spectacle within the continuity conventions of cinematic ‘transparency’ and within the traditional coding of the bush legend.106 Hall’s spectacle-displays are either ‘appropriately’ located as theatre within the diegesis or else articulated in terms of spatial and temporal continuity within the narrative: shot-reverse-shot, match cuts, matching screen direction and so on. For Tulloch, Smith—unlike Hall—was occasionally arbitrary in his use of match cuts and wipes, failing to establish continuity. But ultimately, Hall’s success (and Smith’s failure) rest on what Tulloch identifies as his formal and ideological control.107 In Tulloch’s view, the two contemporaries were particularly distinguished for their respective understanding of ‘realism’. He identifies their competing claims for ‘realism’ as one based on theatrical ‘presence’ and the other appealing to the ‘bravura of technical novelty’.108 In taking his musical revue out of the theatre and into the bush, Smith’s film was ‘inappropriately’ theatrical. Tulloch attributes
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this distinction between the two filmmakers as an outcome of their respective career histories. Hall was someone who possessed at the beginning of his career ‘a considerable knowledge of the conventions of screen realism. Smith, with his strong stage and vaudeville background, belonged to another tradition—one more in keeping with that of J. C. Williamson.’109 Tulloch continues more specifically: The emphatic stage-audience relationship which the film/ vaudeville combination foregrounded was becoming incompatible with the increasing demands of screen ‘realism’. When spectacle-display scenes were included in Cinesound films, such as the brief diving sequence in Ken Hall’s The Squatter’s Daughter, they were much more completely and transparently enfolded in the narrative via use of stars, editing, variety of camera set-ups, and their coding in terms of country values.110 And so for Tulloch it is precisely Hall’s use of film-specific techniques that serves to heighten his apparent control over continuity within the conventions of screen (rather than theatrical) realism. Hall’s films, including The Squatter’s Daughter, are notable for their abundant use of one screen technique in particular—the wipe. The fashion parade in Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938) is a veritable celebration of the wipe, and the titles for The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934) were composed of what were for the time very impressive book wipes. In The Squatter’s Daughter at least seven different types of wipe are used on twenty-six different occasions in sequences that are alternatively ‘poetic’, dramatic and simply explanatory. Right from the lyrical opening sheep sequence the film positively revels in the effect. It is as if the screen itself ‘unpeels’ as the direct result of the frame’s singular inability to carry the full weight of the scene. As a pasture fills with sheep, the image ruptures, revealing a new view and then another, and another of the same scene (see figures 3–50, pp 72–4). Hall’s evident interest in these moments of shot transition extends to other parts of the film. For instance, he resorts to depicting sunsets on more than one occasion partly, one assumes, to capture a kind of pictorial splendour, but also, one suspects, in order to elaborate the film’s visual style (see figures 63–70, p. 132). In their accelerated fade
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Figures 63–70: The Squatter’s Daughter—daily dissolve (frame capture)
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Figures 71–4: The Squatter’s Daughter—where there’s smoke … (frame capture)
Figures 75–8: The Squatter’s Daughter—Waratah supercomb (frame capture)
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to night, these sunsets are treated by Hall as something like nature’s own attempt at a dissolve. Similarly, when Jimmy and Zeinah escape from Fletcher’s clutches in the midst of the bushfire they are gradually engulfed by a haze of smoke until fully hidden from view (see figures 71–4). When a wool bale is pushed aside to reveal the sheep at the source of its contents, Hall seems to be deliberately evoking the wipes that occur elsewhere in the film (see figures 75–8). Interestingly, and despite its prevalence in the first two-thirds of the film, Hall declines to use the wipe from the climactic bushfire sequence onwards, when the maximum effect of narrative momentum is provided by parallel action and the distraction of sheer spectacle. Wipes had been revived during the early 1930s in Hollywood only with the advent of optical printers. Observing the new fashion for wipes in the USA, Hall was especially keen to incorporate them into his plans for The Squatter’s Daughter, ostensibly to help ‘impress critics and audiences with the film’s technique’—a strategy that appeared to pay off, at least where Hall’s contemporaries were concerned.111 Hall intended for the wipe to signify a kind of contemporaneity— to place the film in a ‘here and now’ that posited its proximity to American cinema. According to Barry Salt, filmmakers during this period almost always reserved wipes for signifying a time-lapse.112 For Hall, however, the inclusion of this effect was not to achieve a ‘wiping away’ of some diegetic past, such as Salt describes, but rather a wiping away of a broad cultural ‘pastness’ or datedness. A review in Smith’s Weekly indicated its novelty (and limitations) for contemporary reviewers: ‘[Hall] uses an angular method of dissolving his shots of sheep and bush, which is new to us, but in its too hurried obliteration of beautiful scenes, rather irritating.’113 In a sense, Hall intended the wipe to ‘interrupt’ (irritate) the film’s relation to a ‘source’, either in the sense of a mimetic cinematic ‘classicism’ (the wipe as irritating cine-naturalism) or a theatrical precedence (reminding viewers they are watching a film, not a piece of theatre). The undated script draft describes the film’s opening sequence as a series of lap dissolves rather than wipes: ‘As final title fades last of sheep pens before lens and clear vision to show gorgeous pan of Belltrees valley. Lap dissolves each getting closer until we come to gate of homestead … Lap to huge flock of sheep—vast scene of densely
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packed animals. Apparently endless flock stretches away in every direction.’114 This is followed by a ‘series of wipes’ described in the script as illustrating: Shepherds mustering dogs working (to disclose mavellous intelligence). Dogs run over sheeps back. Mounted men. Sheep leaping wildly through narrow counting gate. Tally man. More mobs coming up to muster (scenic effect, dust, dog barks, etc). In theory, the wipe is a potentially disruptive visual device, a rhetorical flourish that interrupts the so-called seamlessness of classical editing, opening the film up to the possibilities of ‘artistic motivation’. Part of the excessive flashiness of the wipe lies in its capacity to be read in at least two ways: both ‘narrationally’ (in terms of a conceptual transition) and ‘on the surface’ (as a primarily graphic effect). Hall uses wipes characteristically within the same scene, to make a transition from a shot of something to another—usually tighter—shot of the same thing. In a narrative sense, his use of wipes seems to indicate a desire to get beneath the surface (pehaps even a sort of ‘searching behind the veil’, as Barky puts it in a moment of inspired loquacity), even when a subsequent wipe suggests that there is only more surface. Like the layering of a palimpsest, these wipes allow us to glimpse a temporary truth before erasing this vision out of existence, surreptitiously giving in to another partial vantage. Here, Hall seems to be positing a relationship of structural simultaneity between shots rather than a more conventional seriality. Each wipe seems to have the effect of producing an emphasis, an act of narrative underlining, which might also be represented (as indeed it has been) as a clumsy heavyhandedness. It is also possible to approach the wipe in terms of what it suggests about the image per se. Every wipe might be viewed as a sort of figurative imperialism, a matter of advance and retreat that
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acknowledges the image itself as a site of contest. As one image enlarges another diminishes; the success of one depending on the failure of the other. In this approach, wipes posit a necessary relationship between shots as if they are somehow clasped in a passing embrace. The wipe, then, is a figuration that is made up of unfolding images and partial views, which are contingent upon each other but do not make up a whole (except as components of a wipe). They need not be added, surmised or sublated within a conceptual or narrative reading. The wipe is a form of representative practice that speaks and shows itself in terms of rhetoric rather than the mimetic. In the context of his use of the wipe, Hall’s opening images of sheep can be thought of in terms of ‘sets’ (rather than sequences or still points), image-pairs that are not necessarily structurally related but rather to be thought of as (perhaps twinned) relations per se. Hall’s wipes are composed of a continuous sequence of paired images whose relations are made evident by the contiguity of shots and the liminal contact between their mobile borders. In this way, the contingent and processual nature of the world—its phenomenal status (as a thing)—is foregrounded. If the wipe raises questions, they are questions of the demonstrative. The wipe makes shot transitions obvious; it calls to attention their deliberation. There is a potency implied in the wipe. Wipes present themselves as acts of willing and doing (not disablement). Wipes call attention to the display, to the revelation. The spectacle of the bushfire, on the other hand, having been diegeticised, cannot call upon such devices (or could only do so at the expense of its diegetic state; that is, the wiped sheep are, if not emblematic, then at least pre-narrative; but the bushfire is ‘real’). What results from the bushfire sequence is a flat display of a type not uncommon in the film, where the spectacle of the real is presumed to overcome all artifice (as if the fire would be less sensational if it had been effectively sensationalised). Instead we are given anecdotal press releases, evidence of real danger to real people and so on. The Squatter’s Daughter’s magnificent opening sheep sequence, with its atypical unzipping wipes, derives its power from showing us what Australian cinema might look like (rather than being simply a reading of Australian society). This sequence and the film’s later bushfire scenes are moments of plastic expression that are not otherwise evident in the dialogue-dominated central sections of the film. It is as
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if, in order to accommodate a compulsion for speeches and spectacle, the film must resort to an increasingly complicated plot to keep abreast of the need for constant explanation. Having been introduced to the full power of cinematic iteration, Hall’s characters take to gravely reiterating what has already been presented—retrospectively adding their voices as if to cast doubt on the achievement of what has been seen, on the authority of the visible. Many contemporary critics deplored the ‘redundancy’ and excessiveness of the film’s dialogue as unnecessarily repeating already seen knowledge. Sydney’s Sun newspaper: ‘Since the era of the talkies, many pictures have depended all too little on the dramatic use of camera, but The Squatter’s Daughter is not one of these. The photographs carry the action in a manner that is cinema at its best, so that the dialogue, which is not on the same high plane, falls into its proper place.’115 What these critics do not account for is the real redundancy of the dialogue: the way in which the film’s voices simply articulate already given doubts about representation itself, doubts that the rhetorical character of Hall’s visual techniques have already seeded. Hall’s stress on a kind of demonstrative ability or able-ness at almost every level of his involvement in The Squatter’s Daughter is restated in dialogue by Barky (‘I’ve never asked anybody to do what I’m not willing to do myself’). (Despite the certitude of the assurance it is hard to imagine Barky undressed and playing a gumleaf, something he does make his boundary-riders undertake for the audience.) In his later Lovers and Luggers (1938), Hall describes one of his central characters throughout the script in no uncertain terms: ‘Daub’s a doer.’ This becomes a not very subtle link to a nudge-nudge, wink-wink joke about reproductive action in the film’s final scene. For Hall, willing, doing, production and reproduction (and their obverse) are all variations on an anxiety around disablement.
The permanently partial Nymphs here, ewes there. No, we were here. When I say ewes, I don’t mean youse—I mean ewes. Understand? No. Let George Do It (Ken G. Hall, 1938)
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The importance of disability tropes for cultural nationalists like Hall and his critics is not coincidental. Conceived in terms of the permanently partial, disability lies at the heart of questions of ‘Australian’ representation and cultural reproduction. In claiming a figurative failure in his films, Hall’s critics themselves fail to apprehend them precisely at the level of rhetoric. They assume, as on occasion does Hall, a simple movement from rhetoric to mimesis. In their easy swing from fiction to fact—the ontological status of what is represented— the nation is not questioned, but the tenor of its reproduction is. While I am not in the slightest bit interested in reclaiming Hall’s films for the sake of some sort of ‘artistic’ credibility, I am interested in recovering them for a type of critical ambivalence that has for the most part been missing from their assessment. His critics (and sometimes his admirers) have treated Hall’s films, with rare exception, as if they do not know their effect or the ambition (for another knowledge—of origins) that inflames and propels them. And they apparently do not possess the means for theorising this ambition and so, according to their critics, they lack the capacity for entering into the quarrel over themselves. They are, for their critics, ‘unconscious’—probably lulled into slumber by the incessant fro-ing of passing flocks of sheep. On the other hand, the idealised past for which Hall’s latter-day critics long, perceived as a tirelessly nascent, prodigiously fertile national cinema, returns as the future dream for an Australian cinema that never arrives. What in fact appears is the fact of nothing (satisfactory) appearing—the frustrated or impossible return to an ‘unrepresentable (or impossible) before’. Hall’s critics reject his contributions to a nascent national cinema as inadequate for the kind of wholesome national cinema they can only imagine. This overwhelming nostalgia pervades these critics’ treatment of Hall’s work also. In addressing themselves specifically to Hall’s narrative leaps and discursive and formal anomalies, Hall’s critics open themselves to accusations of a teleological comprehensiveness where history is concerned. The retrospective critical vision applied to Hall’s films invariably homogenises or unifies these phenomena—usually from the perspective of a ‘linguistic’ (and sometimes cultural) norm that appears later. So, for example, Hall’s critics produce a type of retrospective completion around The Squatter’s Daughter by ‘identifying’ what they perceive to be its failings and then plugging its
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(conceptual) gaps and smoothing its interruptions and absences as evidence of these ‘failures’. Or, in the exceptional case of John Tulloch, the same comprehensiveness is achieved by locating Hall’s success in comparison with a contemporary ‘failure’ in Beaumont Smith. In seeking to be so comprehensive, critics and commentators on The Squatter’s Daughter fail to recognise that the film itself is discursive (positively rodomontade in its commentary) on matters of comprehensiveness and comprehension. In this way, they also demonstrate a reluctance to ‘think nothing’, particularly in relation to matters of national identity. The critical challenge posed by a film like The Squatter’s Daughter is to ‘think nothing’ of nationalism in a form other than simply not-thinking (of it) at all. In characteristically harnessing his films for their own arguments, Hall’s critics dislocate their potential meanings and effects to a series of secondary representations (the veracity or ‘appropriateness’ of the national cinema or, even more specifically, the power of censorship, the novelty of the film revival and so on). In this sense, they approach films like The Squatter’s Daughter as if they are something like our cinema’s ‘originary ruins’: films that anticipate their misrecognition, but which are, as a matter of course, eclipsed by the knowledge of what comes next—or by the thought of what they might have been if they were only fully formed rather than a disfigured vestige, a shadow, a cinema not-quite-there.
Notes Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce. Sylvia Lawson, ‘Not for the likes of us’, in An Australian Film Reader, Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989, p. 156. First published in Quadrant (May–June 1965). 3 Al Duff, former world president of Universal Pictures, was asked to assess Hall’s contribution to the Australian film industry during the This is Your Life tribute: ‘I think I can sum it up very rapidly. Ken has an extraordinary record, making seventeen consecutive money-making pictures. I don’t think that’s been equalled anywhere in the world. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock or some of his peers have such a record, and that is in my opinion a world’s record and certainly an Australian record.’ Ken G Hall: This is Your Life, episode 3/023. 4 Hall’s films enjoyed sporadic exposure during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962 Hoyts released Let George Do It and On Our Selection as a double bill with some success. In June 1972 the 22nd Sydney Film Festival ran a major retrospective of Australian film (1911–71) but screened only Mr Chedworth 1 2
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Steps Out and either the trailer or excerpts of The Squatter’s Daughter, On Our Selection, Strike Me Lucky, Dad and Dave Come to Town, Let George Do It, and Dad Rudd MP. Raymond Longford and the Chauvels, on the other hand, were represented by several films respectively. The decision to screen Hall’s film in excerpt echoes the 1965 Sydney Film Festival’s practice in which fragments of seven Hall films and only one full feature were screened as part of a ‘Hall Historical Program’. This is the program that was dismissively referred to in a letter by Kevin Evans published in Film Digest 4 (October 1965), p. 17, part of which served as one epigraph to chapter 2. The Minister for Tourism and Sport, Hon. E. A. Willis, quoted in Film Weekly, 3:34 (26 August 1971), p. 2. Herbert G. Hayward, quoted in Film Weekly, 3:34 (26 August 1971), p. 11. As the one Australian filmmaker from the pre-war years whose oeuvre is more or less intact, Hall’s name has been recently claimed for a National Film and Sound Archive certificate awarded annually to an individual who has contributed to the archival preservation of Australian cinema. Ken G. Hall, quoted in Philip Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, Cinema Papers (January 1974), p. 76. Later in the same interview Taylor asks about the middle ‘G’—‘This is an American practice?’ Hall replies: ‘Yes, American practice, Ken G. G for George.’ (p. 88.) Thoms was a prominent member of the experimental film group, Ubu Films. Another member of the group, David Perry, parodied a Ken G. Hall finale in a poster design. Perry considered Hall to be ‘Ubu’s arch-enemy’. Cited in Ubu Films 1965–1970: Sydney Underground Movies, Peter Mudie (ed.), UNSW Press, Sydney, 1997. Albie Thoms, ‘Ken Hall’ in The Australian Screen, Moran and O’Regan (eds), Currency Press, Sydney, 1985, p. 49. ibid., pp. 52, 54. ibid., p. 53. Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 88. ibid. ibid., p. 84. John Baxter, The Australian Cinema, Pacific Books, Sydney, 1970, p. 75. Baxter’s comments beg a question, which is how to contextualise the changing conceptions of ‘art’ in the 1930s and 1970s. For instance, the screenplay for The Squatter’s Daughter makes repeated reference to ‘art’ in camera directions, for example: ‘Most artistic possible shots of small station, stream, picturesque little homestead’ (p. 51) or ‘Artistic sunset’ (p. 72), by which the script seems to mean something pictorial or perhaps painterly but not necessarily entirely unmotivated or uneconomic or un-American. John Tulloch, Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, pp. 30, 155. ibid., p. 30. Ken G. Hall and Michael Thornhill, ‘The Australian Film Industry observed: Ken G. Hall and Michael Thornhill present divergent views’, Masque (May/ June 1968), p. 11.
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Alan Seymour, ‘Thoughts on Theatre’, Masque (March/April 1968), pp. 24–5. ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid. (original emphasis). Ken Quinnell, ‘An evening of overall vileness’, Filmnews 6:8 (August 1976), p. 5. ibid. Ray Edmondson, Andrew Pike, Graham Shirley and Ian Griggs, ‘Mail’, Filmnews 6:9 (September 1976), p. 2. Andrew Pike, ‘The history of an Australian film production company: Cinesound, 1932–1970’, MA dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1972, p. 102. ibid., pp. 113–14. Pike’s assertion fails to account for the overtly ‘local’ elements of Dad Rudd MP (1940) or Smithy (1946). Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 77 (original emphasis). It might well be that Taylor has misidentified Eisenstein’s influence from the original German footage rather than Hall’s re-edited compilation. For a brief discussion of the way in which the proponents of the Australian film revival turned to Europe for inspiration see my ‘In search of a cinema’, in A Century of Australian Cinema, James Sabine (ed.), Reed Books, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 130–53. Ken G. Hall, ‘Why is there no Australian film industry?’, Masque, no. 2 (November–December 1967), p. 24. Bruce Chandler, ‘A Hall of doubtful fame or “The most successful of our filmmakers” ’, Film Digest, no. 6 (December 1965), p. 3. ibid, p. 6. ibid., p. 3. ibid., p. 5. ibid., p. 7. In Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Stanley Kwan, 1996). Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 24. Hall also described O’Reilly as a ‘hard-faced, stiff, cold, public servant’ (in Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 74). Interestingly, Hall attributed O’Reilly’s unsuitability for the job of censor to his lack of ‘impartiality’ (ibid). ‘The censor speaks’, Everyone’s, 18 April 1934, p. 1. ‘Extracts from annual reports’, available at http://libertus.net/censor/ docarchive/oflc_history.html (accessed 11 February 2004). Slessor, ‘Telling the truth about “Squatter’s Daughter”—When critics must be cruel to be kind’, p. 5. Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994, p. 6 and passim. Charles Chauvel, also writing in 1933, enthusiastically embraces all three. In a brochure he produced for students at the Chauvel School of Scenario Writing, Chauvel advised of suitable themes that might be deployed for a
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future national cinema in Australia, and which included: ‘HUMAN WEAKNESSES: Under this heading can be found many excellent themes such as the hunchback whose great brain will overcome his physical defects …’ Charles Chauvel, ‘The Chauvel School of Scenario Writing’ [1933] cited in Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, Ina Bertrand (ed.), UNSW Press, Kensington, NSW, 1989, p. 171. Eric Michaels, Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary, EmPress, Rose Bay, NSW, 1990, p. 62. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 155. N. Beischer and E. Mackay, Obstetrics and the Newborn: An Illustrated Textbook, W. B. Saunders, Sydney, 1986, p. 19. Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film: 1900–1977, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 158. Cited in Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929, Oxford University Press, London, 1983, pp. 251–2; Table Talk, 19 September 1912. William D. Routt, ‘The fairest child of the Motherland: Colonialism and family in Australian films of the 1920s and 1930s’, pp. 28–52. The most interesting inversion of this pattern in Hall’s oeuvre is the film Thoroughbred in which the ‘daughter’ is a Canadian (a plot device to explain the presence of American actress Helen Twelvetrees) who must choose between two Australian men, one rich and righteous, the other disabled and morally deficient. Her decision to settle on the latter was at the time attributed to the off-screen romance between the two actors but might equally be seen as a gesture to the ‘Jane Eyre’ syndrome in Australian cinema. Deleuze and Guattari note that ‘incest’ is itself a kind of originary (and therefore impossible) thinking in which descent is perpetually reduced to filiation; an act of re-engendering oneself. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161. In discussing disability in The Squatter’s Daughter, I find myself repeatedly confronted by the inadequacies of descriptive language to achieve a suitable sensitivity towards the experiences of the disabled themselves and to rise to the challenge presented by everyday language and its deployment of disability tropes. If I use words such as ‘crippled’ and ‘lame’ it is only to discuss their rhetorical use in the context of the film itself. Joan’s predecessors also include other nationalist Joans-of-good-deeds, including most notably ‘Joan of Arc’ (another woman of sheep, nation, allegory and sacrifice). Joan of Arc proved to be a figure of some import in the early Australian film industry and lent her figurative authority to such films as The Joan of Arc of Loos (George Willoughby, 1916). Probably Dalkeith Station near Cassilis, which, although not a major stud, was in the 1930s considered a ‘glamour’ stud at shows—and one of the ‘daughter studs’ of the prestigious Boonoke Station. Hall’s dismissive anecdote about McMaster giving him advice on how to fudge large numbers of sheep—‘having no doubt read a fan magazine on making movies’—suggests that Hall might not have been consciously aware of McMaster’s previous film work.
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John Tulloch, Legends of the Screen: The Australian Narrative Cinema 1919– 1929, Currency Press and Australian Film Institute, Sydney, 1981, p. 391. 57 ibid., p. 396. 58 ibid., pp. 396–7. 59 ibid. Vera James claimed in an interview never to have seen any of the various versions of The Squatter’s Daughter. Interview with Graham Shirley (30 April 1977) transcript in NFSA, p. 22. 60 Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 20. 61 At one point in the screenplay Barky implies that Clive would be more ‘complete’ if he too was ‘half a man’. When Joan decides to return home from a visit to the recently arrived Ironbark, Clive is told to accompany her. ‘I can go alone, Barky,’ demurs Joan. Ironbark replies, ‘If Clive’s half the man I used to be, he won’t let you.’ (The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 46.) In a scene that was also deleted, Clive and Joan are shown outside the Waratah gates at which point Joan quickly insists: ‘This will be far enough, thank you. What a Man you’ve shown yourself to be. I wanted to show you up as a liar and a thief, but the truth would have broken your father’s heart. And I’ve seen an old man with a broken heart—my own father.’ Here Joan links the theme of partiality to masculinity (as did Jimmy). (The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 47; original emphasis.) 62 ibid., p. 18. 63 The film credits suggest that this is actually the dog’s name. Apparently Bidgee belonged to Arthur Smith, the Cinesound innovator who developed the studio’s sound on film system. 64 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 50. 65 ibid., p. 89. 66 In an earlier version of the script, this sense of Jimmy and Bidgee’s interrelationship is further accentuated and the mutuality of their fate is foreshadowed when Fletcher threatens to punish the dog for killing sheep. Jimmy clutches Bidgee (known in the screenplay as Pal) to his chest, querulously declaring to Fletcher: ‘I know I’m only half a man—but I’ll stand up to you—for Pal.’ Fletcher sneers in reply, and Jimmy counters by taunting him: ‘Shoot! Go on shoot! One bullet will do for us both.’ (p. 55.) And as if to seal their fate around the matter of death, Jimmy addresses the dog doubtfully: ‘Pal—you’re not a killer? If you were I’d have to kill you. That’s sheep-men’s law.’ (p. 56.) 67 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 67. 68 Perhaps the confusion of the statement lies in Zeinah’s use of the language of biological identity (race) to symbolise amour fou—passion; the fever in the blood—in such a way as to suggest that romantic destiny somehow transcends genetic destiny. 69 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 73. 70 Tulloch, Legends of the Screen, p. 378. In keeping with the earlier discussion of Tulloch’s treatment of Lorna, this observation attributes only comparative power to her. Interestingly Tulloch still maintains Keane’s ‘activity’ in his description, in direct contrast to his lengthy and contorted attempts to describe Lorna’s passivity. 56
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ibid., p. 380. The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 96. 73 The phrase is from Hamid Naficy, ‘Framing exile: From homeland to homepage’ in Home Exile Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, Hamid Naficy (ed.), Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 3. 74 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 12. The lines after and including ‘true of Faith’ have been crossed out in the script. 75 ibid., p. 95. 76 ibid., p. 23. 77 Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce, final remarks. 78 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 95. 79 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 6. 80 Alfred Hawkesworth, Australasian Sheep and Wool: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise: From Paddock to Loom; From Shearing Shed to Textile Factory (6th edn), William Brooks & Co., Sydney, 1930, p. 91. 81 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 80 (my italics). Hall seems to have possessed a bent for gemellarity from his earliest film review as a cadet journalist (‘Twin Beds’) to scenes like the one in Grandad Rudd, in which Grandad engages in a conversation with his mirror image before entering a party with babes in arms: Dave: ‘The old man’s got twins!’ Grandad: ‘He flatters me.’ This scene is obliquely reiterated in the film’s concluding moments in the chook yard: Grandad: ‘That’s the way to get married—economy and efficiency! Feed the fowls and the eggs will look after themselves.’ 82 See John Lash, Twins and the Double, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, passim. 83 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Story of the Lynx, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, pp. 228–9. 84 ibid., p. 225. 85 Hilda Bridges, The Squatter’s Daughter, NSW Bookstall, 1922, p. 184. 86 ibid., p. 192. 87 ibid., pp. 184–5. 88 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 48. 89 Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 53. 90 ibid., p. 30. 91 Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans. Harsha Ram, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998. 92 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 61. 93 Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce 94 Roger Climpson’s concluding remarks on Ken G Hall: This is Your Life. 95 Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 56. 96 Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 3. 97 Ken Quinnell, ‘Ken G. Hall’, Sydney Cinema Journal, no. 3 (Winter 1967), pp. 27–8. 98 ibid., p. 27. 71 72
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William D. Routt, ‘On the expression of colonialism in early Australian film: Charles Chauvel and naïve cinema’, in An Australian Film Reader, Moran & O’Regan (eds), p. 65. In a sense, Routt is elaborating and theorising on a much earlier observation made by Cecil Holmes, writing on the defining qualities of Australian film in 1954: ‘Perhaps the characteristic of what is best in Australian productions has been their folk quality, crude and simple perhaps, yet recognisable and authentic.’ (In ‘The film in Australia’, Meanjin, 13:2 (1954), p. 189.) 100 Cinesound editor Bill Shepherd reluctantly agrees there might indeed be continuity ‘errors’ in films like The Squatter’s Daughter, but explains that they are not his or Hall’s. In an interview with Graham Shirley, Shepherd blames the presence of continuity errors on the English, who recut Cinesound’s films when they were sent across for their British release. See Graham Shirley and Bill Shepherd, ‘Bill Shepherd: Pioneer Australian film editor’, Cinema Papers (December 1974), pp. 296–302. He also attributes the ‘job’ of continuity alternately to the ‘script girl’ and the director, who ‘had it all worked out in his shooting script’ (p. 299). Shepherd also alludes to some dispute over the role of editor on The Squatter’s Daughter, which is attributed in the credits to both himself and George Malcolm. According to Shepherd, Malcolm ‘didn’t cut a foot of it’ (p. 298). However, Hall rigorously disputed Malcolm’s version of events (see ‘A matter of fact’, Cinema Papers, March–April 1975, p. 46). Apparently, the film was completed in something of a rush: ‘Reel six of The Squatter’s Daughter was premiering at the State while reel nine was coming off the printer at Bondi. I have an idea we’d make an alteration, and reel nine still had to be tinted red because it contained the bushfire sequence.’ (p. 299.) 101 Chandler, ‘A Hall of doubtful fame or “The most successful of our filmmakers” ’, p. 7. 102 The thirty-degree and 180-degree rules refer to camera placement conventions that serve to heighten the perception of narrative continuity. A detailed description of these conventions can be found in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edn, McGraw Hill, New York, 2001, pp. 263–73. 103 David Bordwell, ‘Jump cuts and blind spots’, Wide Angle, 6:1 (1984), pp. 4–11. Bordwell is astounded that it was not until the 1960s that the jump cut was recognised by critics as a stylistic option, a shift that he explains in terms of a commensurate shift in analytical categories and strategies available to film discourse at that time. This shift was inspired in part by the films of the French Nouvelle Vague and in part by a greater emphasis on expressive authorship in the reading of films. 104 Tulloch, Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning. 105 ibid., pp. 159–60. 106 ibid., p. 160. 107 ibid. 108 ibid., p. 154. 109 ibid., p. 152. 110 ibid., pp. 153–4. 99
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Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 54. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edn, Starword, London, 1992, pp. 210, 236. 113 ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 6. 114 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 1. 115 Cited in Graeme Shirley and Bryan Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency Press, Sydney, 1983, p. 119. 111 112
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Chapter 4
Origins interrupted: Splitting heirs and forebears
Originality is not the urge to be different from others, to produce the brand new; it is to grasp (in the etymological sense) the original, the roots of both ourselves and things. Hillel Schwarz1
Who can accept the Garden of Eden … or the flood? Ken G. Hall2
For Hall’s many critics it is his perceived relationship to cultural (rather than specifically textual) sources that proves to be especially problematic. In proposing Hall’s ‘failure’, his critics (from the mid-1960s onwards) base their arguments on what they observed to be an association between Hall’s films and the Hollywood cinema (an indice of Americanism). In this move, these critics reiterate a key assertion of so much film historiography—at least where national cinemas are concerned—that (after World War I) the American film industry operated as a hegemonic force in relation to other film-producing countries. Within the terms of this comparison, theorists of national cinemas measure filmmakers and their films against either of two stylistic options: first, in terms of their success or failure at attempting to
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imitate perceived Hollywood (rather than, for example, European or British) benchmarks (Hall supposedly fits in here) or, second, in terms of their ‘defiance’ of Hollywood in producing a kind of counter-classicism (the position preferred by the architects and allies of the Australian film renaissance). In the case of film commentators reassessing Hall’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, the options are doubly conflated and contorted. For some critics, only in his failure to adequately imitate Hollywood does Hall propose a ‘local’ or national cinema that defines its difference precisely in terms of that failure. For others it is in simply and symptomatically choosing to imitate that Hall signals his failure to be ‘local’ or adequate to the national. In almost all instances, however, the critic’s measuring or evaluating activity is based on the idea of a dominant Hollywood cinema as its primary referent and benchmark. While this partly explains the backlash against Hall in the 1970s, it does not altogether describe how Hall’s contemporaries measured The Squatter’s Daughter’s success or failure. For those reviewing the film on its first release, the significance of The Squatter’s Daughter stood outside (or at least just to the side of) its relation to the Hollywood cinema. To them, The Squatter’s Daughter was comprehensible in terms of other (Australian) iconography or, even more markedly, to a benchmark of mimetic fidelity (a critical measure that itself was derived from and can be traced through the critical reception of the film’s theatrical predecessors). Perhaps for this reason, the very things Hall’s later critics derided—poor artistry and technical skills—were championed by many of Hall’s contemporaries, who measured the film against local rather than ‘international’ standards. Perhaps also for this reason, the only English review of the film that I have been able to locate is unremitting in its faultfinding: ‘Australia will have to do better than this weak melodrama if she is to find a place on the movie map … There is some interest in the sidelights on Australian bush life and the sheep grazing but that is about all.’3 The American trade journal Variety does mention the film’s stage forerunner in its opening assessment of the film, although in conclusion it duly notes: ‘To young Hall goes a lot of credit for producing. He lacks the finesse of Hollywood, but his work shows decided promise.’4 The views of Hall’s contemporary critics rested on the perception that in addition to an American classicism, there existed a ‘national’ or
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perhaps even a ‘commonwealth’ classicism as well. Their reception of The Squatter’s Daughter raises questions about the tendency of later critics (and, more generally, some schools of Australian film studies) to understand the Australian cinema of the post–World War I period solely in the context of a reaction for or against Hollywood.5 The film’s own pre-publicity emphasised its status as a modification of its antecedents and therefore the comparative ‘modernity’ and originality of Hall’s feature film: ‘The plot and dialogue of “The Squatter’s Daughter” have been a good deal altered since the story first appeared, in the early years of the century, as a stage play, and as a silent film. The dressing is that of 1933.’6 Hall himself claimed very little reliance on preceding versions and suggested that the film’s relation to earlier texts was limited to the provision of ‘added value’ in promoting the film: ‘The title was well known, had a strong Australian flavour and some woman appeal. We did not retain much more than the title in the final washup.’7 The stage play of The Squatter’s Daughter must have seemed to be ‘very old’ in 1933. Also known as The Land of the Wattle, it had been written in 1905 by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan under their symbiotic nom de plume ‘Albert Edmunds’ and had first taken to the stage in 1907. Between the turn of the century and the year of Hall’s magnum ovine, 1933, there was a silent film and three novelised versions of The Squatter’s Daughter story (as well as a couple of closely related novels that relied on many familiar plot-points if not the exact title). And this figure does not account for the many successful presentations of the stage play during this period. The play’s story line is somewhat more complex than Ken G. Hall’s later homage, although many threads of semblance remain. The eponymous squatter’s daughter is Violet Enderby, a spirited young woman who single-handedly manages a large sheep station. She is romantically pursued by Dudley, the depraved scion of her guardian, James ‘Guardy’ Harrington, owner of the neighbouring property, Waratah. Dudley suggests that it would be in Violet’s financial interest to join the two stations in marriage, as her dead parents would have wished. Violet is unimpressed: ‘You forget Dudley that I am an Australian girl. I’ve been accustomed to station life since childhood, and when thrown upon my own recources [sic] you will find me quite capable of managing my own affairs without your assistance.’8
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Unbeknown to Violet, the debt-ridden Dudley has conspired to have her true love, the lowly station overseer Tom Bathurst, kidnapped and killed by the notorious bushranger Ben Hall during a prearranged robbery of the station’s payroll. Dudley himself is being blackmailed by a peripheral member of Ben’s gang, an escaped convict called Nick Harvey, who knows that Dudley is not actually James Harrington’s son but that Tom Bathurst is. In fact Dudley’s biological father is none other than the blackmailer, old Nick himself. Their secret is also shared by Dudley’s alcoholic lover, Sarah. In a world before DNA testing, the only evidence of origins interrupted is a locket containing a mother’s image—a memento mori in the possession of the unsuspecting Tom Bathurst. Tom is unaware of his connection to Harrington, a situation that is played for pathos. In one of his frequent altercations with Dudley, the latter accuses him of being ‘dragged up among the blacks’. Later, Violet quizzes Tom about not knowing his parents: Violet: You have nothing to be ashamed of Tom. Whatever your parents may have been you yourself are a man of honour. Tom: Thanks Miss Violet for your good opinion. (MUSIC) My life has been a sad one—my earliest remembrance was finding myself lying in a miamia wrapped in a blanket, and of a kind old black who used to nurse me.9 To lighten the drama, comedy is provided by Violet’s friend Jenny Thornton; her prudish chaperon Miss Spriggins (who hates everything about Australia, but particularly the wildlife—in which she includes the station’s sheep); a Scottish ‘new chum frae the Heilands’, Archie MacPherson; and an array of farcical Aboriginal characters (Biddy, Billy, their son Nulla Nulla and his love interest Mulga). Eventually Dudley tries to kill his biological father, the blackmailer Nick, and is exposed by his lover Sarah as an imposter. Harrington discovers Tom’s locket to be the same one he placed around his infant son’s neck before heading off to Sydney and abandoning his wife to the fatal perils of rural isolation. Tom’s secret story, of being brought up by local Aborigines (who are thus positioned at the scene of the central character’s origins) and an old shepherd, is revealed to everyone.
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Bailey and Duggan signal their own sentiments by having the evildoer Dudley taken into custody as an ‘aider and avetor [sic] of Ben Hall’s gang’. The trooper also arrests his father. And the play finally stammers to a halt once everyone (except Nulla Nulla) has delivered their last words: Nick: It would be a pity to part father and son—you know, Copper, birds of a feather flock together. Trooper: Now then, stow your gab and come along. Dudley: The game’s up. I wish you all goodbye—and damn you. Miss S:
Oh why did I ever come to Australia?
Violet: (to Sarah) Don’t go, you have brought us happiness and we’ll try to make your future life as happy as our own. Tom: Thank God the mystery of my birth is cleared at last. Violet:
Yes, Tom—you’re a Squatter’s Son –
Tom: And I’ve won the love of ‘A Squatter’s Daughter’. Curtain.10 Interestingly, in the final instance Violet, like the later Joan Enderby, resists coupling and proposes a threesome. The scene is remarkable for the way in which the dialogue is almost overpowered by the sound of loose threads being vigorously tied. This is a conclusion about who gets to have the last of the last words and in which those same last words are, not coincidentally, the play’s first—the title. The inverted commas around ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’ not only allude to the play’s opening but also, as a parting gesture, emphasise the idea of the squatter’s daughter as a type—with a life outside the terms of this stage-play itself (see figures 79–80).
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Musterer (Hilda Rix-Nicholas, 1935).
Figures 79–80: The squatter’s daughter as a type: The Squatter’s Daughter (George W. Lambert, 1923–24) and The Fair
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Somebody’s baby Barky: Pure merino—that’s what made Waratah! Hall, The Squatter’s Daughter
Bailey and Duggan’s stage play was preceded by a little-known novel penned by Harold MacKenzie called The Squatter’s Daughter—An Australian Romance, published in 1890. MacKenzie’s story is high Victorian tragedy—a tale of morality and manners—and it ranges freely between Australia and Europe. The impending tragedy is indicated in an early sheep sequence: ‘Truly a sheep in Australia goes through much hardship during its existence. From the time of its birth until it is converted into mutton its life is one long persecution. Then as so often happens, when the arid plains of the interior are for years together almost devoid of sustenance, these patient animals die in thousands.’11 The book follows the fortunes of Muriel Grey, daughter of ‘muttonaire’ Duncan Grey of the sheep station Timboora. Muriel is engaged to marry Eric Rymanscourt, an Englishman having his ‘colonial experience’ at the nearby Karatoomah. Before she marries, Muriel takes a tour of Europe during which she is wooed by a Scotsman, Malcolm Seebold. While Muriel is away, Eric receives a head injury during the running of the Squatter’s Cup. While Eric is recuperating, his nurse, Mrs Fordyce, falls in love with him and destroys Muriel’s letters, sending her a forged reply of rejection from Eric. Guilt eventually gets the better of Mrs Fordyce and, after confessing to Eric, she commits suicide in the bath. Muriel, believing herself to have been spurned by Eric, marries Malcolm, much to the chagrin of the latter’s lover, Lottie, who lets her looks go in despair. Eric rushes to Europe in response to a letter written by Lottie that declares Malcolm to be a bigamist. On discovering the newlyweds in Cairo, Eric challenges Malcolm to a duel. Muriel, fearing for Malcolm’s life, cross-dresses and takes his place and so is killed by the unsuspecting Eric who, on recognising what he has done, shoots himself also. Malcolm, it transpires, never makes it to the showdown having stopped on the way for a drink to settle his nerves. Although the book does feature cross-dressing, some stirring sheep moments and speculation about the relationship between Australia and England, it otherwise bears little resemblance to the
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later The Squatter’s Daughter cycle. Bailey and Duggan’s stage-play is also preceded by an unrelated film, The Squatter’s Daughter, made in England in 1906. That film (which survives) is a simple siege-bysavages story in which the native aggressors appear to be Amerindians. Certainly Bailey and Duggan don’t refer to this film or MacKenzie’s preceding novel in their recollection of their play’s genesis. Other novels, released soon after the opening of Bailey and Duggan’s play, and with similar but not identical names to The Squatter’s Daughter, bear a closer resemblance. The Squatter’s Ward (1908) and The Squatter’s Bairn (1910) are both stories of adopted orphans who marry their non-biological siblings.12 The Squatter’s Ward opens with a chapter titled ‘Somebody’s baby’. (A Girl of the Bush also features a graphic depiction of the changelings motif, see figure 81). An Aboriginal man named Wahwon approaches the house of successful squatter Richard Merton with a white infant in his arms. It is a girl with a gold chain around her neck to which is attached a locket containing the image of a ‘beautiful lady’. The child has a note pinned to her dress: ‘This little child is motherless, or believed to be and it is impossible for
Figure 81: A Girl of the Bush—unknown origins
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me to bring her up. I have taken the liberty of sending her to you, as I know no-one else with whom I could trust her. It will be a charity if you adopt her as your own daughter.’ The note goes on to describe the large fortune the child (to be known as Edith) will inherit on the author’s death. It is signed ‘Her Father’. Edith is later joined by another foster child, Harold, whom she eventually marries. In The Squatter’s Bairn, the squatter Alexander Grant and his son Ralph rescue a white child named Enid who has been raised by an Aboriginal ‘tribe’ after her parents were killed in a fierce bushfire. No surprises when Enid and Ralph also eventually marry. These novels must have contributed to the sense that The Squatter’s Daughter arose unaided out of the heady ether of the early twentieth century. A souvenir program for the play’s closing night in Sydney in 1907 included the story of how The Squatter’s Daughter (aka Land of the Wattle) came to be—on the trot, as it were: They agreed in saying that the idea of the plot was Mr Duggan’s and Mr Bailey told how that gentleman communicated it to him one day, about two years ago, while they were walking down Bourke-street [sic], Melbourne … Then the pair proceeded to jot down ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ of scenes and acts, and bearding Mr Anderson in his den, placed the matter before him in such a feasible light he gave them strong encouragement to proceed in the good work.13 Duggan and Bailey had met on the set of Duggan’s first play, The Democrat, at the Royal Standard Theatre in Sydney in 1891. Duggan’s sister, Eugenie, a highly successful actress, was married to the aforementioned theatre entrepreneur William Anderson. With the further financial backing of Anderson, Bailey and Duggan were able to expand their acting and writing partnership, and in 1912 they started the Bert Bailey Dramatic Company. Bailey and Duggan’s participation in The Squatter’s Daughter was not entirely located off-stage—the two also appeared in the production. Bailey played the new chum, a comic Scotsman, Archie McPherson, on stage. The character of Archie is echoed in Hall’s version by the slapstick antics of Scotty the Shearer, although there are
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many distinctions between the two characters. Duggan appeared in the stage-play as the bushranger Ben Hall, a character whom Ken G. retains in his own surname only. A program for a 1919 stage version of The Squatter’s Daughter also features Edmund’s sister Eugenie as the play’s heroine, Violet Enderby.14 Bailey and Duggan reprised their respective roles as Archie MacPherson and Ben Hall for the play’s first filmed interpretation in 1910. A visiting English stage actor Olive Wilton replaced Duggan’s sister Eugenie in the title role.15 According to a detailed publicity brochure, this film was a faithful screen translation of the Bailey and Duggan stage play. An advertisement for the film in the Argus describes it in the hyperbole of ‘first’ and ‘most’ and ‘longest’ and ‘original’: For the first time in Melbourne The Latest and Most Successful Moving Picture Ever Presented in Australia —The Squatter’s Daughter (X4)— The Famous Romantic Australian Picture Drama, By Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan. THE LONGEST PICTURE EVER FILMED BEING 5000 FEET IN LENGTH This Picture’s Chief Attraction is due to the fact that it is the First Cinematograph Representation of an Original Australian Drama, and that it is the First Picture Production where the characters are interpreted by Metropolitan Australian Actors and Actresses. The advertisement goes on to boast: ‘The Most Expensive and Up-todate Cinemetograph [sic] Projector and a Capable Lecturer who will keep his audience in touch with the story of the play from beginning to end.’16 Hall’s 1933 film version did not pursue the evident intertextuality between theatre and cinema in its casting, most significantly declining to use Bert Bailey, who had been previously associated with Hall’s first
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feature production On Our Selection (1932) and his subsequent Dad and Dave films. There is, however, one exception: George Cross, who played Tom Bathurst in the 1910 film version and appears in Ken Hall’s film in an unspecified acting role and was employed behind the camera as a director of acting.17 Cross’s participation was imposed on Hall by Greater Union Theatres (specifically Stuart Doyle and Frank Marden) who, in Hall’s words, didn’t believe that Hall ‘knew about the stage, which was true’ and decided that Cross’s long-standing association with Bert Bailey would lend some credibility to the performances.18 Cross was later singled out for thinly veiled criticism by Hall, who was trying to defend the film against accusations of ‘overacting’: He was a ham but a lovely fellow and I’ve had a great regard and respect for him. I could control him to some extent. A lot of the stuff on The Squatter’s Daughter was overacted to hell. But that was the way it was and nobody objected to it at the time. The press didn’t tear me apart and say ‘This is dreadfully overacted’. I don’t blame George Cross for it because I could have altered anything and I constantly did.19 Hall’s desire to cash in on The Squatter’s Daughter’s title was a calculated move. The various stage productions of The Squatter’s Daughter are claimed as the most successful Australian melodramas of their era.20 The stage-play initially ran for seven weeks in Melbourne followed by eleven weeks in Sydney. Twelve months after it opened a report in the Argus described the play’s spectacular rise to success: ‘First performed at the Melbourne Theatre Royal in 1907 The Squatter’s Daughter ran for 36 performances. On being transferred to Sydney, it established a record for an Australian play of 72 consecutive performances, only 6 behind the record run for an English play in Australia, (the London Adelphi success In the Ranks by G. R. Sims and H. Pettit).’21 In 1908 it was further reported that The Squatter’s Daughter had been seen the previous year by more than a million people in Australia, a considerable claim given the country’s population stood at about four million at the time. Its popularity was especially evident in the largest cities—in Sydney, 150,000 had paid for admission; in Melbourne,
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120,000—although it had also toured to a smaller Australian centres. Such was the demand for the play that for the Sydney season of 1907, ‘special cheap excursion trains have been put on by the Government to enable “the people on the land” to see this gem of Australia’s own producing’.22 An advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald in February 1910 claimed: ‘The play … had made more money than any other Australian play ever produced, realising £70,000 in 3 years, and witnessed by over 1,500,000 residents of the Commonwealth of Australia and Dominion of New Zealand.’23 Among its many claims to greatness, The Squatter’s Daughter is also renowned as the first of a string of later melodramas to feature an independent Australian bush girl as a key figure. The play was hailed as representing the introduction of a new type of national drama, relying equally for its success on a careful combination of bucolic verisimilitude and a Bulletin-inspired bush burlesque in which both the newly shorn sheep and the intellectually fleeced hayseed might share stage honours. The opening night program for the 1907 season describes the play simply as an historical drama ‘reminiscent of the early ‘60s when a reign of terror existed’—a reference to the marauding and melodramatic bushrangers that frequent the plot.24 But despite its status as a period piece, the play’s popular novelty lay in its evident respect for verisimilitude that for adulatory audiences overwhelmed the heights of histrionic plot. Margaret Williams’s examination of turn-of-the-century Australian theatre notes the crucial development of a taste for verisimilitude that accompanied the first presentations of sheep narratives like Land of the Wattle (aka The Squatter’s Daughter) and The Breaking of the Drought, a taste the plays were careful to provide for, usually in the form of animal performances. The ‘Albert Edmunds’ play of The Squatter’s Daughter, for instance, opened with a flock of sheep crossing the stage accompanied by barking dogs and cackling kookaburras to herald the breaking of dawn. Such was the gravity of their mimetic labour it was rumoured the animals refused to perform this dawn sequence twice on matinee days. The idea of incorporating performing birds (and other wildlife) had been a popular stage device since the success of the innovative rural melodrama The Breaking of the Drought (Bland Holt, 1902, and also later remade as a sheep film by Franklyn
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Barrett in 1920), which included a wandering emu and trained crows that flew down and picked at the bones of dead cattle during a graphic drought scene. When the play was eventually realised for the cinema this scene in particular proved to be especially controversial, its blunt depiction of rural drought of concern to those who otherwise thought the national cinema should be devoted to promoting the productive virtues of Australia’s primary industries. A concerted effort was made by Bailey and Duggan to ensure The Squatter’s Daughter’s outback ambience—a factor appreciated in many press reviews of the day. A reviewer comparing it to the next play by ‘Albert Edmunds’, The Man from Out Back, took care to note, for example, that there were more animals in the former (and you can hear the disappointment in his voice): ‘There were snakes, opposums, wallabies, cockatoos, horses, and one or two more varieties of wild creatures in “The Squatter’s Daughter,” but in “The Man from Out Back” there are only horses, dogs and a galah.’25 One notable special effect included in this first production was a waterfall gully, described in the 1907 program as consisting of a ‘huge fall of 500 Gallons per minute falling from an enormous height, and emptying itself into a Lake of Real Water, extending the whole width of the Theatre Royal stage’.26 The play included a variety of vaudeville-style entertainments as part of the diegesis, including a shearing competition that prompted loud audience response and which was described in baleful terms by the Table Talk critic: ‘The shearing of real sheep is very interesting (and realism cannot go much further than that unless they slaughter them in view of the audience).’27 These various accounts of the play suggest that the use of actual sheep in the on-stage antics was intended to contribute to the play’s mimetic as well as emblematic representational strategies. The souvenir program of the 1907 Melbourne season described the stage settings, in the all-encompassing terms of an apparent oxymoron, as a ‘dream of realism’.28 It’s not clear here whether the phrase is meant to capture a kind of ‘picturesque realism’ or rather the idea that the play exemplifies what ‘realism’ might be imagined (ideally) to be. What is clear is that the description produces the idea that the mimetic (in the form of a ‘picturesque realism’) is the result of two (or perhaps twin?) productions: the production of the diegetic stage ‘world’ and its referent (a ‘natural’ world that is also understood in terms of the
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productive; its ‘primary’ products the deserved outcome of a carefully crafted cultural labour). As a dream (of realism) the play holds out the promise of a kind of comprehensiveness—a self-referential world in which the metropolis can also nominate or represent its own ‘source’ (the rural origins of Australia’s representational wealth) back to itself. The play’s highly successful runs and revivals came to an end in July 1929 when William Anderson staged his last season at the King’s Theatre in Melbourne, an unsuccessful resurrection of the very dramas on which his reputation rested, including The Squatter’s Daughter. For the latter, Edmund Duggan reprised the key role of squatter James Harrington—a far cry from his earlier fame playing the bushranger Ben Hall. Apparently, the shearing of sheep on stage maintained its effect and, according to the Argus, ‘Those who took it seriously and those who regarded it with their tongues in their cheeks enjoyed it equally.’29 It was painfully obvious to Ken G. Hall, however, that the ‘test’ of verisimilitude was now to be found in the ‘cinematic’, in the deployment of the camera, rather than in the claims of the dialogue or the progressive unfolding of the on-stage action.
Good Australian To say, ‘Is your sheep genuine?’ would be a worse breach of manners than to enquire whether a citizen’s teeth, hair, or internal organs would test out authentic. Philip K. Dick30
It is not surprising then, given the play’s profile and acclaim, that many of Hall’s contemporaries assessed his film The Squatter’s Daughter in relation to its textual forebears in the play and the film (although rarely the novels) that preceded Hall’s feature. Film Weekly’s reviewer, for example, assured readers that: ‘The adaptation of the original story has been considerably altered but this makes no real difference to a plot which, of a melodramatic order has been utilised to create a modern interest much more appreciated than the old stage presentation.’ The film, the reviewer goes on to declare, is ‘GoodAustralian’, by which we can surmise that the measure for excellence is held against (the unstated but clearly implied) ‘Bad-Australian’ (rather than ‘Good’ or ‘Bad American’).31 Smith’s Weekly laid the film’s faults squarely at the feet of ‘the decrepit melodrama’ but proceeded to make a critical comparison
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with the Hollywood cinema anyway: ‘ “Smith’s Weekly” grades “The Squatter’s Daughter” in the A class—though many Western cowboy films of similar themes and equal mediocrity have been more harshly treated in the past.’32 In a scathing editorial in Smith’s Weekly, Ken Slessor uses the film as the basis for an examination of Australian film criticism itself, comparing the way in which Australian films are assessed with the critical stance applied to films from other countries: The time has come when, in their own interest, Australian talking pictures must be examined with as dispassionate and searching a scrutiny as that which is applied to films from any other country. This in itself, is a tribute to the stage of improvement reached by local film producers. Their pictures have long since passed the point where they can be regarded somewhat sentimentally as curiosities or historical souvenirs. They enter the same field as the imported film, and must be judged by identical standards. Nor indeed if the Australian film industry is to survive, could any other process of criticism be of the slightest value. Bearing this in mind, it would be absurd to say that ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’ (Cinesound’s latest production, released this week) is a successful film, or even a tolerably good film.33 According to Slessor, Australian critics, when looking at their compatriots’ films, must not avert their eyes nor succumb to sentiment (to blind themselves with or from the sort of passion that only a naked mirror vision might inspire). Instead, critics must look at Australian films as if they are alien to them. In expunging sentiment, in alienating the object of scrutiny, Slessor avoids any accommodation of a genuine ambivalence (the coexistence of opposite emotions); arguing instead for a cold, clinical dispassion as the basis for critical activity. Only from this quasi-ethnographic position can the film critic ensure continuity of local film production. In arguing that The Squatter’s Daughter is a film that might as well be ‘imported’, and therefore a failure, Slessor anticipates Hall’s later post-revival critics. Slessor then compares the film’s plot and performance with Hall’s previous film On Our Selection, which, as a comedy, requires different
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critical standards that are not answerable to matters mimetic: ‘ “On Our Selection” was at least downright slapstick, but the others make a pretence of reality, and must be assessed by different standards. Lowclass melodramas may mean a little easy money at this stage, to local producers, but they are a poor foundation for any permanence in the Australian film industry.’34 The problem with The Squatter’s Daughter, according to Slessor, is that it is both low-class and a melodrama, a combination of qualities that do not augur well for future offspring. In contrast to these accounts, the vast majority of the film’s reviewers relied on the very criteria that had been previously applied to stage versions of the story. In reviewing the film, newspaper and magazine writers demonstrated a preference for a type of appraisal associated with the very theatrical productions they compare the film with: assessing the film’s success at producing a sense of verisimilitude and the mimetic. They were impressed (or on occasion dismayed) by the film’s attention to verisimilitude through which the film was seen to lay claim to a kind of ‘local’ or national authenticity. The Sun News-Pictorial’s review is typical of reviews of the period: ‘Having early created the right outback atmosphere, deft direction wastes no time in launching the melodramatic plot, with sincerely authentic human types of station-life. Particularly Grant Lyndsay and Jocelyn Howarth move and speak with natural ease. Skill is also shown in the effective groupings of all the players, and some novel comic relief is duly injected.’35 An article on Jocelyn Howarth’s promotional tour in Tasmania gives a sense of Cinesound’s own investment in this idea of verisimilitude: ‘The bush fire work was undertaken at Wallacia, Penrith, and although many people were under the impression that these scenes were faked, she gave the assurance that every part of them was genuine. No doubles were used, each of the cast doing their respective work entirely.’36 Hall later reiterated the connection between the ways in which a specifically filmic device might become part of the film’s wider claims: ‘The climax of The Squatter’s Daughter was to be a bushfire—sheep in a bushfire (see figure 82, p. 164). That meant danger in the actual story line, adding to the suspense of the film, and in the actual shooting as it turned out—to cast, crew and to the sheep of course.’37 Cinesound very publicly prided itself on the ‘authenticity’ of the performances (no ‘doubles’) and insisted on an operative
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Figure 82: The Squatter’s Daughter—sheep in danger (production still)
commitment to mensuration as evinced by Hall’s story of his fidelity to the numbers of sheep in the opening sequence and the many publicity articles about on-set injuries in the shooting of The Squatter’s Daughter. For Hall, the empirical verifiability of the film could be measured in terms of its successful deployment of an excess of detail (that more sheep were used than would be typical in such a scene).38 Cinesound, in promoting the perils of the production, embellishes further by positing a mimetic relation between the circumstances of the film’s production and the ‘danger’ presented on-screen. And yet The Squatter’s Daughter’s plot abounds in duplicities and thrives on a kind of suggestiveness. And at the time of its release in cinemas The Squatter’s Daughter was itself ‘doubled’ in a simultaneously released novelisation written by Charles Melaun. Melaun’s treatment was described in advertisements in terms that emphasised the nation’s greatness and infantilised Joan’s achievements: A book that will make you proud to be an Australian. Full of the breath of our great outdoors, the greatest sheep stations on earth, and the dangers which beset a brave little girl. You
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will find within its covers, the real Australia, painted with the deft touch of an artist who loves the comedy, drama and pathos of our own great continent. A short review of the book placed it firmly in a textual lineage: ‘The play, “The Squatter’s Daughter,” by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan, has reversed the usual practice and found its way into the form of a novel by way of the screen film, which was adapted from the play … The author—or should he be called the translator?—has done his work well.’39 There had previously been other literary adaptations of The Squatter’s Daughter. The first fully-fledged novelisation was written by
Figure 83: The Squatter’s Daughter (Hilda Bridges, 1922), front cover LaTrobe Rare Books Collection, State Library of Victoria
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Hilda M. Bridges, a prolific pulp romance writer who was directly inspired by the stage-play and apparently committed it quite faithfully to the page. The cover of the original edition of the book features a woman sitting side-saddle on a horse, surrounded by malevolent bushrangers (see figure 83). As if to ‘clean up’ this image the back cover advertised a soap product with an image of Little Bo Peep, a vista of sheep and the caption ‘Lux won’t shrink wool’. Bridges’ novel opens (in accordance with the stage version) with the tribulations of the English governess, Miss Spriggins, who is almost drowned beneath an avalanche of sheep. Amid her calculated screams she is heard to mutter, ‘Is there no place in this dreadful country where I may walk without danger of meeting wild beasts?’40 Her charge, Jenny, is most amused: ‘… I couldn’t tell which was you and which was the sheep, Spriggy, dearest—And if I’d tried to pick you out, darling, you might have been yarded up and I’d have had a sheep for my governess …’41 Spriggy, it transpires, also suffers ‘hydrophobia’. In demonstrating her problem with sheep she admits her wider problem of fluidity, which is in turn a crisis over assimilation. It is no surprise that Spriggy later articulates incredulity over the story’s Aboriginal characters’ aspirations to partially participate in the predominantly white culture of the sheep stations. In a noteworthy departure from the play that points to one of Hall’s ‘innovations’, Bridges’ novelisation allows Dudley to evade the law when his erstwhile family give him money to escape. In this context, the 1933 film’s success is calculated in terms of its ability to overcome its theatrical and literary antecedents either by producing a heightened and novel form of verisimilitude or by so modifying the theatrical source as to render the relationship between the film and its antecedents unrecognisable. Occasionally, the skilled eye of the critic might determine latent atavistic leanings, particularly when critics view themselves as participants in a form of classical literary appreciation for which questions of ‘imitation’ were paramount. For these reviewers, the critical weight shifts from an assessment of the relationship to ‘nature’ (mimesis) towards the detection of the imitation of ‘ancients’ (authoritative precursor texts). But even given the latter, the question of the imitation of Hollywood is still not especially important to many of the film’s contemporary judges.
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A dream (of realism) From the lambing outback to the day when thirty wool ships race from here half round the world to be first home with the fleece. It’s our wool Derby. Any other nation would make an epic of it—but we are not yet awake. Barky, The Squatter’s Daughter (Charles Melaun, 1933)42
Hall speaks often about the arduous labour that accompanied the film’s genesis, claiming that it took at least six months to transform the stage-play into a screenplay: I tried E. V. Timms immediately. He was writing a lot of books about that period and he was a very popular author, but he was no good for films. I tried author after author and finally went back to Bob Dexter, who had been my chief in my Publicity days. He had been to America and had done a lot of writing over there. He wrote the final screen play after a lot of consultations and, between us, we got it off.43 Hall here is intent on inserting himself into a story of literary origins, undermining the authority of the writers, including Bob ‘Gayne’ Dexter, who, according to Hall, was simply a participant (a consultant) in the birthing process. For the most part, reviews of the period think of the ‘source’ of the film primarily in terms of its theatrical predecessors rather than its generic gestures to the American cinema. Hall, on the other hand, attempts to present his vision as arising without an evident textual source, claiming it instead as a vision of realism, a text that is revealed rather than (re)written. The very subtle irony here is that the film’s theatrical antecedents also gestured to verisimilitude as the basis of their vision and appeal. In this way the resources and content that Hall deploys in repressing his sources are in many ways a continuance of the theatrical history that is being repressed. Hall conceives of his remake as a radical modulation, emphasising its difference from its predecessors, although he does not entirely sever its relationship to them (most obviously he retains the play’s title when he might have changed it). In Hall’s mind it is the
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process of modulation that makes for individuation. Hall also guesses that ‘innovation’ seeks an immaculate origin, systematically masking antecedents with stories of autochthony. The modernist valuation of the state of being original entails the (active) repression of precursors. Hall goes to great lengths to repress his literary and theatrical sources. Critics writing in the 1960s and 1970s accused Hall of ‘failing’ adequately to overcome or repress his (cultural) originals, which they establish as a generalised notion of the American film industry. And Hall himself acknowledged a certain debt to the American model of film production (if not its content). There is an implicit association between a film’s preoccupation with origins and the debates over lineage and intertextuality that surround its reception. According to the film theorist Mikael Iampolski, ‘… the theme of mythic origins enters the text along with the process of intertextuality’.44 Furthermore, he argues that these textual considerations have broader implications for understanding the paradoxical relationship of texts to the culture from which they arise and in which they circulate. These considerations include the specific authorship of a film itself. ‘In systematically cultivating a myth of origins’, he says, ‘… a culture also raises the question of how anything begins, the point, more specifically, from which a text emerges. Yet this very hankering for origins ultimately reveals that texts finally lack a definitive source.’45 Hall’s stories about the relationship of The Squatter’s Daughter to its textual progenitors characterise his contribution to the cycle as one that interrupts a lineage or descent premised on parthenogenesis. Hall interrupts a form of intertextuality (in which each version of The Squatter’s Daughter begets the next) with intertextuality. In creating a set of alternative textual relationships (to American or British or Cinesound films, for instance) Hall (and his critics) allows for a process of intertextuality. This process of intertextuality extends itself most assertively to the text’s perceived relationship to ‘nature’ or the ‘real’ (as alternative and textual antecedents). Mikhail Iampolski believes that the task of a theory of intertextuality is to provide, through the act of reading, a ‘new insight into the functionings of a text, in those moments where mimesis, the desire for imitation or likeness, breaks down, giving way to semiosis’.46 The task of the critic is to identify ‘source concealment’, the hidden discourse of
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origins—to produce semiosis from apparent mimesis. For example, evident or obvious quotations obstruct mimesis and are consequently transformed in the process of semiosis. Some exceptional reviewers of the period of Hall’s filmmaking were torn between the critical detection of an adherence to verisimilitude and the detection of cultural quotation in the form of Americanisation: Australian audiences have already become familiar with the great expanses of Texas and of Arizona. Now they see the spreading plains of their own country depicted in the same brilliant manner … It would be unreasonable to expect perfection in the first serious film which the Cinesound Studio has put forth, in a community thousands of miles from the great centre of cinematographic production … One does not quarrel with the fact that the film is a melodrama. … What one does deplore is the poorness of the dialogue; and the uninspired way in which the incidents mingle conversational cattle-rustler doings in the American West with reminiscences of popular successes during the nineties.47 In this instance the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer identifies the film’s American inflection as both the source and the undoing of the film’s ‘naturalism’. The newspaper critic identifies a latent disposition to cattle that interrupts the film’s woolly aspirations. For this reviewer, The Squatter’s Daughter is anachronistic in its parentage: the dialogue script is the impoverished progeny of an unsuccessful coupling of the contemporary Hollywood western and nineteenth-century Australian stage-shows that serves to interrupt the film’s appeal to a form of cinematic realism. As Iampolski sees it, ‘source concealment’ becomes crucial to the very structure of cinematic language, especially in the case of films (like The Squatter’s Daughter) that make a claim for a type of realism: The desire for originality, for new readings, and the refusal of precursors and all authority figures universally go hand in hand with the discovery of origins, among which nature and reality figure predominantly. Realism, then, is readily
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framed by an ideology of novelty. From this flows the characteristic ambivalence attending every search for origins (this ambivalence is also evident in cinema—indeed, cinema may well be its fullest expression). On the one hand, this search pushes cinema into closer and closer contact with reality as the origin of everything, leading it to cultivate an ideology of realism. On the other hand, cinematic realism is constantly asserted on the basis of a myth, the myth of an absolute, the myth of origins. Cinematic realism is inseparable from cinematic mythology.48 Hall’s claims for a form of cinematic realism in The Squatter’s Daughter (as a transposition of the desire to find or know origins) are based on the repression of intermediate sources: the ‘intertext’, as it were. The paradox of this fixation is that at the same time as an author like Hall is affirming his desire to overcome the derivative nature of his text (i.e. to enter into an unmediated contact with ‘existence’), his march towards realism leans on an ever-widening path of quotation and intertextuality. For Iampolski, ‘Cinema seeks reality by increasing its textual links to culture.’49 In The Squatter’s Daughter, for instance, ‘nature’ is the result of both a literal (cinematic) and narrative ‘production’. Whereas realism claims a singular point of origin (the real), the truth is that the intertext—the precursor text—is never singular and never a moment of pure origin. There is no arbitrarily defined point of initiation or authorship. These paradoxes are most prescient in one particular scene in The Squatter’s Daughter in which Barky makes a passing reference to the station’s indigenous boundary-riders, who are revealed to us not as station hands but playing gumleaves for Barky’s party guests; a musical interlude, a moment of light relief preceding the high drama of the bushfire. This scene represents a significant departure from the preceding versions of The Squatter’s Daughter, which included considerable roles for Aboriginal characters. In striving to establish a type of cinematic realism and narration that distinguished his version of The Squatter’s Daughter from the verisimilitude of the play, Hall made a number of changes: altering character names, reducing plot events such as the rodeo scene, deleting the roles of the bushrangers. But the most significant ‘missing’ factor remains the almost complete absence
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of Aboriginal characters in his contribution to the cycle. In Hall’s Squatter’s Daughter, a (not altogether successful) repression of the theatrical source is accompanied by a repression of other understandings of originality that are present in the theatrical and literary versions of the narrative: the presence of Aboriginal characters.
Boundary-riders It is only an experiment in local colour. Ken G. Hall on a scene involving Aboriginal performers.50
In Bailey and Duggan’s stage version of The Squatter’s Daughter, the character of Nulla Nulla is particularly complex, at various times alternating between the comedic and dramatic. It is Nulla Nulla, for instance, who is able to restore Tom’s reputation when Dudley tries to frame him for colluding with the bushrangers. And it is Nulla Nulla who rides to the rescue when the new chum Archie is later kidnapped. It is Nulla Nulla who protects Tom’s virtue when Dudley imputes that he has left for a romantic ‘rendezvoux’ [sic] with Sarah at the Halfway House (when in fact he has set off to render assistance to the beleaguered Archie). And a little later it is Nulla Nulla again who ingeniously climbs through a fanlight and tackles Dudley after the latter imprisons Violet in order to prevent her rescuing Tom from the clutches of Ben Hall. Nulla Nulla’s fumbling imitations of Tom and Violet’s romance (a pastiche performed in ludicrous underwear) sit uneasily with his otherwise evident virtues as an action hero. In this particular scene, the play uses farce and the English stage convention of contrasting ‘upstairs and downstairs’ as a way of designating and evaluating a racial difference through a direct comparison of two romantic courtships—one white, the other black. But for the most part the play seems concerned to provide Nulla Nulla with an active plot position from which to intervene in the course of events. One of the various traces of this figure in later versions is the character known only in Hall’s film as Morgan. Charles Melaun opens his first chapter of the film’s novelisation by introducing us to Nulla Morgan—‘an evil-looking, broken-nosed tough’. In this single reference, Melaun must be seen as simultaneously revising and repressing the theatre’s brave, loyal and comic Aboriginal character Nulla Nulla.
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The placing of indigenous characters (played by white actors) on centre stage has implications for the way in which the stage-play of The Squatter’s Daughter apportions difference and similarity— displacing Aborigines from an oppositional or antithetical position (demarcating absolute difference) in relation to their white compatriots to something closer to a ‘between’ or liminal space; an uncanny space underlined only by the culturally cross-dressed white actors. In this way the theatrical version of The Squatter’s Daughter moves the liminal to its centre. In Dugan and Bailey’s version of The Squatter’s Daughter, the presence of an Aboriginal character is deployed to highlight the contrast between the rivals Tom and Dudley, for instance. Dudley, on discovering Nulla Nulla in the store (where he has been sent by Jenny), accuses the Aborigine of stealing and proceeds to whip him. Tom Bathurst intervenes: Tom: I shall always make it my business to lend a helping hand to the weak and defenseless. Dudley: You seem to take a pleasure in defending the black vermin. If I had my way I’d wipe them out of existence. Tom: And I shall always stick up for them. This country once belonged to them, and the least we can do is treat them with justice and humanity.51 Dudley’s father James Harrington intrudes on the argument and finds himself, as usual, in agreement with (his biological son) Tom. Harrington senior uses the opportunity to avail us of his paternal disappointment in his ‘known’ son Dudley, suggesting that it is not only their opinions but also their natures that differ. In proving themselves (condescendingly) tolerant of one measure of difference (racial), Harrington and Tom hint at an underlying likeness that cannot be explicitly articulated (familial). Despite her book’s overwhelming debt to the stage-play, Hilda Bridges initiates some significant shifts of emphasis in her retelling of this scene. For instance, the altercation between Tom and Dudley over the whipping of Nulla Nulla moves away from the play’s stress on a
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type of correlative equanimity between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people (‘… and the least we can do is treat them with justice and humanity’) to stressing a relationship premised on the common in the sense of an ordinary or everyday decency (rather than the more lofty pursuit of ‘justice’): ‘The vermin!’ blustered Harrington. ‘If I had my way, I’d wipe them all out of existence.’ ‘No doubt,’ said Bathurst. ‘But I think that considering that the country once belonged to them, the least we can do is treat them with common humanity.’52 Notwithstanding this evident valorisation of likeness, at other points the play still finds the mere suggestion of miscegenation humorous. Difference in parallel is fine, but in admixture is laughable; although, for the nervy Miss Spriggins, even parallel difference is threatening. She is, for example, scandalised by the thought of Nulla Nulla marrying Mulga (in her mind, the idea of Aborigines availing themselves of the institution of marriage by definition constitutes a parody of Western manners that undermines its authority). Again her neurosis owes as much to the transplantation of a widespread English stage convention highlighting class difference as it does to the observation of a racial difference. The lovelorn Archie is more understanding (recognising a similarity above and beyond racial difference): Archie: Ah we’ll [sic] boys will be boys whether they’re black or white. I envy him his good luck. Miss S.: Mr McPherson, I’m astonished at you. If I were a man I should consider it degrading to marry a horrible black creature like Mulga. Archie: You misunderstand me Miss Spriggins, I didna hae’ a thought of wedding Mulga. I only envy Nulla’s good luck in getting the girl he loves.53 Underscoring this interchange is the play’s running gag in which Miss Spriggins is taunted with the prospect of an unwitting clinch with
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Billy, Nulla Nulla’s father. Eventually it is Billy who demurs: ‘Me bin no get married her. Too much talk.’54 Billy’s objection to Miss Spriggins’ wordiness is a position the play reiterates at a number of levels and in a variety of contexts. At one point, for instance, Ben Hall tells Dudley to give Violet a ‘clip over the head and quieten her’, and it’s an instruction that the play itself is at pains to enact.55 Characters like Dudley seduce with actions and not words. The Squatter’s Daughter does its best to invest in a type of naturalism and foreshadows Hall’s self-declared emphasis on deeds rather than speeches. For the most part the play has hardly any monologues but, despite the play’s preference for action over speeches, Hall was terribly conscious of its delivery of national sentiment via dialogue, and he determined that his film (one of Australia’s first sound features) would reconcile his need to distinguish himself visually with his desire to capture the ‘novelty’ of sound. Hall approaches this problem from two vantages. On the one hand, he identifies sound and image as being of equal concern: ‘We were of course looking for sound just as carefully as we were looking for pictures, even more so, in fact. We were in a new dimension. Sound was the novelty. Through this film our people were going to hear their country as well as see it, something they had never done at the movies before.’56 On the other, Hall explains that he attempted to capture images that were also opportunities for ‘displaying’ sound: ‘I was photographing sound as much as I was photographing picture.’57 The most telling example of this strategy in The Squatter’s Daughter is the scene depicting the Aboriginal gumleaf band, a scene that is as dissonant formally as it is thematically. Despite the popularity of Aboriginal characters in the stage versions of The Squatter’s Daughter, Hall’s version very nearly dispenses with them. Nearly, but not quite. There are certainly no Nulla Nullas in Hall’s screenplay; nor does Hall choose to provide the standard plot explanation that attributes Wayne’s childhood survival to the Aborigines who found and raised his textual forebears, such as Tom Bathurst. Instead Hall’s one particularly painful reference to Aborigines occurs when Barky introduces his ‘Abo boundary-riders’ to the party of revellers. A set of sliding doors part to reveal a particularly disconsolate Aboriginal ‘gumleaf band’, warbling a tune by whistling through local flora. Hall
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must have been pleased with the shot, given his comments to the press at the time of shooting the scene, and which were duly reported: The sound of gum leaves being blown on in unison does not fall euphoniously on the ear. It remains to be seen how these sounds will emerge on the screen. As Mr Hall remarked yesterday, during a lull in the proceedings, they will at least be characteristic. ‘It is only an experiment in local colour,’ he said, ‘which we hope will appeal to people overseas. If it turns out badly, we need not use it in the completed film.’58 The draft version of the script includes an editing instruction: ‘Break dance up with C.U.’s of Abo. Band [sic] and two comedy shots of faces of individual players if any are worth shooting.’59 Apparently they were. Like the play, but with less explication, the ‘boundary-riding’ Aboriginal characters apportion difference for white characters. As Boundary-Riders, the Aboriginal performers provide a ‘source’ of definition for the lost, mistaken and confused whites. But, unlike the characterisation of Aboriginal protagonists in the play, Hall’s Aboriginal band is ‘disabled’. The players cannot move, especially when compared with the dancing white youths they perform for. Still, Hall does not represent them as (cultural) fragments either. This band plays as one; a mob. Hall’s Aborigines are otherwise whole—indeed it is part of the racial/national point of that sequence that Aboriginal people are whole or intact—but necessarily immobilised. Their supposed passivity anticipates later arguments that would have Aborigines understood as a passing race, submitting to an inevitable demise for which only their own submissiveness is to blame. The scene’s immobility raises questions of encryption. This is a viewing of Aboriginal culture that suggests the museum display. But the ‘problem’ presented by Hall’s depiction of Aborigines in The Squatter’s Daughter is also one of intertextuality. How are we to understand this spectacle in terms of a textual history and convention that stressed action and comedy for Aboriginal characters? It is significant that nobody is laughing in this scene and nobody is going anywhere. To an early twenty-first-century viewer, this is surely one of the film’s most difficult scenes. Hall palpably fails to employ indigenous
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people as anything more than sound and spectacle, as an index of a type of artful realism; ‘local colour’ indeed. Like its corralled sheep, the film’s Aborigines are ‘representative’—on a phenomenal as well as a metaphoric level. Hall’s Aboriginal musicians are required to ‘perform’, and they create a performance that proves to be indigestible, lodged as it is in the midst of a narrative about the sources and authenticity of identity. In this sense, and despite its distastefulness, this is a most important scene in which the film wrestles with indigeneity and originality or (ab)originality. The Squatter’s Daughter posits racial difference as a hyperbolic discourse—prone to exaggeration and selectivity—in order for the lesser difference to assume more importance than the greater similarities (or other differences). The existence of a racial minority antagonises the narrative object (homogeneity) by withholding its objective—productive sameness. This sequence doesn’t allow the film the implicit power to generalise, suggesting instead that representation might not always return as the same. However, by the time we get to Melaun’s novelisation of Hall’s film, Aboriginal characters are completely absent from the narrative. Melaun does not include the musical interlude at the party, and Jeff Rhodes (the novel’s Wayne Ridgeway) does not explicitly mention Aborigines in his version of the story so far … ‘You haven’t explained yourself. I know your name—nothing else:’ There was now appeal in her voice. ‘What are you? Who are you?’ ‘I don’t exactly know,’ he admitted. But stung by the girl’s disbelieving laugh he continued impatiently. ‘That’s a fact. I suppose I was born somewhere. You’ve got to have a father and mother for that to happen—I don’t know who mine were.’ A wan smile lit the man’s face and he continued softly: ‘The first thing I remember was riding with old Guiffan in North Queensland. Then he died. I was twelve then, just a lonely kid. Since, I’ve kind of made every new horizon my home.’60
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Hall’s version of The Squatter’s Daughter minimises the inclusion of Aboriginal characters, for the most part positing the ‘problem of origins’ in Australia in terms of other measures and tests of difference and sameness, through representations of the disabled, ethnicity, twins and so on. In purporting to think nothing of Aboriginality (‘it is only an experiment in local colour’) Hall aims to assert his own originality from his textual progenitors; by thinking nothing of Aboriginality (i.e. by not thinking much about it) we might think something of Hall’s originality. But in proposing a relationship whereby the measure of Hall’s originality rests on the concealment of his textual sources (which think something rather than nothing of their Aboriginal characters) he reveals first how crucial indigenous Australians are to a deep understanding of the ‘problem of origins’ for Australian national culture and, second, that, especially for Hall, Aboriginality was never incidental to The Squatter’s Daughter. Ironically in its one pithy gesture to indigenous Australians, The Squatter’s Daughter not only concedes its own textual origins, it also gestures towards larger problems of authorial and national/cultural originality. It is to these wider issues that another sheep film, Bitter Springs, turns its overt attention.
Notes 3 4 5
Hillel Schwarz, The Culture of the Copy, Zone Books, New York, 1996, p. 248. Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce. ‘Down Under’, Picturegoer, 18 August 1934, p. 25. ‘Rick’, ‘Squatter’s Daughter (Australian made)’, Variety, 31 October 1933, p. 17. The recent industry debate over the Fox Studios development in Sydney is a good case in point. See my discussion of this debate in ‘(pre) facing the nation’ in Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films, Deb Verhoeven (ed.), Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 1–13. 6 ‘ “Talkie” studio. The producer at work. Heat of the arc lights’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1933, n.p. 7 Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 56. 8 Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan, The Squatter’s Daughter: A Drama in Four Acts, n.d. manuscript held by National Library of Australia, I, ii, p. 16. This version of the script might be different from the one cited by Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929, which lists this quotation as p. 15 and uses the word ‘resources’ in place of ‘recourses’. Various broadsides for the play indicate that some adjustments were made over time. Most notably a broadside for the 1919 Princess Theatre presentation includes an additional scene in Act III at the Slip Rails in Waratah that is not listed in the c. 1915 advertising for a performance at the King’s Theatre. I can only assume, since the manuscript I have seen lists the play’s title as simply The 1 2
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10 11
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Squatter’s Daughter (i.e. without the qualifier ‘Or the Land of the Wattle’) and, since it includes the additional scene in Act III, that it is a later rather than an earlier version of the play. ibid., p. 18. ibid., IV, 2, pp. 69–70. Harold M. MacKenzie, The Squatter’s Daughter—An Australian Romance, Pater & Knoydon, Melbourne, 1890, p. 13. E. J. Maher, The Squatter’s Bairn, Rebman, London, 1910. And Edward Sylvester Sorenson, The Squatter’s Ward, Hurst & Blacket, London, 1908 (republished in Australia in 1919). Quoted in Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 220. Directed by William Anderson. Played at the Princess Theatre—week commencing Saturday, 1 November 1919. See Katherine Brisbane (ed.), Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991, p. 160. Argus, 29 October 1910, n.p. In yet another facet to The Squatter’s Daughter’s narrative preoccupation with ‘unknown origins’, the screen play is missing the first two pages, so a detailed cast list that might shed light on George Cross’s role in the film is not to be found here. Hall, cited in Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 81. ibid. Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 220. Much of the following account of The Squatter’s Daughter stage-play is based on Williams’ very full account. Argus, 3 May 1909. Cited in Williams, Australian Melodrama, p. 92. The extent of the play’s success was limited only by the restricted terms of lease on the two venues in which it played—a matter quickly rectified for subsequent presentations. Reported in Table Talk, 4 July 1907. Cited in Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 224. Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 297. In 1910 it was announced that in the period up to June 1909 the play had earned its two authors £2050 in royalties. Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 224. Table Talk, 27 Might 1909. Cited in Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 230. Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 223. ibid., p. 224. ibid., p. 223. Argus, 22 July 1929, n.p. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Harper Collins, London, 1996, p. 11. ‘ “The Squatter’s Daughter” at Sydney Civic’, Film Weekly, 5 October 1933, p. 22. Unsigned review, ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 6.
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Slessor, ‘Telling the truth about “Squatter’s Daughter”—When critics must be cruel to be kind’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 6. 34 ibid. 35 ‘Cinesound’s dramatic success’, Sun News-Pictorial, Monday, 23 October 1933, p. 10. 36 From ‘Miss Jocelyn Howarth’, Mercury, 20 October 1933, p. 10. 37 Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 60. 38 See Vivian Sobchack on the epic for a larger discussion of this use of excess, ‘ “Surge and splendor”: A phenomenology of the Hollywood historical epic’ in Film Genre Reader II, B. Grant (ed.), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995, pp. 280–307. 39 ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Queenslander, 5 October 1933, p. 44. 40 Bridges, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 21. 41 ibid. 42 Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 31. 43 Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 81. 44 Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, p. 245. 45 ibid. 46 ibid., p. 253. 47 ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 1933, p. 3. 48 Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, p. 81. 49 ibid., p. 82. 50 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1933, p. 9. 51 Bailey and Duggan, The Squatter’s Daughter: A Drama in Four Acts, I, i, p. 5. 52 Bridges, The Squatter’s Daughter, pp. 31–2 (my emphasis). 53 Bailey and Duggan, The Squatter’s Daughter: A Drama in Four Acts,, IV, ii, p. 66. 54 ibid. According to the theatre historian Margaret Williams, this is a common thread in plays from this period: ‘The new chum, however, is always shown as the inferior of the Aboriginal characters, in colonial experience at least: the endless scenes in which English swells or their strait-laced spinster equivalents are tricked into being kissed or tumbled off their chairs by the mischievous Nardoos and Mulgas place the new chum well and truly at the bottom of the melodrama’s social ladder.’ (Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 272.) The Squatter’s Daughter stage-play includes two new chums: Miss Spriggins, who is persistently shown to be less adept in Australia than the play’s Aboriginal characters; and Archie, who learns just enough to succeed in courting the young Australian character of Jenny, who (perhaps allegorically) promises to marry and financially support him. The film carries this attitude towards the British through the character of Scotty the shearer and a Baby Austin car (of which a good deal more humour is made in the screenplay when Mrs Ramsbottom is led to believe Scotty has a baby called Austin). 55 Bailey and Duggan, The Squatter’s Daughter: A Drama in Four Acts, III, iv, p. 55. 56 Hall, Australian Film: The Inside Story, p. 53. 33
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In Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce. 58 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1933, n.p. 59 The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, p. 63. 60 Melaun, The Squatter’s Daughter, p. 34. 57
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Part 3 One man’s meat: Bitter Springs, assimilation and sheep Sheep … These placid creatures, which used to require so little food, have now apparently developed a raging appetite, and turned into man-eaters. Fields, houses, towns, everything goes down their throats. Sir Thomas More, Utopia1
Abstract Like The Squatter’s Daughter, Ralph Smart’s film Bitter Springs demonstrates a preoccupation with the problem of origins common to the Australian sheep film. Bitter Springs signals its preoccupation with origins in two senses; first in terms of the problem of antecedence and ab-originality (who came/comes first, and whether being first entails certain rights or privileges). The second sense of Bitter Springs’ preoccupation with origins occurs at the level of the film’s rhetorical failure to represent a conclusive ‘ending’, which it argues is also a beginning. In light of its conclusions, the film suggests, retrospectively, that a culminating and convulsive moment of cultural collaboration might also be a moment of cultural reproduction. Part 3 provides a diverse array of documentation to reveal how Bitter Springs is implicated as a participant in—and as a commentator on—the unfolding of assimilation policy in Australia.
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Bitter Springs: the plot This 1950 Ealing Studios production shot around Quorn, South Australia, follows the misfortunes of the King family as they (and several hundred sheep) travel across Australia in search of land for their sons. The only daughter, Emma (Nonnie Piper), dresses like a boy (perhaps in hope of an acre or two). Wally (Chips Rafferty) is an unapologetic racist. The hired help is either British (Tommy Trinder and Gordon Jackson) or pan-Aboriginal (Henry Murdoch as ‘Blackjack’) and inclined to sympathising with the plight of the dispossessed local inhabitants, a fictional indigenous community called the Karagarni. The Karagarni don’t give up their land easily, and they employ their ingenious ability to disappear into the foliage as a subversive strategy against the Kingly incursions. The battle reaches its apotheosis when John King kills one of the Karagarni during an altercation that results after the latter resort to stealing sheep for food (their supply of kangaroo having been exhausted by the gun-wielding Kings). The Karagarni retaliate by preventing the Kings from drawing water at the bitter springs. But after effectively fighting the Kings for most of the film, the Karagarni are finally driven away by the reluctant local police. Impatient with the Kings’ lack of concern for the Karagarni’s welfare, Trooper Ransome (a marvellously bilingual Michael Pate) tries one more time to persuade Wally to incorporate the Karagarni into his visions for the land: Wally: If only they’d help me grow wool. Get new water dug. Could I ever make them understand? Ransome: Maybe the point is—you understand. That’s the big thing—it’s a start. Bitter Springs then concludes abruptly, with a fleeting image of a Karagarni elder in labourer’s clothes helping Wally shear a sheep in wishful image of bucolic idyll. This cursory ending constitutes the stiffest and most embarrassed of nods to the contemporary social policy of ‘assimilation’; an ending that signals a certain discomfort, if not with assimilation, then with the scene’s status as an ‘ending’, which the film strongly suggests should be also regarded as a beginning of sorts—‘a start’.
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Chapter 5
Tea and sympathy and a thirst for sheep
There is no uncertainty about who will swallow whom. Paul Hasluck, Minister for Territories (1952)2
Cultural conception(s) 2 A policy can come to a dead end but social change has no terminus. Paul Hasluck (1952)3
Bitter Springs was intended by its director, Ralph Smart, to be a controversial account of the treatment of indigenous people during the period of Australian colonial expansion; specifically, on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the remote northern regions of the state of South Australia. What Smart did not intend were the scandals that erupted before a single camera had even been loaded and which ensued for many months after the film crew had left South Australia; scandals that centred precisely on the treatment of indigenous people employed to appear in the film. Smart later described Bitter Springs in plainly pained terms: ‘I’ve never been more unhappy. It’s the worst time I ever had in my life.’4 Smart was not the only person feeling sorry for himself—other crew members shared his unhappiness. Ealing’s general manager in
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Australia, Eric ‘Bungy’ Williams, made the cast and crew’s collective complaints known in an explanatory letter to the Publicity and Tourist Bureau of South Australia: ‘… in review we have met difficulties in inadequate accommodation, transport, weather and the high cost of communication and travel to and from our base here in Sydney.’5 The crew’s dis-sentiments were more publicly reported in the press just before the film’s release in an article titled ‘Friends were tried’ in the Adelaide Advertiser: … Ealing Studios publicists admit … [by] this time the unit was getting homesick and Quorn is really not a good place for strangers to be in too long. The weather hold up had spread the location time well beyond the schedule and some friction developed in the unit by people getting touchy over trifles. The limitations of country life were beginning to tell and a few careless words easily caused a scene.6 But the discontent that plagued the production was not limited to Ealing personnel alone. The next chapters will sketch a history of the unhappiness and controversy surrounding Bitter Springs, controversies that were something more than mere ‘trifles’—controversies that arose for reasons more profound than poor weather, long delays or personal conflicts on the set. In doing so they will contextualise many of the contemporary arguments about Bitter Springs in relation to the question of origins and agency, of (agri)cultural production and consumption in the Australian sheep film and especially in terms of broader debates over the emerging policies and practices of assimilation. In one of the few essays to address the cinematic representation of assimilation in Australia, Meaghan Morris makes a curious distinction between ‘the past few years of remembering’ that preceded the election of Prime Minister Howard and the period of forgetting that has been the Howard Government’s hallmark, with its disinclination for Aboriginal narratives in Australian history and policy formation. In her call to the idea of remembering differently but without novelty (i.e. without resorting to originary thinking), Morris says:
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We are being asked to forget about the past years of remembering. Personally, I have no intention of doing this. It has been far too interesting, too involving; Moffatt’s films, Langton’s essay, books like The Heritage of Namatjira have engaged me in my own history to a degree that I never thought possible (brought up as I was on sheep, damned sheep and explorers).7 It’s worth noting that Morris describes the figure of sheep within the terms of the unthinking and ultimately insignificant: sheep are for forgetting, not remembering. But Morris’s observation of these implied originary images or tropes suggest contrary and contingent representative movements. On the one hand, she proposes that, in her experience, the repetitive image of sheep is replaced by (the more interesting) one of Aboriginal people but, on the other hand, she is saying that the movement of history is in fact working the other way, such that sheep imagery replaces Aboriginal imagery (a movement we have already noted in the history of The Squatter’s Daughter cycle). The figure of sheep replaces and is replaced by images of Aboriginal people (which are replaced by sheep and so on). Bitter Springs is especially interesting in that it also offers contingent images of Aboriginal people and sheep in its drama of assimilation. Understood as originary tropes, the images of both sheep and Aboriginal people are depicted in such a way as to resist interpretation (such as when they are presented as a ‘natural feature of landscape’, for example) at the same time as drawing attention to their representative ‘placement’ in the scene (rather than the landscape per se). In Bitter Springs, the images of sheep and Aboriginal people are not sequentially separated (by time or memory) but are mutually implicated in a contradiction of another order. Bitter Springs draws on the conflicting and conditional movements described by Morris, rendering the originary insignificant (unmeaning) at the same time as drawing attention to the ‘meaningfulness’ of its images. Laleen Jayammane has noted the way in which the aesthetics of assimilation itself ‘acknowledges the modern and tries with a sort of cunning to continually redefine its terms so as to prevent the erasure of memory and of our capacity to remember’.8 This observation is especially apparent in the way Bitter Springs attempts to reconcile its dramatic momentum in a
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final image of assimilation that includes Aboriginal people, nonAboriginal people and sheep.
Empty stomachs and ambivalent spaces Now I’ve gone a bit blank, as I do so often. Ralph Smart9
From the moment contact is made with white men, two things begin to happen: the aboriginal tends to become detribalized, and he becomes acquainted with new foods and develops new desires. In order to satisfy those desires he abandons his own territory … Eventually the white community surrounds him and almost engulfs him. Paul Hasluck10
For much of Bitter Springs, narrative momentum is driven by Wally King’s desire to acquire land, which, as the film explains, is ultimately intended to benefit his ‘sons’. The novelisation describes in intimate detail how the need for space also reflected a larger desire to colonise ‘nothing’ as a sort of deliberate attempt at exogamy: Few people lived on the station who were not involved with sheep in some way or other. It was a compact little community where everybody knew everybody else and where most people seemed to be related to one another—and a lonely place, too. It was rather on the edge of things—if that were not an exaggeration. Travelling on horseback in one direction, towards the south-east, a man would eventually reach the town. It would be Adelaide. Going the other way, in any direction north, in a manner of speaking, there was nothing. In Australia, at the turn of the century, there was a country—a continent to be opened up.11 For the novelisation, the point of the Kings’ journey is to turn from what is known (‘everybody knew everybody else’, and apparently everybody also knew sheep) to what is not known: ‘nothing’ (which, interestingly enough, is characterised as the topographical and conceptual equivalent to Adelaide).
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Of course, when the Kings arrive at the Bitter Springs they don’t find their shangri-la of nothingness. The Kings find something that they unsuccessfully attempt to dismiss as Nothing. They are confronted by the very present ‘Karagarni people’. The labour of Bitter Springs is to transform this Nothing (which turns out to be a something) into a Nowhere (which similarly turns out to be somewhere). And so, although the film is not interested in thinking about the landscape in relation to indigenous ‘rights’, Bitter Springs is very interested in realising a ‘space’ for indigenous people. Bitter Springs sets out a ‘problem’—to provide a ‘space’ for Aborigines in a white Australia—which it expects to solve in a brief final image of cooperative labour between King and Karagarni. This emphasis on ‘space’ is alluded to in Trooper Ransome’s speech just before the film’s end, which is delivered in part against a backdrop of chained Karagarni (who are further confined by a window frame through which the Trooper watches them): ‘Well, you’ve got everything your own way, Mr King. You wanted the blacks off your land and you’ve forced the government to do the job for you. Well, that’s my orders.
Figure 84: Bitter Springs—‘Out they go—the whole lot of ’em’ (frame capture)
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Figure 85: Bitter Springs—And all they see is sheep (frame capture)
Out they go—the whole lot of ’em. Where they go I don’t know. I guess nobody cares … Well, Mr King?’ As if to underscore the trope of Aboriginal banishment the camera steps back from the window as Trooper Ransome verbally expels the Karagarni (‘Out they go— the whole lot of ’em’). Ransome then exhorts Wally to ‘care’ about the destination of the Karagarni. But Wally King quietly remonstrates with a curious double negative: ‘Fighting don’t get you nowhere, Mr Ransome.’ In order to achieve ‘nowhere’ (by which he means ‘somewhere’ or perhaps even ‘anywhere’) King must abandon his alternative attempts to ‘shove ’em off’ or ‘ease ’em off’ and opt instead for the trooper’s preferred strategy, to ‘take ’em in with you’. Here Bitter Springs links assimilation to a topographical ambition: the pursuit of ‘nowhere’. And it is to this image of an apparent ‘nowhere’ that the camera briefly turns. As it does, Trooper Ransome reminds us that this ending is also ‘a big thing. It’s a start.’ In the breathless blink of Wally’s newfound regret we are treated to what might be a fantasy or vision of the future: a vision shared by
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Wally and Ransome (and, we are expected to believe, also shared by the Karagarni). At the end of the film we are faced with the laboured elaboration of a shared vision as well as a vision of shared labour. It is not clear, however, that the benefits of this labour are also shared. What we see is an image of an Aboriginal elder shearing sheep alongside Chips Rafferty and surrounded by other Aboriginal labourers busy with the various tasks of wool-growing. Aborigines and nonAborigines move rhythmically, as if in apparent harmony. The frame itself seems to be divided into three ways of reading the scene’s ‘spaces’: horizontal, vertical and ‘perspectival’ (through depth). Each economically encapsulates a ‘history’ of wool production; in fact, the shot overall presents an entire ‘economy’ of primary production as if it tells the whole story from beginning to end. Which is of course what it claims to be—both a beginning (‘a start’) and an ending and an exhortation to move to the ‘middle’. Reading the image from left to right, the labour of shearing leads directly to a stack of stuffed wool bales on the edge of the frame but within Wally’s reach. Vertically, from bottom to top, swirling sheep appear to occupy the shared dream space above the heads of both Wally and the Aboriginal shearer. From background to foreground, stuffed, swirling paddocks yield to the rhythm of the shearers via the mediating space of an enclosed yard crammed close with milling sheep. Wally and an unnamed Karagarni ‘collaborator’ occupy the centre or middle of the frame but, interestingly, not the middle ground. This space of mediation is reserved for the sheep. So, situated between the past and present, the background and foreground, is an indistinct gathering of sheep. As an exemplary moment of originary thinking, the final scene occupies an ‘impossible’ vantage: the gaze upon a cultural conception, an impossible moment of reproduction and ‘knowledge’. In its rush to depict a representative physical labour, Bitter Springs ‘forgets’ about the labour of parthenogenesis. It chooses a curiously static image for its narrative conclusion of cultural dynamism—of cultural origins as an instant of dramatic change. In contradiction to the film’s previous graphic momentum, we are treated to something more closely resembling a frieze of shearers posed in unison; an image to be read like a medieval fresco—in which any ‘dynamism’ in the image lies in the formal positioning of elements rather than the depiction of
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momentum per se. This is an image in which cultural movement is domesticated, in which a capacity for fluidity is harnessed to a ‘productive’ purpose. The final scene is like an emphatic stop to a story of sweeping physical movement, yet it stakes its claim to being something else altogether.
Critical distances Does he herd sheep? You can’t say does he heard sheep. You can say: Does he hear sheep, or: Has he heard sheep. A Damsel in Distress (George Stevens, 1937)
Bitter Springs was subject to a volatile critical reception at the time of its release. Much of the critical discussion about the film was centred on the film’s final scene. Dr Charles Duguid, chairman of the Aboriginal Advancement League (and described in the press as a ‘champion of aborigines rights’) thought the sudden reconciliation between colonising sheep-grower and overnight shearer thoroughly ludicrous: ‘The attitude of Wally King (Chips Rafferty) and his son to the natives is not an exaggeration, but the sudden change in this film from fierce bitterness to full co-operation is absurd. It never happens that way.’12 For Duguid, an early advocate of certain aspects of assimilation policy, the reasons for the Karagarni’s sudden embrace of pastoral cooperation (rather than the Kings’) must have been more self-evident since he doesn’t balk at the Karagarni’s inexplicable transition into farmhands. Not so another reviewer, who echoes Duguid’s mock surprise in ‘explaining’ the film’s ingenuous ending but understands what Aboriginal people might be getting in return: ‘In an astonishingly naïve end sequence—just a few words and a couple of shots—we’re told the blacks cooperate with the whites in the end, do the shearing, share the advantages of civilisation.’13 In contrast, another (proto-deconstructionist) reviewer attributes the final scene’s ‘compromise’ to a matter of mutual deception rather than a lack of sophistication on the part of the filmmakers: ‘The film[,] which is beautifully photographed, ends with a truce between white and black with the aborigines helping with the sheep shearing—and each side diligently pulling the wool over each other’s eyes.’14 Other contemporary viewers expressed disappointment with the film’s ending, although for different reasons. At the
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most local level, a reviewer in the Quorn Mercury found cause for complaint at all levels—from the ‘bitter springs’ in the seats of the Quorn Town Hall to the standard of the local sheep flock: The photography of our scenery was grand and some residents would like to see the picture again to study more fully spots of interest. It was an indication of the seasonal conditions last year to see the quality of the sheep used. The use of more sheep dogs and less of the stockwhip when driving sheep would have been more true to life … The end was rather disappointing. Picture lovers would have liked a love scene, a fitting end to the story.15 Another local, ‘Skinny Newland’, a Quorn resident for forty-five years who had a part in the film and was known by the principal cast as ‘the star of the Stockmen’s Rest’, also disliked the ending. He was reported as suggesting that the film would have been better with two improvements: ‘It was excellent but would have been far better in Technicolor,’ he said. ‘Also, the ending was tame. A rollicking old fashioned accordion dance in a woolshed would have been just right.’16 A love scene, an accordion dance in a woolshed; it seems everybody wanted a different ending—including the director. Ralph Smart is purported to have initially considered a most unorthodox ending in which Wally King’s intransigence results in a terrible scene of slaughter—the bleakest of endings intended to reflect the bleakest of circumstances for the displaced Karagarni.17 The novelisation of the film avoids these endings altogether, choosing to conclude with Ransome’s final words to Wally, ‘The point is, as I see it, you understand. And that’s a hell of a thing—whatever you start.’18 There is, however, a reference to the final assimilationist scene in the book’s illustrations. A still image of the shearers with Wally King facing his Karagarni employee is included with the caption: ‘A year later with the Abos [sic] co-operating.’19 The overriding sense of dissatisfaction with the film’s conclusion is not limited to contemporary critics of the film. Some years later the ending could still raise hackles. Writing in the late 1970s, film historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper note that despite ‘the film’s overall sympathy for the plight of the dispossessed Aborigines [which] was
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characteristic of Ealing liberalism in the 1940s, and was more honest than most Australian film-makers ventured to be at that time’, the ending acted as an ‘unconvincing compromise’.20 Philip Kemp reverses Pike and Cooper’s location of a ‘house style’, finding that ‘Ealing feeling’ at the film’s end rather than throughout the more successful preceding scenes. Kemp describes Bitter Springs as taking up a promising subject, which is then ruined by a combination of factors including ‘the fatal Ealing weakness for resolving all conflicts with a fudged, compromise ending’.21 No matter what their overriding opinion of the film, all are in agreement that the ending is no triumph. In his history of Ealing Studios, George Perry describes the final scene as a ‘somewhat crude and desperate piece of plot construction.’22 Another (unnamed) commentator, writing in the mid-1990s for a catalogue of Australian indigenous films, characterises the scene as being ‘tainted with deceit’ for revealing, as if despite itself, ‘just who is the profiteering boss and who is the ill-fated subordinate’.23 For film theorist Bruce Molloy, writing at the height of Aboriginal activism against the ‘bicentenary’ celebrations in the late 1980s, the conclusion of Bitter Springs is also ‘obviously contrived’ and ‘artificial’, a disappointing antidote to an otherwise ‘effective’ dramatisation of a conflict over Aboriginal land rights.24 He reads the ending as a legitimation of anti-Aboriginal policies and activities: ‘The ending of Bitter Springs showing amicable black–white relations in productive cooperation both idealises the process whereby Aboriginal land has been “civilised” and legitimises the dominant position of whites and their appropriation of Aboriginal lands.’25 Later, Molloy allows the filmmakers the possibility of subversive intent, but only in the final analysis: ‘The concluding sequence is not convincing, since it runs counter to the tensions so effectively evoked over the last half of the film, though it is possibly ironically subversive: not just the sheep are being “fleeced”.’26 It seems that, in the end, Molloy admits the possibility that perhaps it is not just the sheep, nor even just the Aboriginal people, but the viewers too who are deceived. Anne Hickling-Hudson is far less generous than Molloy, sarcastically describing the ending as a ‘fitting assimilationist finale’, with its ‘vision of the Aborigines working happily on the farm as sheep shearers, neatly dressed and with smiling, willing faces’. Instead, what this image suggests, but which, according to Hickling-Hudson, it ultimately masks
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or shies from, is ‘the archetypal distortion of the historic tragedy and brutality of the white invasion and the heroism of black resistance’.27 For those writing since the 1970s, the palpable sense of failure on the part of Bitter Springs’ concluding scene rests on a particular reading of the film’s approach to Aboriginal rights (and social policy). Molloy’s disappointment at the film’s ending, for instance, leans on his reading of the preceding narrative as ‘one of the most effective statements about indigenous land rights in Australian feature films to the present time’.28 On this basis, Molloy struggles to make the best of an ending that eludes his own understanding of ‘rights’ developed in an era of political self-determination for Aboriginal people (as distinct from how indigenous ‘rights’ might be understood in a period that favours ‘assimilation’ or even ‘protection’, for instance). Assessments like those of Hickling-Hudson, Molloy and Kemp reveal the ways in which their perception of a binary and apparently inviolable conflict between the Kings and the Karagarni appears to remain unresolved by the conciliatory terms of the conclusion. Viewers of Bitter Springs, both recent and contemporary, struggle with an ending that advocates a socio-narrative resolution based on a utopian vision of ‘assimilation’ rather than one more closely aligned with the policies of ‘protection’ (which preceded it) and ‘self-determination’ (which followed it) respectively. These assessments do agree, however, that the film is centrally concerned with the rights of indigenous people and that the film’s conclusion, an image of cultural beginnings, does not, in the end, do enough to acknowledge the antecedence of the Karagarni in its final woolly image of national origins. It is this struggle over interpretation that dominates discussion of the film even among those who participated in conceiving it.
The fastest way to a heart … There is a very strong tendency by some of those who deeply sympathise with them to treat the aborigines as though they were pets … These people are not pets. They are human beings, men and women, and nothing should ever be done to impair their dignity or selfrespect as human beings. Paul Hasluck.29
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In an interview with Ralph Smart recorded for the National Film and Sound Archive in 1997, the actor Michael Pate (who plays the sympathetic Trooper Ransome) declared that Bitter Springs was ‘48 years ahead of its time’, although the film is clearly not self-determinist in sentiment or rhetoric. He explains a little later in the interview, modifying the length of the anachronism slightly: Michael Pate: I think you wrote a script 40 odd years in front of its time which dealt with a kind of Mabo or Wik situation … Your whole idea was who has the right to the land and if there’s a contention about it well then you’ve got to learn to live together and share things. Ralph Smart: Yes, that’s right. 30 It’s not clear how Pate draws the conclusion that the High Court’s Mabo and Wik decisions (to recognise the continuous land ownership of traditional communities) were an exhortation to ‘learn to live together and share things’, nor how he attributes these sentiments to Bitter Springs. Like Pate, Pike and Cooper also claim that Bitter Springs ‘was constructed specifically to explore the problem of Aboriginal land rights and the dispossession of Aboriginals [sic] by white settlers’.31 Certainly the film elaborates and adopts a critical stance over Aboriginal dispossession, but Bitter Springs is by no means clear in its position on land rights for indigenous communities. Instead, Bitter Springs takes great care to position the idea of ‘land rights’ earned through legally conferred ownership (as per the Kings) against other more pressing rights, such as ‘rights of use’ and ‘rights of access’, framed within the overarching dramatic organisation of (primary) production and consumption. This is especially suggested by a scene in the film where (the protectionist figure) Trooper Ransome ‘explains’ the Karagarni’s relationship to the land: ‘There’s a tribe on every waterhole—and two tribes can’t survive on one waterhole—wouldn’t be enough food to go round. Besides (pause) the land’s sort of sacred to them. They don’t budge easy …’
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Bitter Springs proposes assimilation as an answer for two interrelated problems neither of which are explicitly concerned with land rights. First, the inadequacy of the contested land to provide for the consumption needs of two or more communities. There is in some ways an elegant irony in the film’s appeal to the digestive powers of assimilation to solve a conflict over food and water (which is ‘resolved’ numerically by simply making them one ‘assimilated’ community). Second, there is the question of what ‘likenesses’ might be found between the two rival groups on which to forge such a community— likenesses that the film recovers in a sweaty image of labour (but this evident interest in ‘likeness’ is coyly suggested throughout the film in its repeated return to images of indistinguishable sheep). If ‘rights’ are imagined by the film’s concluding image, it is that the ‘right’ to citizenship (community membership) and the ‘right’ to work are contingent (and equally so for British immigrants and Aborigines). And so, although Wally King is given legal ‘right’ to the land by the colonial government without consideration for the indigenous community that might already occupy it, the film doesn’t really consider in any depth that the Karagarni have similar ‘rights’ to land ownership or even occupation. Rather it appears more concerned to point out that the Karagarni demonstrate ‘understandable’ reactions to their sudden change of (principally culinary) circumstance: no more kangaroos. In its final analysis, Bitter Springs would seem to conclude, in the grand tradition of the squattocracy, that land ownership should be premised on a demonstrable facility for labouring it, in order to best maximise its productivity (rather than on the basis of some notion of pre-given or government granted ‘rights’); sheep for kangaroos: Wally King: Just because a few blacks have been scratching around here for a thousand years doesn’t mean they can keep it! Face it Mac, the white man’s on the way in, and no preaching Scot is going to stop it. In drawing on the conventional ‘wisdom’ that Aboriginal people traditionally underutilised the land, Bitter Springs is able to sidle away from any problems suggested by the Aboriginal community’s prior (original) presence, a previous occupation of the land that was officially
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denied by the terms of terra nullius. This deft sidestep is underscored by the film’s stated intention for the end to act as a beginning: that, in ‘starting again’ at its end, the film might wipe clean the slate on matters of prior presence and claim; to once and for all allay the familiar problem of origins at the heart of the national project. Like The Squatter’s Daughter, Bitter Springs directly addresses the question of national reproducability with a concluding emphasis on the rewards of able-ness and primary productivity as somehow absolving the theoretical and cultural challenges of self-consumption in the origin. A series of press reviews demonstrates how the notion of indigenous ‘rights’ was perceived in uncertain terms at the time of the film’s release. In the Daily Telegraph, the reviewer derives assurance by distinguishing between the bitterness of a pre-‘rights’ struggle for survival and the supposedly ‘protective’ policies of the reviewer’s present: Nowadays the rights of aborigines are pretty well protected. Fifty years ago it was often a bitter struggle for survival. The film presents the [fight?] fairly and the shots of Stone Age hunters stalking a kangaroo, slinging boomerangs and spears, and going through ritual tribal dances, are authentic and fascinating. We could have done with more of these formidable figures and a little less of the whites …32 In contradiction to this particular reviewer’s conviction that Aborigines enjoy ‘protected’ rights is a review published in the Daily Worker, which directly contrasts (and thus axiologically links) the film’s ‘sympathy’ to social policy: ‘The outdoor scenes are beautifully photographed and the Aborigine situation [sic] is treated with sympathy and discretion. Unfortunately, in reality, the Aborigines have never had such good treatment.’33 For many reviewers the film’s apparent ‘sympathy’ for the Karagarni raises questions about their own reactions and sentiments (although it is probable that the Daily Worker’s reference to ‘discretion’ simply refers to the movie’s coy inclusion of strange grass skirts, which the Karagarni wear throughout the film to avoid offending viewers with nakedness). The Sunday Herald review blames the narrative’s lack of success on an operative indecision where the film’s sympathy is concerned: ‘A
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chance for dramatic tautness seems to have been lost, too, by the script’s indecision as to whether to enlist sympathy for the blacks or the whites. Its indecision might reflect a healthy willingness to be fair to both sides; but it doesn’t help drama much.’34 The reviewer then hesitates himself, proposing that ‘most people, perhaps, will be sympathetic for the blacks’ since Wally King, as played by Chips Rafferty, is ‘a bit of a bully and a bit bull-headed’. Yet another reviewer cites the film’s ‘uncertainty of purpose’ and divided sympathies as the reasons for its failure: ‘… as a whole Bitter Springs suffers from a disconcerting uncertainty of purpose; it is fundamentally a serious study of the relations of white settlers and aborigines, but the film’s sympathies are divided so evenly between the inexperienced and intolerant whites and the natives that the conflict loses force, while the final compromise is crudely suggested.’35 The Film Weekly reviewer concurs with the idea that the film needs to clarify its narrative point of view. In this case the reviewer believes the film’s clear heroes are the Kings (an argument articulated in the name of Chips Rafferty, the actor who played Wally King) but that the figures of sympathy for the audience are the Karagarni: But where the show falls down most heavily is in the basic idea of the story and the point of view from which it is told. Heroes of the film are the Raffertys. They are on the screen most of the time, and the thing is told from where they stand. You see their hopes and desires, their privations. But your sympathies are with the blacks, and you feel they have been treated shamefully not only by the Raffertys but by the director. At any time in the story they could have killed off the Raffertys, and they meant to do it. But because of false plot development they aren’t allowed to. They’re made to look pathetically ineffectual— simply for the sake of letting everything end happily for the Raffertys—these characters who haven’t got our sympathy anyway.36 Another—unnamed—reviewer confuses an appeal to his own ‘ringside’ sympathies with what he perceives to be the fundamentally pitiable and powerless state of the underdog. This reviewer claims that
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the film ‘belongs’ to the indigenous actors, yet he deploys all manner of racist stereotypes to ensure that this ‘ownership’ remains hollow. For me, however, the picture belongs to the aborigines. Most of them look like Marx Brothers in burnt cork makeup—wildly chattering little men whose fierceness had a pathetic quality that reminded one of naughty children. Always in a Western film I have wanted to be on the side of the Indians. Sometimes I nearly succeeded, losing only when the film pointed out to me that the Indians had better rifles, greater numbers, greater fighting skill and white women were at stake. Now I have won my sentimental battle. The Indians here are Australian aborigines and they are so pathetically amazed, frightened and befuddled by the on-march of the white settlers penetrating their hunting grounds that their final assault of burning and slaughter has no element of savagery in it at all, only desperation. … I could not be frightened of them, nor could I hate the ruthlessness of the settlers, for they were just nice, friendly people too and wanting to survive too. And since their names are Chips Rafferty, Tommy Trinder, Jean Blue, Gordon Jackson, Nonnie Piper, Nicky Yardley and others who have previously appeared in the Ealing films made in Australia by Sir Michael Balcon, I wished them all the luck the backblock settlers deserve.37 For this reviewer, Bitter Springs outlines not so much a battle for land nor a battle for survival but a battle for the audience’s sympathies. For a more outspoken reviewer, however, this same representation and appeal to sympathies produces only a threatening confusion. In an even more offensive and hyperbolic review of Bitter Springs, Paul Dehn indulges in a series of racist fantasies that torment him with their moral incoherence and which can only be ‘rationalised’ away as a cinematic absurdity. It might seem unnecessary to cite this review in full, particularly in light of its unnerving (if not self-conscious) racism, but I do so in order to emphasise the absurdity of Dehn’s own binary alternatives (however ironically he might present them):
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Aha! Aboriginals. Tensely one awaits the clash between a white civilization’s ambassadors and the black barbarous, hairy guardians of the Central Australian Bush. The air will be thick with boomerangs; the undergrowth susurrous with blow-pipe dart and primitive spear. Well black, barbarous and hairy the guardians may be, but they are also the sweetest little men I have ever seen— chirping and chattering in a gay, falsetto language like gibbons recorded at twice their proper speed, and moving with the jerky but enthusiastic agitation of a Silent Film tragedian registering Sudden Love. Of course the tension vanishes and the clash, when it comes is part physical, part ideological—is almost meaningless. They may be naughty little men but Mr Rafferty and his pioneers have no call to shoot them down like dirty Pawnees. If aboriginals really are villainous, they have not been made to appear so in the picture; and if they are not villainous, then the picture’s heroes are. Which is cinematically absurd.38 Dehn’s review does capture something of the film’s arbitrary approach to difference and cultural authenticity, which he links to his own need for clearer lines of sympathy and which also characterises many reviews of the film. These reviewers of Bitter Springs demonstrate the kinds of ‘liberal’ sentiments of pity and sympathy that are usually associated with the paternalism of a ‘protectionist’ or welfare model of Aboriginal governance. Their reviews express the ways in which feelings of ‘sympathy’ produce for some viewers clear expectations over the film’s political (and narrative) resolve. Bitter Springs is seen by them to share, for the most part, their ‘sympathies’ for the Karagarni, and its ending is therefore measured against whatever particular social policy and narrative outcome they perceive to be the most ‘sympathetic’. It is in relation to sympathy that ‘assimilation’ is found wanting by many of Bitter Springs’ critics.39 In these terms the final scene might be seen to fail for its inconsistent presentation of sentiment in that it follows no emotional ‘logic’ for reviewers who would rather distribute their pity as an act of charity accorded to the clearly deserving. And if charity should be its own reward, then there is no need for the film to resort to a conclusion
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based on an image of apparent economic profit for the ‘benefactors’. Wally King, unlike the film’s reviewers, confers his tolerance as an exchange based on the expectation of returns gained rather than as an act of unrequited charity. For many reviewers, the bestowal of charity affords the donor the right to define indigenous agency as passive and ineffectual (the Aboriginal gumleaf band in The Squatter’s Daughter is a potent image of this passivity, for instance). This question of the attribution of Aboriginal agency and its relationship to assimilation and payment or compensation is taken up further in chapter 6, in which the film’s production history is discussed in detail. The other sense in which some critics find the film’s attribution of sympathy to be disconcerting lies in the film’s unsettling of simple binaries, outwardly complicating the convention of the good guys versus bad guys. This narrative complication in itself might be viewed as a product of the film’s subject matter: a story of contingent possession and dispossession. As Gelder and Jacobs point out, Australian narratives of land acquisition and relinquishment are invariably revealed to be uncanny or ‘unsettling’ ones: In an uncanny Australia one’s place is always already another’s place and the issue of possession is never complete, never entirely settled. The conventional colonial distinctions between self and other, here and there, mine and yours, are by no means totally determinable; a certain unboundedness occurs whereby the one inhabits the other at one point, disentangles itself at another, inhabits it again and so on … So one can never be completely in possession of place: one is always (dis)possessed, in the sense that neither possession nor dispossession is a fully realisable category.40 But even those critics who describe the way in which Bitter Springs proposes an unsettling array of identification points still find the film’s ending to be a shocking compromise. Rather than reading the film as leading progressively to the idea of a certain unboundedness, they read the film’s finale as if unrelated to the preceding progression of the narrative. Perhaps a possible explanation for this lies in the way in which the film is consistently and exclusively read as a western rather
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than in terms of the genre more typically associated with multiple identification: the (family) melodrama. Writing on the relationship of the 1930s woman’s film to contemporary political debates about women’s welfare in the USA, Anna Siomopoulos argues that the melodramatic strategy of multiple identification (in the form of equally sympathic points of view) is a facile solution to social or political inequities. For Siomopoulos: ‘The logic of distributive justice behind women’s welfare measures and the melodramatic rhetoric of multiple identification represents a consumer ethic that works to ration out limited resources of empathy among the “deserving” instead of questioning the very need for empathy to justify one’s entitlement to basic goods and social relationships.’41 Siomopoulos argues that the distribution of sympathy (and rations) and the entitlement to civil rights are mutually exclusive ‘logics’: one based on a claim for ‘deserving’ consumption, the other on the inclusion offered by social productiveness—a view shared by some of Bitter Springs’ critics. For these critics, in earning the ‘right’ to work and therefore cohabit, the Karagarni are seen to abrogate the ‘right’ to sympathy, which is only based on the perception of a lack of agency: their ‘simplicity’, ‘powerlessness’, ‘child-likeness’ and so on. These critics are, in this sense, the ‘melodramatists’ rather than the film itself, which is the source of their frustration, especially in their insistence that perceived moral dilemmas ought to be overtly resolved by the film’s ending. Their understood support for a type of conditional charity (rations accorded only to the most helpless) was characteristically adopted towards indigenous people in Australia in models of governance based on ‘protection’, policies that assimilation was specifically calculated to redress. In an article titled ‘From protection to welfare’, Paul Hasluck, a key figure in the promulgation of assimilation policies in Australia in the post-war period (later to be rewarded for this and other efforts with the office of Governor-General) outlines the limitations of protective sentiments towards Aboriginal people and the alternative case offered by assimilation (which, outside the terms proposed by Siomopoulos, he understands as a form of welfare that is not premised on a notion of charity): ‘… any person who seriously addresses himself to the social questions which are posed by the condition of aborigines in Australia today is no longer satisfied by a policy of preventing cruelty
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to them, as to animals, or the restricted hope of smoothing the pillow of a dying race. He thinks of the advancement of their welfare.’42 Like Siomopoulos, Hasluck is dismissive of a reliance on sympathy to ‘justify’ social policy. Indeed for Hasluck sentiment itself was completely irrelevant to the ‘advancement’ of Aborigines in Australia: ‘The ultimate barriers to the advancement of the welfare of these people are social barriers. We should not become sentimental about this.’43 Hasluck’s description of the welfare basis for assimilation (rather than the charitable underpinnings of protection) suggests that reviewers’ confusion over Bitter Springs’ (and their own) sympathies might lie in a further misreading of the film’s finale. Perhaps their difficulty over the destination of their sympathies results from their failure to read the film’s objective for an operative lack of sympathy at a cultural, social, aesthetic and moral level, an indifferent destination at which the film arrives only in the last scene. For Hasluck, protectionism fashioned its proponents and deserving recipients as subjects apart—as partial subjects. With assimilation comes an operative impartiality described as a social fullness in turn premised on the belief that social mobility moves inexorably towards convergence rather than apartness: Historically it means a rejection of the old idea of protection and caring for the aborigines as a special class. As recently as twenty years ago the prevailing idea in Australia was that the aborigines were a special class of benighted people, legally placed in a category similar to that of mental defectives, who were doomed by their nature to be always something less than fully human, who were bound to die out and who had to be protected from exploitation or abuse and who, for reasons of compassion, had to be cared for in special places. They were not like us. They were under protection. The new idea of assimilation was a recognition that they were like us or could become like us and that in fact they were moving more and more towards our community.44 A more recent assessment of Australia’s assimilation policies shows that although assimilation set out to redress ‘protection’ by
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drawing on notions of cultural convergence and homogeneity, in theory and in practice the distinction between the two policies was less apparent. Tim Rowse describes two ‘older certainties’ that underlined the ‘innovation’ of assimilation: One had to do with nationhood: in a unified nation, people would be culturally homogeneous. The other certainty was that of charity: the poor had a duty to realise what charity judged to be their intrinsic potential. In the ‘assimilationist’ version of charity, that potential was clearly stated to be a citizenship to which no significant features of ‘Aboriginality’ were attached.45 This idea that assimilation was a form of charity by another name (with attached social obligations and benefits) and that this form of charity was intended for those indigenous people who demonstrated the potential for cultural ‘invisibility’ was shared across the mainstream political spectrum. In arguing for Aboriginal representation in federal parliament in 1950, the Opposition leader Ben Chifley identified differences between Aborigines living in traditional communities and indigenous Australians who had been irreversibly separated from those communities: The Federal Parliamentary Labor Party will press for representation of aborigines in the Commonwealth Parliament. Announcing this decision today, the Opposition Leader (Mr Chifley) said it was not envisaged that aborigines who lived in the tribal state independent of the Australian economy should be electors. ‘The Labor Party,’ he added, ‘has in mind those who form inescapably a fragment of our society, whose own culture has disintegrated, and who are for the most part socially and economically depressed and politically without rights. ‘They are in the Australian community, but not of it. ‘They can never revert to the natural state of the aboriginal people who retain their own culture and tribal organisation.
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Figures 86–7: Bitter Springs—high points and low points of view (frame enlargements)
‘Where they are of part European and part aboriginal descent there can never be any question of such a return.’46 Here Chifley links the measurement of ‘blood quantum’ with a propensity for cultural fluidity and the consequent granting of the ‘privileges’ of civil society (voting rights, parliamentary representation).47 Assimilation, like protectionism, relied on a tenuous connection between the value of national homogeneity and the conditional rights of Australian citizenship (which would be conferred as an act of charity only on those members of Aboriginal communities prepared to relinquish their cultural distinctiveness). In the assimilationist Australia of the 1950s and 1960s, indigenous people could apply to the government for permission to own property and vote but only if they first agreed to sever all contact with other indigenous people. Given these arrangements, it’s hard not to ignore the underlying socioeconomic thrust of assimilation policies: to transform indigenous Australians into sole wage-earners (such as farm labourers) with nuclear families rather than members of communities made up of extended families and kinship networks. For Hasluck, such formal measures intended to encourage Aboriginal people to relinquish their identity were technically redundant. Hasluck distinguishes between the idea of indigenous people engaged in a process of moving from the fringes to the centre (i.e. towards white Australia) and the idea of being culturally positioned ‘mid-way’. For Hasluck, those who are ‘mid-way’ occupy a defining cultural position and have already relinquished any prior claims to
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Aboriginality: ‘They are not aborigines but a mid-way people facing all sorts of difficulties peculiar to themselves, enduring all sorts of confusions in their minds. They are living a life which, having lost its ancient nourishment in an aboriginal culture, is not yet fully sustaining itself from new sources.’48 In attempting to create an image that resolves this problem of ‘lost’ nourishment (as described by Hasluck) the final scene of Bitter Springs certainly aims for a kind of homogeneity and ‘middleness’ where point of view is concerned. The last image belongs to no particular character’s vantage and is presented with a studied even-handedness that doesn’t elaborate any sense of its political viewpoint (as evidenced by the often contradictory opinion in which it is held). It is as if throughout the film, the camera itself is attempting to find a ‘middle’ ground finally resting in the film’s concluding moments. And perhaps therein lies the frustration for those viewers most interested in the occupation of the high (moral) ground. Throughout, the film rests on assorted point-of-view strategies—some associated with the Karagarni (often high-angled shots taken from tree tops), others associated with non-Aboriginal characters (graphic, low-angled views as the Karagarni charge the homestead, for instance). Specific point-ofview sequences range from the occasionally ethnographic, the crossculturally sympathetic, the bewildered, the fearful and so on. They serve to reiterate the film’s narrative interest in surveillance and invisibility and to underscore divided emotional allegiances. In one particularly ethnographic point-of-view sequence the ever-curious Mac offers John King his binoculars to better observe a Karagarni funeral. But King junior cannot look (for shame) since he was responsible for the death at the centre of the ceremonies. In this sequence, the camera’s avoidance of John King’s point of view mirrors a character who shows us that not looking can also signify a form of regret or empathy—and consequently our empathy can be for both the mourning Karagarni and the regretful racist. Conversely, this sequence also suggests that camera point-of-view is not always about character identification or sympathy—it can be about a studied curiosity, for instance. It might be that in dispersing its point-of-view sequences between the Kings and the Karagarni, Bitter Springs both establishes a narrative objective to elicit manifold sympathies on the part of the
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spectator while also moving the viewer graphically away from an intense or singular emotional identification in order to better ‘evaluate’ the characters and the narrative itself. Because the viewer is able to empathise with all characters, all actions become understandable (except perhaps the film’s own action in rushing to a theoretical ending that explicitly belongs to no ‘one’ because it encapsulates a social vision). In attempting to forge an image of a ‘shared’ ojective, the film’s conclusion provides the audience with multiple and global views, vantages that belong to everybody and therefore nobody (except perhaps Ralph Smart himself ). As a fiction, a utopic vision, the film’s final image of ‘assimilation’ carries the weight of its enthusiasm for the annihilation of difference or at least an annihilation of certain types of difference that typify the rhetoric of assimilation. Wally’s narrative eagerness for sheep is transformed into an aligned appetite for indifference and assimilation (as distinct from antagonism and eradication). In this move he is forced to recognise a more fundamental and obvious want: that in order to survive he must immerse himself in (cultural) fluidity. Wally’s ‘humanitarianism’ is the recognition of a (shared) experience of thirst (and a corresponding and keen appreciation for fluidity). The Karagarni, on the other hand (represented as being well acquainted with the redistributions of consumption), are expected to acquire the Kings’ passion for production. Harmony (and a new beginning) is achieved as the recognition of the contingent fundamentals of all originary moments—production and consumption. The contradictory responses of audiences to the conclusion of Bitter Springs suggests that it is through appeals to sympathy that viewers are able to link the film’s scenario to policy positions that similarly relied on sentimental appeals for legitimacy; in particular, policies of ‘protection’. The solution to the ‘problem’ of ab-originality (which is really the fact of prior occupation) in the film lies in the cultivation of multiple points of empathy and the figuring of a new ‘classless’ social vision imagined as a collaborative effort of production rather than the redistribution of consumption. In this way, Bitter Springs sidesteps the very real redistributions that were the cornerstone of assimilationist government practice, which materially benefited the Ealing production team behind the scenes and which will be discussed in detail in chapter 6.
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In this sense, the film’s conclusion cannot—and does not—guarantee ‘assimilation’ per se in the utopian (and post-modern) sense of a cross-cultural encounter that is premised on mutual understanding or benefit. Nor does it posit a theoretical or abstracted ambivalence (in the sense that Wally King and perhaps the Karagarni have exhausted all other options and have no choice but assimilation and the consequent abandonment of the divisions of cultural and racial difference). In setting itself so conveniently in a prior moment of Australia’s colonial history, Bitter Springs couches a vision of assimilation as if it is the correct and future outcome of a staged historical ‘logic’. To many viewers of the early 1950s it might seem that, of Trooper Ransome’s three choices (‘you can hunt ’em off, you can ease ’em off or you can take ’em in with you’), the first two had been exercised already. Certainly the film vigorously attempts to present the ‘choice’ of assimilation as the final straw for an exasperated (and thirsty) King family— but this contention rests on the ludicrous proposition that there are only three choices for cultural practice and that the act of choosing sits squarely with the King family, not the Karagarni people.
Changes of heart I would hope that in a conference such as this, free from a political atmosphere or journalistic stunting, we might apply ourselves in discussion of the future of aborigines to more accurate description and more intelligent analysis than is customary and avoid the fallacy that all you have to do is pass a law or open a school and the aborigines can be drafted into civilization like a flock of well-kept sheep. Paul Hasluck49
Charles Duguid’s incredulity at the film’s ending, quoted near the beginning of this chapter, lay specifically in his disbelief that Wally King could suddenly find a heart. In Duguid’s experience, a white colonist at odds with an indigenous community would be incapable of indifference (let alone sympathy) altogether. Bruce Molloy makes the interesting observation that Wally King’s sudden change of heart is not the first in the film and is in fact pre-empted by Blackjack who, in the midst of the Karagarni’s successful campaign against the King family
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inexplicably decides to switch allegiances and assist the latter.50 As an exemplary figure of Aboriginal assimilation, Blackjack’s ‘team change’ suggests that assimilation operates as a kind of ability or capacity for ‘mutability’ (a facility for changing sides, changing minds, changing hearts and so on), which is underlined by Wally King’s later reversal. But what the film’s finale presents as a choice of sorts for nonAborigines is simply a mercurial conversion (or a fait accompli) for the Karagarni (whose fluidity is assured when we are told by Trooper Ransome that they are named after the waterhole they frequent). Duguid is disturbed by the way the images themselves segue: their rush from scenes of inviolable conflict and irreducible difference to complete concord. For the pro-assimilationist Duguid, for example, it is particularly the ‘suddenness’ of Wally’s change from racist to reconciliationist—in contradistinction to the rhetoric of lingering evolution that marks early assimilationist thinking—which is of concern. And certainly the narrative’s arrival at a conclusion is peripatetic. Although there is no known record of his opinion, Paul Hasluck would doubtless have agreed with Duguid’s criticism of the film’s sudden convulsive conclusion.51 Writing as Minister for Territories (1951–63), Hasluck noted his intentions for government to play a strictly regulatory role in relation to the assimilation of Aboriginal people during this period:52 ‘I did not want to promote rapid change but rather to regulate the change and take exceptional social measures to assist the transition and to reduce its harmful effects.’53 Hasluck even devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs of this period, the oddly titled Shades of Darkness, to ‘Gradualism’, by which he means a type of caution; a ‘going slow’, but also a hope for ‘evolution not enforcement’—by which he means a belief that change must be the ‘choice’ of those it affects.54 Of course, many critics of assimilation (and even Bitter Springs itself ) have shown that these so-called ‘choices’ are not usually characterised by a wide nor equitable range of options. At other points of his argument for assimilation Hasluck seems to contradict himself over the matter of choice, suggesting instead that assimilation was inevitable and that the only choice was the rate at which the community accepted its promulgation: ‘Protection usually had only a temporary value. Moreover, protection implied separateness. The problems of social adjustment and the problem of race relations are problems of “coming together” and they can never be
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overcome by adopting the methods of “keeping apart”. Even the policy of “keeping apart” could not succeed, for protection could never arrest the course of change.’55 For Paul Hasluck, cultural convergence and national homogeneity were an historical imperative and assimilation was the means through which an inevitable ‘coming together’ would be achieved. Nothing could interrupt the course of this progression. Bitter Springs offers its final idyllic moment of assimilation ambivalently as a matter of necessary haste that is viewed by some critics as an unconvincing alacrity. It is not entirely clear, to this viewer at least, whether the scene is suggesting that the morphogenesis of the Aboriginal shearer is an instance of evolutionary processes or whether the film offers his image as presenting the condition for the possibility of a (cultural) ‘evolution’. Is the film’s final spasm the conclusive convulsion of an evolutionary triumph or the beginning of one? A redemptive end or an opportunity for progression? Or both? In any case, the film reduces the ‘time’ of evolution to the instantaneous difference between two discrete points: before and after. The implied space between these two points is the space of a miraculous metamorphosis that cannot or should not be seen perhaps, (as with John King and the binoculars) for shame; should not, because this is also a
Figure 88: Bitter Springs—a moving ‘conclusion’ (video capture) http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/ebooks/0-522-85240-8/video.html
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space of comparison (between past and future) in which lies the opportunity for an implied moralisation. So although the film might be set in the past (turn-of-the-century Australia), it is certainly not set in History. Rather, history is produced as an effect of the crossing of a threshold—both sentimentally and politically on Wally’s part; visibly and culturally on the part of Aborigines. Wally himself moves spatially closer towards the Karagarni, but sentimentally he moves towards the British characters and the government (in the figure of Ransome), who uniformly display an approved and exemplary liberal ‘understanding’ towards the Aborigines. As Bruce Molloy has noted of Bitter Springs, the crucial role played by Jean Blue as ‘Mother’—the arbiter of disputes—further emphasises the role of the ‘mother country’ (Britain) as the source of conciliation and mediation.56 On the other hand, Blackjack is intended as a figure of History—a precursor of what will be (for assimilated Aborigines). At the same time, he is a reminder of the film’s unspoken exhortation to forget the past altogether and to embrace the present (and presence) as self-evident virtues. For many viewers of Bitter Springs it is the shock of the revision that the end attempts to carry which is its undoing and which is exaggerated by its brevity (all of thirteen seconds to smooth over what appears in the preceding ninety minutes or so to be an irreconcilable difference). That the film is slowly but surely attempting to find the common ground that unites Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians is lost on these viewers. As I have noted, Bitter Springs clearly argues that we are all universally and most basically united by a common need for nourishment. In this regard, the film shares the very ‘ontological’ approach to being that attracted Paul Hasluck’s attention to the social policy of assimilation. For Hasluck, social harmony (in the form of assimilation) was premised on the idea of identifying the foundational conditions for similarity or conformity from what had previously been understood as irreducible difference. He remembers that it was early on in his career that he ‘rejected the idea that race was a barrier to social advancement or that race made any difference between human beings. We tried to think of the Aborigines as we thought of ourselves, not as another race but as fellow Australians.’ But, as Hasluck continues, he moves away from his pursuit of the essential foundation that underlies all Australians and places the onus
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on Aboriginal Australians specifically to conform to ‘the Australian community’: As young idealists, we campaigned against those who thought ‘once a black always a black’ … As I saw things at that time the chief difficulty was not one of racial dissimilarity but of social acceptability. This meant the minority need not be of the same breed but had to be socially acceptable to the majority and, on their own part, had to be adaptive to the customs and habits—in broad terms, the way of life—of the Australian community.57 The final scene of Bitter Springs makes a similar segue to Hasluck, radically shifting the mode of its preceding foundational claims. The film moves suddenly from a depiction of the universal or common ground that unites black and white essentially (and which also positions them in conflict), to an image that is explicitly intended to be paradigmatic (i.e. a theological mode of originary thought). Bitter Springs’ conclusion adopts the elevated, godly vantage of the exemplary. It is concerned less with what ‘we’ share (content) than the image of sharing itself (form). As a conclusion, it is more interested in the organisation of its elements than the preceding action. In the final moments of the film, Bitter Springs makes a foundational claim of an altogether different order, proposing an exemplary scene of assimilation from which similar arrangements are expected to issue. It is as if the film’s very approach to the originary has suddenly shifted mode. So when Molloy and critics writing after the 1970s suggest that the end of Bitter Springs simply does not ‘fit’ with whatever they perceived to be the thrust of the preceding narration, they are in one sense correct. But their arguments are less concerned with the film’s originary claims. For these critics, the finale’s flaw is its political clumsiness, its ‘unfitness’ as a social conclusion. In their mind, the vivid images of indigenous dispossession that dominate the preceding narrative should give rise to policy resolutions other than assimilation (which had been widely discredited as a policy objective by the early 1970s). But perhaps it is not simply, as Duguid and others averred, that the final image is inadequate as an image—too brief, too abrupt, too sudden. And perhaps it is not only, as Molloy and others writing well
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after the film’s release theorised, that the ending is politically inadequate. Perhaps the final bucolic image of assimilation in Bitter Springs fails precisely because it reveals the inadequacies of any attempt to comprehensively represent a moment of national naissance, a moment of origins. Bitter Springs proposes an originary moment in comprehensive terms, imagining simultaneously both the enactment and the effect of assimilation. This scene is expected to carry the transformation of a narrative centred on rival consumption into a scene of harmonious productivity without recognising the ‘impossible’ contingency of these narratives for indigenous Australians. Its final image of (agri)cultural production (sheep-growing) rests on the incidental depiction of a cultural consumption (the figure of an assimilated indigenous shearer dressed in labourer’s clothes). Bitter Springs exits with the proposal of a new start for an assimilated ‘Australia’ that is only partially known since its genesis rests on the erasure of the indigenous culture that has made it possible. Bitter Springs thinks Nothing of racial difference as it depicts the miraculous transformation of the Karagarni hunters from consumers of sheep into producers of sheep and, in so doing, cleverly circumvents a larger act of cultural consumption on the part of the Kings. And finally, as an image, the film’s conclusion is unable to reconcile its own formal or digital qualities—its ‘black and whiteness’, its boundaries. It might be that what the film’s reviewers really want, other than the image they are presented with, is words; oleaginous words like those penultimately uttered by Ransome; words that can achieve a sense of closure that this, or for that matter any image, cannot.
Passing resemblances Please don’t talk about me like I’m an animal or just not here at all. Julia, Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer, 1997)
‘There’s no one to see us.’ ‘No one to see us, eh?’ ‘Oh him, he doesn’t matter.’ Emma and Ma, Bitter Springs
I began this chapter by showing how the cast and crew of Bitter Springs, including the director Ralph Smart, seem to have responded to their
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experience on set by feeling sorry (for themselves). It is sage to consider the difference between feeling sorry and being sorry in a present-day Australia in which the Prime Minster balks at apologising for prior government policies and practices that harmed indigenous people—including those perpetrated in the name of assimilation. This chapter has further shown the importance placed by both audiences and filmmakers on the manipulation of ‘sympathy’ in Bitter Springs. Bitter Springs is ostensibly about types of movement (physical, cultural, sentimental, conceptual). And dissatisfaction with the film also revolved both around the speed of this movement and its destination (towards assimilation). But while Bitter Springs itself is very much interested in the question of ‘movement’ as an emotional state (being moved), and as an historical stage (moving on), it is also interested in how an opportunity for cultural origins might be the quite literal outcome of a shift of location (a movement motivated principally by the droving of sheep). Bitter Springs is neatly divided into two sections, each half characterised by a crisis of fluidity (namely a desperate need for water), a thirst that is sated only by the appearance of the helpful government representative (Trooper Ransome). Each half is distinguished by its approach to physical and cultural movement respectively. The first half is devoted simply to ‘getting there’, whereby the British immigrants are assimilated as pioneer Australians in the context of a difficult physical journey. This section of the film is characterised by the purposeful movement of the settlers and their sheep: moving towards their destination in an orderly, continuous linear fashion, from town to frontier. Lengthy images of dusty sheep driven en masse towards an unknown destination dominate this section of the film. The second half of the film is devoted to ‘staying there’, in which mobility is measured in terms of a cultural rather than a geographical distance traversed. This section is marked by the presence of Aboriginal characters whose movement (from waterhole to waterhole, for instance) is represented primarily in terms of physical necessity rather than as motivated by social choices. Tim Rowse notes how Aboriginal movement has historically been characterised in relation to ‘drift’, a ‘movement devoid of agency’, as encapsulated in popular misconceptions of ‘walkabouts’ as aimless journeys, for example.58 The idea that Aborigines were somehow a
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‘passing’ culture, unable to halt their own inexorable demise, is a further example of the lack of agency attributed to Aboriginal people (or indeed the colonial perpetrators of their genocide). Rowse observes that assimilation also rested on the belief that Aborigines were ‘passing through’ a series of historical stages of which cultural homogeneity was expected to be the last. Assimilation was characterised through a very confidently proclaimed understanding of the future’s relationship to the past: the seeming inevitability of indigenous progression through a logic of stages from which there could be no return. In this sense, the underpinnings for assimilationist arguments can be found in those earlier understandings of post-colonial Aboriginal culture that rested on the apparent surety of an imminent ‘racial’ demise (aka the ‘dying race’ thesis most famously put by the former Ooldea missioner Daisy Bates in her famously titled book, The Passing of the Aborigines).59 Paul Hasluck was influenced by these ideas of drift, and they formed an observational basis for his theories of assimilation. Writing about the views that informed his ministerial approach, he identified an inclination to cultural movement on the part of Aborigines, a movement from the ‘fringes’ to the ‘white heart’: Having observed the fact of this ‘drift to the whites’, one hoped that closer association with whites might not mean deterioration and further disadvantage for the Aborigines but might mean improvement of their lot and their acceptance on equal terms—that the end might not be what Elkin described as ‘intelligent parasitism’ but full membership of and participation in Australian society, and that Aborigines would see themselves as citizens not fringe-dwellers.60 For Hasluck, cultural movement is inevitably centrifugal. Those at the ‘fringes’ of society—the socially marginal—will move to the centre, the middle ground, the middle class (both literally and metaphorically). Bitter Springs depicts this unavoidable movement to the centre with both an explained story (the Kings’ desire to move from the coast to Central Australia) and a pithy gesture (the Karagarni’s dramatic assimilation). Hasluck regarded social mobility as both ‘natural and desirable’. In other writings he spoke of it as a defining feature of the nation (not
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just located at its edges): ‘… in Australia mobility in society was visible and … our people were perpetually overcoming any attempts to fix a person permanently in one class or another. We were a fluid society … This idea of mobility in society had its outcome in a faith that there was no reason why an Aboriginal should not move too.’61 Hasluck’s paradoxical positioning of the fluid as a type of fixed feature of Australian identity is also suggested in Bitter Springs. Even in reading Bitter Springs as a text that is aligned to assimilationist policy positions, it is still possible to see its reliance on the idea that cultural identity is ultimately based on a type of fixity rather than non-originary fluidity; or rather that its representation of cultural fluidity ‘fails’ for its prior presentation of (originary/essential) binary cultural fixities. The film’s conflation of reformed racism and national prosperity posits choice and compromise as characteristically white Australian traits that can be traced in the film’s pedagogical address and its teleological representation of history as a literal form of movement. The press release for the film put it crudely: ‘But in the end the white man’s magic prevails; not the magic of the gun, but that other magic, the magic of compromise, of finding a way to give both sides a chance of living side by side without violence.’62 Aborigines on the other hand are conventionally represented as archaic yet transient anachronisms progressing fitfully towards the greener paddocks of a more ‘contemporary’ lifestyle encapsulated in that closing shot of the Aboriginal elder sweating over a sheep for the greater good of Australia’s economic prosperity. Their movement is not characterised by choice. The message for Aborigines is that Australia’s wealth is not so much to be shared as it is to be sheared. The point of discourses of ‘passing’ in assimilationist rhetoric is to identify a type of cultural practice that by definition obscures its agent; a paradoxical condition of inevitability (so obvious it almost need not be named) and invisibility (aiming for the indistinction of the mainstream). Carole-Anne Tyler describes the specific workings and paradoxes of ‘passing’: … the mark of passing successfully is the lack of a mark of passing, of a signifier of some difference from what one seems to be. In fact, passing can only name the very failure of passing, an indication of a certain impossibility at its
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heart, of the contradictions which constitute it … Passing is the effect of a certain affect, an uncanny feeling of uncertainty about a difference which is not quite invisible, not quite unknown, not quite non-existent—a sort of life in death, in which otherness appears on the verge of extinction, dying into the self-sameness it still lacks even as it lacks difference.63 For Tyler, ‘passing’ is a no-win situation, an evacuation of both difference and sameness, a movement that never quite arrives at its destination, a feeling that doesn’t quite ring true, a state of ‘not-quitethereness’—not unlike the state of the permanently partial described in chapter 3. What is of interest is how many of these ‘feelings’ were also attributed to the British actors who were involved in the production of Bitter Springs and in their roles as on-screen indices of another cultural movement, that of post-war migration.
Too many ‘cooks’ Miss Brown: Poor little sheep. It hasn’t much future, has it? Just mutton. Mr Wilson: And where would England be without it? If I was a sheep I should be proud to serve the Empire. Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1949)
The characters most sympathetic (to Aborigines) in Bitter Springs are the British ones. Through the English Tommy and the Scottish Mac, Bitter Springs links Aboriginal assimilation with the post-war Australian approach to migration, in which movement or mobility and assimilation aligned. The movements entailed in this depiction of migration to Australia are viewed as both a cause and an effect of assimilation. The alternative version of the script, held in the archives of the British Film Institute, concludes with a different ending that makes this link more explicit. In this draft, the Aborigines are ‘herded’ and ‘corralled’ by stockwhip-wielding police. The script notes suggestively caution: ‘It should be quite clear they are disarming the blacks and not beating them.’ The film’s finale is a slow pan of the farm showing the entire King family and their Aboriginal cohabitants busy with the
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industry of sheep-growing. The camera eventually comes to rest on comedian Tommy Trinder, shears in hand—at work on the overlong hair of little Charlie and watched by an Aboriginal child looking on in amusement: L.Ss EXT. HOMESTEAD. DAY A spectacular shot of the TROOPERS riding around the Blacks, corralling them, disarming them etc. It is important that this should be a striking scene pictorially, for it brings us back to our main theme—the problem of Blacks and Whites. EXT. GENERAL VIEW OF HOMESTEAD. DAY. A YEAR LATER As the music for the finale of the picture is brought up to the climax, we see revealed what change the past 12 months have made. WALLY has been as good as his word to the TROOPER. He has tried to justify himself as contributing to the development of Australia. Over wide scene near the Homestead we see Aborigine Horsemen driving the sheep towards the pens. In the pens other ABOS are drafting the sheep which are pushed through into the shearing sheds. Here we find WALLY, BLACKJACK, JOHN & MAC assisted by ABOS. EMMA & MUM are picking up the fleeces and throwing them on the sorting table. CAMERA PANS ON and we come to TOMMY also shearing but he is shearing the new overlong hair of LITTLE CHARLIE, whilst NIZA, the black child, stands by grinning with amusement. (END OF PICTURE)64 In this version the final demand for mediation rests not with Aborigines but the British characters, who have acted as ‘sympathisers’ throughout the film. Gordon Jackson and Tommy Trinder ‘stick up’ for the
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Karagarni in a number of instances. John King goes so far as to accuse Mac of ‘always being on their side’. Trinder continued his role as self-appointed defender and sympathiser off-set. The British comedian liked to point out his feelings of empathy for the Aboriginal actors who worked on the film as well as passing on his own thoughts on assimilation and citizenship for indigenous people: I leave here with a sincere admiration of and liking for your aborigines, who only need a decent break to become good citizens. As far as I can see they have never been given a real chance. I have found them intelligent, helpful, and fun-loving people, with whom it has been a pleasure to be assocated … Australia, I consider, should do something decisive about the aborigines, either by complete segregation in proper reservations, or by giving them the same opportunity as white people to become useful members of the community.65 Here Trinder neatly, if somewhat bluntly, outlines one of the contemporary policy positions developed towards Aboriginal citizenship: the either/or choices offered by assimilation. Useful (or useless). Assimilated (or segregated). By Trinder’s reckoning, it is the government who wavers (who ‘should do something decisive’) rather than the ‘intelligent, helpful and fun-loving people’, who are in fact the objects of a widespread expectation to produce a kind of cultural fluidity on their part. The involvement of Tommy Trinder, a celebrated vaudeville star, proved to be particularly controversial—for filmmakers and critics alike. Typical of the comments about his presence in the film is the following assessment from the Sunday Chronicle: ‘In [the Aborigines’] company, the picture hops. Without them, it plods prosaically, despite the galvanic efforts of Mr Trinder, who has so obviously been grafted on to the story for the purposes of comic relief that it is something of a relief when his absence allows us to get on with the story.’66 When asked by David Stratton some years later about the abruptness of the film’s final reconciliation between the ‘settlers’ and the Karagarni, Ralph Smart answered in terms that distinctly implicated Tommy Trinder:
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Stratton: The ending of the film seems a little abrupt. I mean, the Aboriginals seem to change rather quickly. Do you remember if there were any reasons for that, or did you have to finish it quickly in the end? Smart: Yes. I mean we had very bad weather and just—you know, I didn’t get a proper chance to make the film at all. And besides that I certainly realised, once I started with Tommy Trinder, I realised that not in a hundred years did he fit into it. He just wasn’t there. I mean, he was London and the Music Halls, not in Australia and the outback. So there was no hope for it. I knew that I was sitting on a powder keg, and every day as it rained, got worse and worse and I was getting unhappier and unhappier till I was really not in a fit state to make a film at all.67 In this vague and drifting response, Smart shifts his attention from the film’s cursory and concluding appeal for indigenous assimilation to focus instead on comedian Tommy Trinder’s apparent inability to ‘assimilate’ and ‘fit’ into an outwardly dramatic narrative. In Ralph Smart’s mind nevertheless, Trinder shared an onus for ‘interchangeability’ with the Aboriginal actors. In terms that further take up the idea of the British as cultural mediators (this time between Australia and the world), Smart extrapolated from Trinder’s failure to assimilate by going so far as to suggest that the dream of a cultural alliance between the English and Australian film industries rested entirely on the comedian: ‘I mean, to have a stand-up comedian in a story like that was impossible, so of course it was just a disaster. And that was probably the end of Ealing wanting to be in Australia.’68 In fact, Bitter Springs was the last Ealing film to be made at the Australian Pagewood studio, but the decision to end the British studio’s production might not have been Ealing’s alone. Despite the efforts Ealing made to establish regular Australian-based film production, the Australian Government decided not to extend Ealing’s lease any further, arguing that films were non-essential and the leaseholders non-resident. Smart had actually known for some time that Trinder would be included in what was to become Bitter Springs. An early announcement for the production in an October 1948 issue of Film Weekly
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mentions the actor as confirmed at (early) draft stage: ‘The title of Ealing’s next production to begin next March will be “The Pepper Trees” a story of two immigrants to this country. Tommy Trinder and Chips Rafferty will be starred and it is hoped to bring out Gordon Jackson who has a role in “Eureka Stockade”. Ralph Smart who made “Bush Christmas” will write the script and direct.’69 Smart was, however, particularly upset by Trinder’s inclusion, which was made on the orders of Ealing chief Michael Balcon and which necessitated some of the script changes Smart complains about.70 At another, more coherent point of the interview with David Stratton, he explained: … Tommy is a very splendid music hall artist but just didn’t fit into this film and, having had him forced on to me, and having to go back to England having had my script rewritten in Ealing, I then come back and when I go back in the end, and the film is seen in the theatre, we come out of the theatre and Micky Balcom [sic] says to me—because he makes a lot of films, he made a lot of films—he said, ‘Ralph, you had a good subject there. Why did you have to have Tommy Trinder?’ I said, ‘Micky, I have telegrams from you telling me I must have him.’ ‘Absolute nonsense!’ He turns around to Lipscombe. ‘Bill, did we ever force Ralph to have Tommy?’ ‘No Mickey, no.’ (LAUGH) So you can’t win, you see?71 The conflict between Smart and Balcon over Trinder seems to have taken another turn with the report of cuts to the film for its London release: ‘Rank cutting experts who cut the film said that either Trinder or the Aborigines had to go. One of the team explained it: “It was a toss-up. Trinder gags with which audiences everywhere are more or less familiar, or Abo [sic] antics with which they definitely are not. The Abos won.” ’72 Ralph Smart sees the film’s production history as a series of creative compromises: the final product diminished to the almost unrecognisable trace of an original idea ruined by too many cooks. And given this (albeit reluctant) capacity for compromise, he is censorious of those who do not demonstrate the same facility for flexibility and who do not therefore aim for an operative, sheep-like ‘indistinguishability’—viz. Tommy Trinder.
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What is most interesting is Smart’s reluctance to speak about the more obvious theme of cultural compromise and camouflage entailed in the final scene of ‘collaborative’ sheep-shearing that concludes Bitter Springs. It is to this theme of cultural compromise—in the form of the specific arguments made for assimilation (= lit. digestion) during the production of Bitter Springs, and their correlative, the specific practices of assimilation (as the organisation of consumption)—that chapter 6 now turns.
Notes Thomas More, Utopia, Penguin, London, 1976, p. 46. Paul Hasluck, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, in Native Welfare in Australia: Speeches and Addresses, Perth, 1953, p. 51. 3 ibid., p. 49. 4 Ralph Smart, interviewed by David Stratton for the Film Pioneers Oral History Project, 23 October 1979. Held by National Film and Sound Archive. 5 Eric Williams to Publicity and Tourist Bureau, dated 3 November 1949. 6 ‘Friends were tried’, Advertiser, 23 June 1950, n.p. 7 Meaghan Morris, ‘Beyond assimilation: Aboriginality, media history and public memory’, Aedon, 4.1 (1997), pp. 24–5. 8 Laleen Jayamanne, ‘ “Love me tender, love me true, never let me go”: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’ in her Toward Cinema and its Double: Cross Cultural Mimesis, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001, p. 251, n. 15. 9 Interviewed by Michael Pate, 14 August 1997, National Film and Sound Archive, ID No. AEJ000519 0328654–0003. 10 Paul Hasluck in Australia, House of Representatives 1951, Debates, vol. 214 (18 October 1951), p. 184. 11 J. Clifford King, Bitter Springs: The Story of the Film, Convoy Publications, London, 1950, p. 1. 12 ‘About those grass skirts’, Mail (Adelaide), 9 July 1950, n.p. GRG 52/90. 13 ‘Bitter Springs’, Film Weekly, vol. 74, no. 1253 (26 October 1950), p. 16. 14 News Chronicle, 8 July 1950, n.p. 15 Michael Davenport, Mercury (Quorn), 27 July 1950, p. 1. 16 Advertiser (Adelaide), 11 July 1950, p. 3. Here Newland might be referring to a silent Australian classic, The Man from Kangaroo (Wilfred Lucas, 1920), which did indeed feature a rollicking dance in a woolshed—a scene since lost but recorded in production photographs. The scene recurs as the rousing conclusion to another sheep film, Funny Things Happen Downunder (John McCormick, 1965). 17 This ending is mentioned as Ralph Smart’s original and preferred script in Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, p. 183. A search of the BFI script archive reveals an earlier draft with a different 1 2
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20 21 22 18 19
23
24
27 25 26
28 29
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ending from that of the released version of the film but not the one suggested in Shirley and Adams. Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, who played John King, also remembers a series of script changes but certainly not the ‘massacre’ ending described by Shirley and Adams (pers. comm.). He also volunteered that Jack Rix, the film’s production manager, could not recall this particular ending. The ‘massacre’ ending is also mentioned in Philip Kemp’s article on Ealing in Australia, although it is possible that Kemp picks up the reference from Shirley and Adams. Kemp repeats the claim of Shirley and Adams: that Smart’s original script ended, ‘far more plausibly and dramatically, with a full-scale massacre of the Aboriginals at the hands of the whites.’ (Philip Kemp, ‘On the slide: Harry Watt and Ealing’s Australian venture’, Second Take: Australian Filmmakers Talk, Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton (eds), Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 159.) King, Bitter Springs: The Story of the Film, p. 112. In ibid. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, p. 210. Kemp, ‘On the slide: Harry Watt and Ealing’s Australian venture’, p. 159. George Perry, Forever Ealing: A Celebration of the Great British Film Studio, Pavilion Press, London, 1981, p. 148. Charles Barr was even more dismissive of the film, failing to mention it in his history of Ealing; and in the alphabetical index at the back he simply notes, ‘Ealing’s last Australian film for seven years; the ‘forties trio form a downward progress.’ (Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, Cameron & Tayleur, London, 1977, p. 190.) No author, Hidden Pictures: An Indigenous Touring Film Festival, Australian Film Commission, Sydney, 1995, p. 46. Bruce Molloy, Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930–1960, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1990, p. 9. Molloy reiterates at several points: ‘Despite its artificial ending, the film is effective in dramatising the “bitter springs” of the question of Aboriginal land ownership’ (p. 194) and: ‘The questions of Aboriginal land rights is developed dramatically in clear terms, only to be submerged in an obviously contrived concluding sequence.’ (p. 198.) ibid., p. 194. ibid.. Anne Hickling-Hudson, ‘White constructions of black identity in Australian films about Aborigines’, Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4 (1990), p. 267. ibid., p. 190. Paul Hasluck, ‘Are our Aborigines neglected?’ An address given at the PSA Service, The Lyceum, Sydney on Sunday 12 July 1959 (Department of Territories, 1959), p. 6. Smart recalls that he wasn’t particularly interested in Pate’s acting abilities but wanted someone the audience would ‘go along with’. Interviewed by Michael Pate, 14 August 1997, National Film and Sound Archive, ID No. AEJ000519 0328654–0003. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film: 1900–1977, p. 210. ‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1950, n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder).
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‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Worker, 8 July 1950, n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder). 34 ‘Bitter Springs’, Sunday Herald, 27 August 1950, p. 5. 35 ‘Bitter Springs’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 17:199 (August 1950), p. 113. 36 ‘Bitter Springs’, Film Weekly, 74:1253 (26 October 1950), p. 16. 37 ‘Bitter Springs: A new kind of Indian threatens the old stockade’, Daily Herald, 7 July 1950, n.p. GRG 52/90. 38 Paul Dehn, ‘Bitter Springs’, Sunday Chronicle, n.d., n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder). 39 A review in News of the World (9 July 1950) was also unconvinced by the film’s ending but perceived the Kings rather than the Karagarni to be in need of ‘protection’: ‘In “Bitter Springs” you are invited to believe that half a dozen whites (including women, children and Tommy Trinder) can go on indefinitely defying mobs of tribesmen operating in their own territory. True, our side have rifles while the poor old aborigines have to be content with spears that are certainly not “jet jobs”. Even so, had it come to a real showdown Chips Rafferty, Tommy Trinder and Co. would have been liquidated so fast that “Bitter Springs” would have been reduced to a short.’ 40 Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 138. 41 Anna Siomopoulos, ‘ “I didn’t know anyone could be so unselfish”: Liberal empathy, the welfare state and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas’, Cinema Journal, 38:4 (Summer 1999), p. 18. 42 Paul Hasluck, ‘From protection to welfare’ in Native Welfare in Australia, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1953, p. 34. 43 ibid. 44 Hasluck, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 15. Hasluck goes on to suggest that he personally believed social assimilation would entail ‘biological’ assimilation as well: ‘This would be integration in the exact and ancient meaning of the term—a making one.’ (ibid.) 45 Tim Rowse, White Power, White Flour: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 26. 46 ‘Labor seeks Aboriginal MHR’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 15 June 1950, n.p. Here Chifley echoes the words of Paul Hasluck, who had delivered a speech in Parliament only days before in which he suggested: ‘The total number of aborigines constitutes a social group within but not of the white community.’ See Paul Hasluck, ‘A national problem’, in Native Welfare in Australia, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1953, p. 6. First delivered in the House of Representatives, Canberra on 8 June 1950. 47 The phrase ‘blood quantum’ has been used in American critical theory to discuss the nineteenth-century concept that a person’s race can be measured by the percentage of ‘blood’ passed from one or several ancestors. See Joanna Hearne, ‘ “The cross-heart people”: Race and inheritance in the silent western’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter 2003), p. 195. Also Frederick K. Lomayesva, ‘Indian identity and degree of Indian blood’, Red Ink, 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 33–6, and William 33
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48
51 49 50
52
55 56 57 58 59 53 54
62 63 60 61
64
65
D. Routt, ‘Who dances when terror strikes?’, Post Colonial Studies 6.1, pp. 91–105. Hasluck, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 12. Hasluck is seeking to establish a difference between a racial notion of ‘half-caste’ and the idea that culturally a substantial number of Aborigines ‘whether full blood or part-coloured, are also half and half’. ibid., p. 14. Molloy, Before the Interval, p. 193. Duguid was a vocal supporter of Hasluck at this time. At the time of the film’s release the Adelaide News reported Duguid’s support for a parliamentary speech made by Hasluck: ‘It is a grand thing that at long last we have someone in Federal Parliament willing to point out the utter inconsistency between our national and international policy on human rights … For twenty years I’ve been in this fight for better treatment of the natives. Mr Hasluck will have my full support.’ News (Adelaide), 15 June 1950, n.p. Hasluck positioned himself carefully in terms of his relationship to assimilation policies (and origins): ‘In later years some writers have linked my name with the policy of assimilation, either for blame or commendation. I did not originate the idea nor did I introduce the word into the discussion of policy. When I became Minister for Territories in the Australian Government in May 1951 I inherited both the word and the purpose it expressed. My contribution was to give greater precision to the idea, to bring clearer and more efficient measures to promote the purpose and to seek fuller co-operation between the seven governments in Australia engaged in this phase of administration.’ (Hasluck, Shades of Darkness: Aboriginal Affairs 1925–1965, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 70.) ibid., p. 128. ibid., p. 117. Hasluck, ‘From protection to welfare’, pp. 32–3. Molloy, Before the Interval, p. 182. Hasluck, Shades of Darkness, pp. 22–3. Rowse, White Power, White Flour, p. 33. Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia, John Murray, London, 1938. American author Grant Madison preceded Bates with his book, The Passing of the Great Race (Scribners, New York, 1916) about indigenous Americans. Hasluck, Shades of Darkness, p. 126. ibid., pp. 126–7. Ealing Studios, ‘ “Bitter Springs”: Press notes’, n.p. Carole-Anne Tyler, ‘Passing: Narcissism, identity and difference’, in Differences 6:2+3 (1994), p. 212. Bitter Springs, unpublished screenplay, dated 6 May 1949, scenes 118–121, pp. 68–9. Tommy Trinder cited in ‘Tommy Trinder led new life here’, News (Adelaide), 31 August, 1949, n.p.
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Sunday Chronicle, 9 July 1950, n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder). Ralph Smart, interviewed by David Stratton. 68 ibid. Bruce Molloy, on the other hand, suggests that the decision of the British government—which refused to exempt the Australian Ealing films on the basis that they were not ‘British’—was largely responsible for the end of the Pagewood project. Molloy, Before the Interval, p. 36. 69 Film Weekly, 28 October 1948, p. 2. 70 According to Bud Tingwell (who played John King), even Tommy Trinder recognised his unsuitability for the project. ‘Tommy Trinder felt awful about it afterwards. Felt he shouldn’t be anywhere near it. Felt he was in the wrong film.’ (Pers. comm.) 71 Ralph Smart, interviewed by David Stratton. 72 Adrian Ball, ‘Hit film cut’, no further details available. Item from the H. E. Green Clippings file at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The report goes on to suggest that cuts were also made to Trinder’s appearances in the Australian release, although less so than the cuts made in Britain. From my viewing, the print held in the National Library Collection (Australia) and the version of the film released on video by the British copyright holders are identical. 66 67
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Chapter 6
Another man’s mutton … Assimilation and Aboriginal agency
It is very nice to have them in the film and to bring these aborigines from their native haunts. It is a big picnic for them. F. O. Skinner, Commonwealth Railways Chief Traffic Manager, Port Augusta1
The only person who seems to have specifically liked the film’s ending was, rather predictably, the South Australian ‘Protector of Aborigines’, Bill Penhall, who was quoted as saying that he was ‘pleased with the way the finale stressed the need for co-operation between whites and natives’.2 Early correspondence between various South Australian Government departments reiterates the idea that the film’s abrupt advocacy of a utopian assimilation was always an integral part of the government’s intention for the film. This correspondence between Ealing and the South Australian Government also shows the fundamental role played by the indigenous actors from Ooldea in securing the film for South Australia. A letter drafted in June 1949 by the staff of the Aborigines Department (on behalf of the chair of the Protection Board, the Minister of Works, M. McIntosh), and written in reply to the
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general secretary of the Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity Association of Australia, attempts to explain the government’s interest in the project: They are wards of the State, and, with the approval of the Aborigines Protection Board, the Government offered their services to Ealing’s films [sic] for the two-fold purpose of advertising the State and the natives, and thereby giving added prestige to both the State and the natives, especially overseas. Provision has been made for payment to the natives by the Board at a rate commensurate with their needs and services and very much in excess of any allowances or earnings they previously enjoyed; they are being wonderfully cared for; there are two missioners in charge, in addition to a school teacher and two women welfare officers. Contracts have been arranged by the Board for ample food supplies of all descriptions and all are living in Army tents. The Chief Protector of Aborigines and two other high-ranking officers of his Department have been in constant touch with the natives, who are very happy and, indeed, enjoying the whole experience. To them it is in the nature of a holiday with long leisure periods, during which they engage in their traditional hunting practices and ‘walk abouts’ [sic]. The natives are not being in any way exploited for the benefit of the film industry, but on the contrary, the Board and the Government believes that, as a result of their association with and exhibition of this film, the whole status of the aborigines will receive an uplift, assisting towards their assimilation in the life of the general community.3 This letter was subsequently edited by the minister, and the italicised references to Aboriginal ‘leisure’ and ‘assimilation’ were removed. Rather than seeking to give ‘added prestige’ to ‘both the State and the natives’, the final version of the letter, dated 22 June, explained instead that ‘the Government offered their services to Ealing’s films [sic] for the two-fold purpose of advertising the State and benefitting [sic] the natives’.4 Apparently Aboriginal South Australians didn’t need to be given prestige but instead would themselves lend their image to
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advertising the state. In doing so, in being perceived as having a productive role to play, they would also somehow benefit. The pre-censored references to ‘uplift by association’ were reiterated publicly in the South Australian parliament by the Ooldea community’s local member, Mr Riches: The natives have been used to advertise South Australia. Their association with the film ‘Bitter Springs’ will mean a great advertisement for the State. There are already indications that from the publicity given there will be considerable tourist traffic in the area. Warren Gorge is already on the map and Quorn must be deriving considerable benefit from tourist traffic. I understand that one of the conditions set out when permission was given for the film unit to come to South Australia was that natives would be used in the production of ‘Bitter Springs’. As a result of their association with the film production the natives have seen clothing, purchased and worn it, and they have had three meals a day with certainty whereas at Ooldea they were never certain of getting a meal.5 The government’s interest in the film production had been evident for some time before Ealing arrived in South Australia in 1949. The South Australian Premier, Thomas Playford, had sought meetings with the studio on a visit to London in 1948. When it was later suggested that Bitter Springs might be located in Murgon, Queensland, Playford reportedly had a short film made of ‘suitable’ location sites in South Australia and forwarded it to Ealing executives in London with the suggestion that one of the sites might be used for the later production of Robbery Under Arms as well. A newspaper article reported smugly: ‘The settings in Mr Playford’s picture so impressed the English executives of the company that they decided to abandon plans for the Murgon site and switch their activities to South Australia.’6 This decision caused great delight in the South Australian press, which further noted that, aside from the quality of the spectacle provided by the Flinders Ranges, the actual reason for Ealing’s interest in South Australia (rather than Queensland) was the relative ‘unsophistication’ of Aborigines in South Australia: ‘…
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Mr Williams said one reason why Quorn had been substituted for Murgon Queensland was that Queensland Aborigines are considered “too sophisticated” for parts as extras.’7 A later report hinted at another reason for the switch of location. Ealing’s Eric Williams was quoted as suggesting that ‘several major changes had been made in the script of “Bitter Springs” since the Queensland site was tentatively selected and this also influenced the decision in favor of South Australia’.8 Yet another reason is revealed in government correspondence. According to the telegrams and hand-scrawled meeting minutes held in the archives of the Aborigines Protection Board and the Publicity and Tourist Bureau of South Australia, the final deciding factor for Ealing was the South Australian Government’s guarantee to provide 120 Aboriginal actors to the filmmakers at no cost. Any expenses incurred by the government would be met by the South Australian Publicity and Tourist Bureau from a fund called ‘Advertising the State’. The Aborigines Protection Board would be directly responsible for disbursing salaries to the indigenous actors.9 Premier Playford was convinced by the film’s unlimited potential for promotion: of South Australia (as a film location and tourist destination) and of the potential ‘exploitation’ of the local (read indigenous) content. Once completed, the film lived up to his every expectation. According to the Adelaide News, Playford found Bitter Springs to be ‘full of interest. He thought that several sequences, particularly those of the natives, might show more [indecipherable] overseas new angles to be exploited and the great possibilities for more film-making in Australia.’10 But exploitation of the scenery was only one part of the Bitter Springs story. A detailed examination of the correspondence and phone calls made between Ealing’s Australian chief Eric Williams and A. J. Baker, director of the South Australian Publicity and Tourist Bureau, outlines the precise nature of the wheeling and dealing over Aboriginal participation in the film; much of which centred on the administration of compensation for the indigenous actors, a key factor in the unfolding practice of Aboriginal assimilation in South Australia.
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Paying with interest The easiest thing you can do to some underprivileged persons at a low level of civilization is to throw them some coins. The throwing of coins may ease one’s conscience, but it will not be of much benefit to them. Paul Hasluck11
A telegram from Ealings’s London office to the Premier on 26 February 1949 suggests that the London producers might consider the possibility of using the Flinders Ranges for Bitter Springs, ‘if it is possible for you to arrange sufficient number of Aborigines’. A letter from Eric Williams to Baker (dated 9 March) reiterated: The main question exercising our minds at the moment concerns the Aborigines: I notice that the Protector considers it will be possible to obtain the numbers required; however this is not very definite and they would have to be of a type suitable for the picture, and a few males (say 8–12) would have to be especially selected for the parts they would play in the film … I propose to telephone you on Monday next when perhaps you or Mr Matthews will be available to give me your further views, as we cannot yet determine or decide whether the essential facilities, the pictorial locations and the necessary Aborigines are, in fact, centred on Quorn.12 It seems that the promised phone conversation did not go well. On 15 March Ealing cabled Baker to say that the studio would now be investigating other possible locations, ‘in view doubtful factors discussed yesterday stop Please therefore make no further tentative arrangements on our behalf for time being stop …’. The bureaucrats of the Publicity and Tourist Bureau had spent the intervening days in the fruitless pursuit of indigenous actors. Penhall from the Protectorate had duly contacted a range of missions and stations, including the owner of Nepa Bunna Station, Mr Eaton, who, against his better judgement, agreed to try to find suitable Aboriginal cast members (on 10 March). Three days later he rang back to say that ‘there are only six to eight old men available about the
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station and that the younger natives in the district were engaged or shortly to be engaged in shearing’. Aborigines resident in Point McLeay were also considered but, according to Penhall, ‘they were at present picking grapes in the McLaren Vale district’. Although he thought ‘it would not be impossible to get them’, he cautioned (on 14 March) that ‘there were not 100 [although] others could be obtained from Point Pearce’. The extent of Ealing’s withdrawal from its South Australian commitments was such that on 17 March an article appeared in the Adelaide press announcing the beginning of screen tests and noting that Bitter Springs would be filmed in southern Queensland.13 What the press did not know was that an urgent telegram had been sent from the Bureau’s chief, Baker, to Ealing a day earlier promising ‘sufficient special cast who could if necessary be transferred to Quorn’.14 A hurried meeting was convened in Adelaide on 22 March between Smart, Williams, Ealing staffer Jack Rix and Baker to make one last pitch for locating the film in South Australia. The Bureau’s trump card was the ‘availability’ of Aborigines resident at the Ooldea mission.15 Penhall was called in and despite his apparent lack of success in attracting any Aboriginal participation in the film to date, he ‘promised assistance from natives and will get on to job straight away’.16 An undated and unsigned nine-point agreement between the government and the film studio seems to have been an outcome of this particular meeting: Conditions under which the Board is willing to co-operate with the Ealing Studios for the employment of aborigines for the purpose of making a film at Quorn. Satisfactory rail transport from Ooldea and return be provided. Clothing for all men, women and children travelling to Quorn be provided. Camping tents, utensils, blankets etc. be supplied for the protection of the natives. The Commissioner of Police be requested to provide police supervision at the Camp, particularly during the first three
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weeks of the film making activities. Mr H. E. Green or other suitable person be asked to live at the Camp as a Welfare Officer, and to assist as interpreter, etc. Three meals of good quality to be provided daily for all aborigines. At the completion of the work remuneration for all adults employed at the rate of £2/-/- per week to be paid to the Board for administration. All expenses in connection with the project to be borne by Ealing Studios. It is distinctly understood the Aborigines Protection Board is unable to guarantee that the aborigines will keep an appointment at the train if transport can be arranged, or that they will not leave before the work is completed. According to draft versions of this document, item 7 originally read: ‘At the completion of work some remuneration for all adults employed be paid to the Board for administration.’ A handwritten amendment dated 24 March clarified: ‘It was decided to ask for an allowance of £2/-/- per week for each adult engaged.’17 The key point here is that the Aborigines Protection Board would decide which actors would be paid with wages rather than their being paid directly by the studio, which, in this document at least, had agreed to cover all expenses. It is the handling of these wages, and the related matter of government provisions for Aboriginal people, that provides the greatest insight into the South Australian Government’s developing commitment to the promulgation of assimilationist policies and practices, a policy understood as addressing the contingencies of consumption (welfare and feeding) and production (wages and labour). A cable from the Agent-General in London—sent on 26 March and received in Adelaide on 28 March, augured well, but it suggests that the London office had not been apprised of the detailed arrangements with Ooldea Mission:
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Reference to T.D. No.65 conference held yesterday with Director Ealing Studios. They are favourably impressed with Wilpena Pound as location for Robbery Under Arms. They also suggest their Australian representative might use location for Bitter Springs film if it is possible for you to arrange sufficient number of Aborigines. Ealing Studios suggests that you contact their agent as soon as possible. And there was still a crucial sticking point for Ealing: the question of Aboriginal remuneration. The beginnings of discontent can be heard in a short note written by the Premier’s secretary to Baker ‘for his information’: ‘With reference to your telephone message on Friday last, the Premier concurs in the suggestion that the Aborigines Department should be responsible for the organization and care of the natives and that the Film company pay the Department expenses incurred.’18 A further telegram to Ealing’s Eric Williams from Baker relayed this view: ‘Government prepared accept full responsibility Aborigines maximum cost to you £1,800 stop …’19 This figure of £1,800 was expected to cover ‘expenses entailed in assembling, clothing, maintaining and supervising the required number of aborigines at Quorn’.20 Meanwhile Baker carefully argued a different point of view to cabinet: ‘The studios point out that if the picture were made in Queensland they would be put to no expense in connection with the use of the aborigines, and ask whether the Government is prepared to waive this charge.’ He continues: In considering the proposal from a publicity angle, I am quite convinced that the value to South Australia would be many thousands of pounds. The Studios have promised that in the initial stages of the film the co-operation of the South Australian Government will be acknowledged, early scenes located at Adelaide will be named and reference will subsequently be made in the film to the Flinders Ranges as the location. These references will definitely tie up the picture with this state … I therefore respectfully RECOMMEND that Ealing Studios be advised that there will be no charge for the use of the aborigines, and that this department
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accepts debit for an amount of up to £1,800 to be paid to the Aborigines Department from the Vote ‘Advertising the State’.21 Baker’s recommendation was approved, and he immediately wired Eric Williams: ‘Urgent Telegram Government agreed provide aborigines without cost to you stop advise decision early as considerable organisation necessary.’22 And so, on the following day, April Fool’s Day, 1949, Ealing finally confirmed its South Australian venture: ‘Thanks cable stop Government’s fine gesture very much appreciated and enables me to state definitely that our next production will be located in SA stop Rix will meet you Monday next and suggest letter of introduction from Premier’s Department would assist his preparatory work on location area stop Thanks regards Eric Williams (Rix)’23 But Ealing’s requirements for Aboriginal actors had not yet been met, and it was later reported that additional indigenous participants would be sought for the production. A telegram sent to Ealing on 26 May described a distinct reluctance on the part of would-be recruits: ‘Twenty men still in camp stop only 3 desire go Quorn.’ What all this maneuvering suggests is that both parties to the agreement argued the value of the Aboriginal South Australians’ participation in primarily political terms: what they would add to the ‘prestige’ of the production, to the ‘promotion’ of the state. The added value of Aboriginal participation was not in question. The material value of the actors, on the other hand, was entirely negotiable. There were two specific issues to be agreed upon: the total amount of money that needed to be considered, and the way in which this remuneration would be accounted. Should the cost of employing Aboriginal actors be measured in terms of a labour cost (as calculated by the filmmakers) or as government expenses incurred by the Protectorate? The answer to this question and the precise administration of these monies proved the extent to which both Ealing and the government benefited from the unfolding practices of assimilation for Aboriginal people. For Ealing, the benefits were obvious. Overall, Bitter Springs was estimated in the press to have cost Ealing in the order of £10,000. The cost of ‘assembling, clothing, maintaining and supervising’ the Ooldea actors in Quorn was entirely covered by the South Australian Government. Cabinet had approved expenditure up to £1,800, but
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these costs spiralled to more than £2,800 by the close of production, less the £200 Ealing agreed to reimburse after a change of plans incurred additional costs. The final figure of £2,648 represents almost 20 per cent of the film’s estimated budget. This was not only a major financial bonus for Ealing but also had an added bottom line benefit in that the Aboriginal actors were also expected (without further payment) to tend to the 500 sheep on set. Ealing was further assisted by the government in relation to the issuing of petrol rations, the waiving of border duties and the arrangement of rail transport for non-indigenous personnel.
The recipe Ingredients: 1 trek (with sheep), 1 Rafferty, 1 shy young love affair (blond), 1 kangaroo gambol, 1 displaced comedian, 3 or 4 wide open spaces, 1 aboriginal tribe; mix none too well, pepper with kindness, and serve slowly. As a recipe film Bitter Springs is partly redeemed by its aborigines, who not only behave naturally, but make one wish the whole piece had been given over to them. William Whitebait, review of Bitter Springs24
Although generally adopted as a policy for Aboriginal governance in 1951, assimilation was not formally defined by its government proponents until a 1961 meeting of federal and state government ministers.25 Throughout its own history the term has proved to be an elusive one, perhaps better understood as both the cause and effect of various government policies and practices towards Aboriginal people during the post-war period. What these practices share is the value of social conformity, itself resting on the belief that the majority will necessarily absorb the minority and that policies promoting social change always describe a forward momentum towards the majority. It is certainly difficult to determine what exactly was practised in the name of assimilation; however, such practices ranged from the government’s abduction of Aboriginal children of ‘mixed-race’ parentage to the organisation of rations and welfare.26 Describing the policy in a speech in 1952, Paul Hasluck could not resist an alimentary reference when explaining assimilation’s relation to government: ‘Advanced
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tentatively fifteen years ago it has now been accepted formally—even if not fully ingested intellectually—by all Australia Governments who have the administrative care of aborigines.’27 The term ‘assimilation’ was initially used in the Australian context by A. P. Elkin (a ‘scientific expert, clergyman and publicist’) in 1938 in the wake of a 1937 conference of ‘Aboriginal Department’ heads who collectively proposed a policy of cultural absorption for ‘mixed bloods’ (also known as ‘part-Aborigines’).28 ‘Full bloods’ would remain segregated in reserves. Under the portentous title ‘Destiny of the Race’, the ‘Protectors’ declared their belief ‘that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end’.29 The immediate effect of this conference in South Australia was the establishment of the Aborigines Protection Board, consisting of six members and the Minister of Public Works, and which was charged with ‘the duty of controlling and promoting the welfare of aborigines’.30 The staff of the Aborigines Department carried out the work of the board. The head of this department (who, during the period of Bitter Springs’ production, was W. R. Penhall) was referred to as the secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board. Of the board’s six members, the secretary was the only person who formally worked with Aboriginal people. The board, despite its titular commitment to ‘protection’, was from its inception oriented to achieving some form of ‘assimilation’ for Aboriginal people. In policy terms, the word ‘protection’ had meant (since the nineteenth century) the segregation of Aboriginal people from non-Aboriginal Australians—to ‘protect’ them from the influence of non-Aboriginal culture. ‘Assimilation’, a term that embraces a kind of aspiration for homogeniety, initially rested on conceptions of partiality (and by implication ‘fullness’) as they were seen to apply to genealogy and race. But by 1951 a conference of Commonwealth and State ministers, convened by the newly appointed Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, addressed the idea of differences of kind (in the terminology of ‘blood quantum’—as full- or part-blood, for example) and replaced them with differences of degree: The Commonwealth and States having assimilation as the objective of native welfare measures, desire to see all
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persons born in Australia enjoying full citizenship. We recognise that some of the barriers against the enjoyment of all the privileges of citizenship today are not legal but social barriers. These citizens will only enjoy the privileges of citizenship if they can live and work as accepted members of the community.31 Assimilation itself was eventually defined in 1961 in the following terms: ‘The policy of assimilation seeks that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain a similar manner and standard of living to that of other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community—enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities and influenced by the same hopes and loyalties as other Australians.’32 But even the primary architect of assimilation, Paul Hasluck, found some difficulty with the term, especially in relation to its understanding of homogeneity and difference, and wrote many years later: ‘Labels have their uses but the reader should remember that they are stuck on the outside of a box and are not part of the contents. “Assimilation” is one such label. It is the label to describe a destination but not a label to describe the policy by which that destination might be reached.’33 Tim Rowse, in his study of assimilationist policies and practices in Central Australia, White Flour, White Power, notes the contradictions entailed in attempting to capture accurately the parameters of the term ‘assimilation’: An historical understanding of ‘assimilation’ must first admit to its heterogeneity, in two senses. First there is the moral incoherence … ’assimilation’ both wooed and compelled, invited and manipulated, offered to forgive Aborigines their heritage while exonerating the colonists’ dispossessing and genocidal actions. Urged to ‘forget the past’, Aboriginal people found that their predicaments were nonetheless determined by their colonial history. Second, assimilation policy was heterogeneous in the range of continuing practices that it encompassed. Not only did a new doctrine stimulate new practices of government, it gave sanction to the continuation of older ones.34
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Jeremy Beckett has also described some of the contradictions of assimilation, specifically as a dissonance between theory and practice: ‘It used the goal of eventual entry into the community as a justification for segregating Aborigines on settlements, and the goal of eventual citizenship as a justification for curtailing civil rights.’35 Bitter Springs set out to be a film about (the inexorable drive towards) assimilation, perhaps revealing rather than revelling in the ‘moral incoherence’ Rowse identifies. But Bitter Springs also gave sanction and opportunity to practices of government that contributed directly to the assimilationist rhetoric the filmmakers might otherwise have sought to put at arm’s length. As the South Australian Government perceptively put it in their letter to the Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity Association of Australia cited earlier, the goal of Aboriginal assimilation would result not simply as an effect of the film’s exhibition but also from the Aborigines’ association with the production. It is the way assimilation informed the administrative arrangements for the Ooldea actors on the set of Bitter Springs that is most revealing about both the government and the film studio’s approach to the policy. These arrangements, in particular the provisions made for salaries and rations, position the film squarely at the forefront of assimilation practices. Tim Rowse’s White Flour, White Power presents a detailed history of the development of assimilation as a system of governance. For Rowse, the practice of assimilation in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century is specifically defined by its attempts to account for and to regulate the feeding of Aboriginal people, initially through direct rations and then through cash payments that could be used by recipients to purchase food. For Rowse, a major goal of assimilation was to replace rations with cash: ‘The assimilationist intention—to induce Indigenous people to adopt the same way of life as the colonists—required some reworking of these rationing regimes, and eventually their supercession, as cash was substituted for rationed goods. The recipients of rations were conceived as being entitled to cash as they cast off their traditional and acquired behaviours and beliefs to adopt “better” ways.’36 According to Rowse, there is a fundamental non-reciprocity at the heart of the rationing relationship. Rationing established orderly frontier routines, but these did not necessarily include shared
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understandings. Rationing was an ‘undemanding’ basis for crosscultural relationships between Aboriginal people and settlers (pastoral or government) in that it did not require mutual understanding.37 In this sense, the rationing process afforded donors of rations the opportunity to construct a notion of the recipient’s agency, and indigenous recipients could maintain their own understanding of the rationing process. What is actually ‘rationed’ is a capacity for agency, a point made forcefully by Rowse: ‘In particular the knowledges associated with rationing have included speculative constructions of the nature of Indigenous agency.’38 With this observation in mind, Rowse identifies an unfolding anxiety around assimilationist discourses for its government proponents: how might the ‘privilege’ of receiving rations (unburdened by ‘obligations’) be misconstrued as ‘rights’? At what point might those receiving rations understand that reception in terms of their specificity, of (political rather than economic) ‘rights’ earned?39 If rationing had the effect of defining Indigenous recipients (to themselves as much as anyone), then it also might assist in creating a distinct political (rather than cultural) identity. As such, the practice of rationing could be seen to operate against the terms of the Commonwealth’s newfound assimilation policies, based as they were on the assumption that all Australians were formally identical in their rights and obligations (although Aboriginal people would be denied full legal citizenship until 1967). As a result of these anxieties, the Commonwealth initiated a staged transition from a ration-based to a cash-based relationship with Aboriginal Australians. In graduating Aboriginal Australians towards participation in a cash economy, the Commonwealth hoped to eventually confer a type of Australian citizenship along with the reciprocal expectations of ‘earning’ and obligation. It is precisely in the centre of this transition from rations to cash that the producers of Bitter Springs found themselves, as both a matter of representation and organisation. Bitter Springs is subversive in its explicit depiction of assimilation as a self-serving economic relationship that satisfies the desire of pastoralists for cheap labour. But what the South Australian Government archives reveal is that this was also Ealing Studios’ desire as an employer of Aboriginal labour and that Ealing Studios and its representatives were active beneficiaries of assimilationist policies and practices, particularly in the organisation of rations and wages. In this context for understanding the treatment
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of indigenous people in the production of Bitter Springs a series of controversies erupted over the film.
Passing the buck—government scandals Whose life is worth more—yours or the sheep? Wayne, The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933)40
How much then is a man better than a sheep? Matthew 12:12 (King James)
The first controversy involved the literal passage of Aborigines from the Ooldea ‘feeding and mission’ station to Quorn, where the film was shot. The actors’ troubles began before the cameras even began to roll. Poorly transported to the set (travelling over vast distances in substandard, open rail carriages), they were further insulted when, on arriving in Quorn during a rare and ominous storm, they were hastily accommodated in the refreshments room of the local sports oval— sleeping on bitumen floors in appallingly cramped conditions. So although Bitter Springs was intended to sympathetically portray the plight of Aborigines dispossessed by white colonists, the producers and the South Australian Government (specifically represented by the Aborigines Protection Board) came under fire for their poor treatment of the Aboriginal actors engaged to perform in the film. The journey from Ooldea to Quorn was made in three stages lasting from the early evening of 15 May until midnight on 17 May. Although the South Australian Government paid for second-class rail fares (for passenger cars that were to be added to what was ostensibly a goods train, otherwise known to those who lived along the track as the ‘Tea and Sugar’), the Aboriginal passengers were forced to spend the two days in what was described by the media as ‘cattle trucks and a dog-box’. And although it was known in advance when they would be arriving—an enthusiastic cohort of spectators and press had assembled for their arrival—no accommodation had been arranged for them. A letter of agreement from F. O. Skinner (of the Commonwealth Railways) grants supply of two TBP-type passenger cars, each able to seat forty-six persons (which amounts to less than the total number of passengers travelling), charging the Protectorate the ‘ordinary fares’ of 58s. 4d. per adult and 29s. 2d. per child under 14 years of age (one
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way).41 Despite this agreement, only one of the old-type passenger cars arrived; the remainder of the Aboriginal actors being forced to travel for two days in two covered vans without seating, sanitary and washing facilities or lights. A report on the brewing scandal was hastily commissioned by the federal Minister for the Interior (Mr Johnson) from the Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (Mr P. J. Hannaberry). This report suggests that in his initial enquiry into travel facilities for the Aborigines’ journey, Penhall had himself suggested that ‘covered goods vans would be suitable’, although this doesn’t appear to be the case according to the government’s own documentation. Lights, the report said, were not provided as it was felt that it would be inadvisable in the interests of the natives to provide lamps. The second passenger car had not been used for the Aboriginal actors, according to the report, as it was occupied instead by the missioner and because of the railways’ desire to keep separate accommodation for any non-indigenous people who might wish to travel on the train. A critical newspaper report added wryly that only ‘one white family joined the train between Ooldea and Port Augusta’.42 These issues were raised in the Commonwealth Parliament as questions to the Minister for the Interior, who disavowed responsibility for the treatment of the Ooldea people (attributing it instead to the South Australian Government). In relation to the poor transport facilities, the minister claimed that ‘they were transported in vans which had been used for the tranport of Australian soldiers during the war’ and that no sanitary conveniences were necessary because of the ‘frequency of stops at each of which points such conveniences are available’.43 He went so far as to issue a press release on this matter. The deputy director of the Publicity and Tourist Bureau claimed that the circumstances behind this disastrous situation ‘were beyond the control of anybody’.44 The News reporter on the scene, Cyril Burley, an outspoken critic of the treatment of the Ooldea actors, countered: ‘My view is that if the weather is beyond anybody’s control, some provision should be made against its vagaries.’45 Burley himself came under attack from embarrassed government officials, which caused public figures such as Charles Duguid to rise to the embattled reporter’s defence. Even his own newspaper felt the need to editorialise on his (and the Aborigines’) behalf:
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Whatever officials may say the public is still far from satisfied about the treatment of film natives at Quorn last week. Officials said on Saturday that in their opinion, the treatment of the 115 aborigines was satisfactory … A staff representative of ‘The News’ was present at Quorn while the natives were offloaded in the rain into open trucks and driven to the oval where they sheltered all night in a refreshment room. He saw the conditions; the officials who say conditions were satisfactory did not. The reporter says: ‘I should have liked the officials to have been at the oval while natives huddled miserably under blankets in the draughty refreshment room or stood in wet clothes round an open fire before a tarpaulin was erected.’ The big question, of course, is whether the arrangements at Quorn would have been considered satisfactory if the 155 men, women and children had been white people.46 And what of Ealing during this fracas? The film producers simply publicly reiterated their contractual agreement: that they took no responsibility for the treatment or living conditions of the Aboriginal actors. Ealing had agreed to shoot Bitter Springs in South Australia only if the State Government covered all the costs and provided for any additional needs associated with the inclusion of Aboriginal actors in the production—a fact later denied in Parliament but evident in government records of the transaction, as we have seen. Premier Playford, answering questions in Parliament more than a year later about the contracting of Aborigines for the yet-to-be-released Twentieth Century Fox production Kangaroo, clearly misrepresents Ealing Studios, suggesting that they paid the government without question (probably in order to exonerate the later production arrangement with Twentieth Century Fox): The Hon. T. Playford—The use of aborigines in the film ‘Kangaroo’ will be very limited: I believe they will only be required for one brief shot. I assure the honourable member that this matter has already been discussed between the
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promoters of the film and the Protector of Aborigines, and there is no desire on anyone’s part to exploit the natives, nor was there any desire to do so during the previous film [Bitter Springs]. For the previous film the promoters paid without question the amount asked for by the Aborigines Protection Board.47 Even after the debacle of their arrival, the Aborigines’ accommodation proved less than satisfactory. An undated handwritten letter from the Ooldea missioner Harrie Green to Penhall—probably written in the week after shooting started on Friday 20 May—suggests that poor weather and accommodation was a continuous issue for the Aboriginal cast of Bitter Springs: ‘30 tents came but only 27 were erected because they only sent poles for 27 and the rest are without [indecipherable] and no tent flys [sic] came at all and water has run through some of them.’48 The Ooldea missioner from 1935–52, Harrie Green, found small cause for optimism amid the disastrous treatment of the Aboriginal actors, being quoted in the press as hoping that ‘the publicity given to the shameful treatment of natives on the trip would arouse more public interest in and sympathy for aborigines generally’.49 The scandal that erupted after the arrival of the Aboriginal actors in Quorn continued in the press and parliament for weeks after the commencement of shooting. The South Australian Government received concerned letters demanding explanation from groups like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of South Australia and the Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity Association of Australia. The Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity Association of Australia were also particularly interested in the wage conditions for Aboriginal actors: ‘We also ask that all artists, extras, and supernumeraries taking part in the production of “Bitter Springs”, irrespective of their race, colour, or creed receive not less than the rates of pay as set out in our agreement with Ealing Films.’50 At the precise moment the Ooldea actors were shivering on the Quorn oval, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) put a claim before the Full Arbitration Court requesting that the basic wage be lifted to £10 per week (an increase of £2). According to wage records, the Ooldea missioners were paid £5 per week. The work of the Ooldea
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actors performing in Bitter Springs was valued at £2 per week, but not all the actors received their wage in cash or at all. In its presentation, the ACTU also signalled a claim of equal pay for the sexes.51 Interestingly enough, Aboriginal women performing in Bitter Springs were ‘paid’ the same amount as men, although when the same actors were engaged to perform for Kangaroo the women were paid only half the salary allocated to male actors. Government payslips for Bitter Springs describe the men as ‘labourers’; the women were simply described in singular as ’woman’. In practice, only some of the Aboriginal actors were paid cash wages and, according to records of correspondence with the Protectorate, the remainder did not always receive the rations they expected. Prompted by several memos from the Ooldea missioner, Harrie Green, the government organised payment in early July.52 A government memo dated 4 July 1948 records the release of funds for the film actors: ‘Money released by SA Government Publicity and Tourist Bureau to the Aborigines Department for £600/-/- as payment for wages due to sixty adult aborigines engaged on the production of the film “Bitter Springs” at Warrens Gorge, Quorn @ £2/-/-/ each week.’53 As already noted, more than sixty adults were on the set in Quorn so it is clear that not everybody received cash wages for their labour. Determining who would be paid was a matter of some negotiation between the Protectorate and Harrie Green. Before filming, on 15 June, Green had written to Penhall about the organisation of payment to the actors from Ooldea: The men from the Coast and others who are civilised enough to enquire are still asking me if they will be payed [sic] and I have said yes and these men say they want to be payed when they leave there, which I think is only right. I am afraid if anything otherwise were to happen now especially now that the working men from the Coast have come, there would be great dissatisfaction among the people. The home children have been and as yet, are needed to participate in the film Mr Smart informs me today. There [sic] payment could come to the mission for better facilities etc in the Home. I think the money could be handed gradually to the camp bush uncivilized people to
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purchase food or clothing as they wish if you would alow [sic] me to do this. I think is [sic] the only fair and suitable way to give them the payment promised to them to me and will result in real satisfaction to all I am sure. In order to further assist the government in determining who should receive cash wages, Harrie Green divided the list of participating Aboriginal actors into two groups: those who understand the value of money (and who should thus be paid in a lump sum)—‘those who are civilized and work for a living and know the value of money for whom I recommend full payment be made in a lump sum.’ This group comprised twenty-two men. The second part comprises of those who are not civilized and who do not know the value of money and who if they received it all in a lump would probably be robbed of most of it by others and so loose [sic] the value and benefit of it. For these I would suggest they get some now and an extra lot of clothing and the remainder I would be willing to take care of for them and make purchases for them of [indecipherable] good or money for extra food at varying intervals.54 This group comprised thirty-six men and twenty-seven women. Penhall accepted Green’s recommendation that this group be paid a small amount of money at the completion of their work with the balance be made available in ‘cash or kind as necessity dictates’.55 Green also distinguishes the Ooldea group from ‘the 2 natives from the Eastern states’: Henry Murdoch and Clyde Combo. Documents held in the Actors’ Equity archives suggest that the form and amount of payment to Henry Murdoch was also contentious. The union’s newsletter Equity noted that, of the £14 to which ‘Murdock’ (sic) was entitled, he was paid only £6 per week, two of which he received personally and the other four of which was paid to the Queensland Department of Native Affairs to be credited to him.56 Green’s copious correspondence was not entirely selfless. He was himself at loggerheads with the Aboriginal Protectorate over his own salary of £5 per week. In a brusque letter written some time in the first week of filming (and possibly after he had learned what other
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non-indigenous personnel on set were earning) Green complains that he had agreed to his position under a misapprehension, having been deviously misled by Penhall and discovering only by accident that the period of employment would be eleven rather than three weeks: As I told you in Melbourne, I was not at all anxious to take this job which is practically a day and night one. Caring for the native people and assisting the Film Producers. But I was willing to do it to help you out and in so doing to expect fair treatment. … [Told the job would last three weeks] … When reading the correspondence in your office I found it to be eleven weeks, I decided unless some change came I would resign and go back to my wife and finish our holiday. The government then attempted to negotiate with Green. But his response was adamant: Mr Bray reassured me on certain points and asked what I expected—I said at least £10 and keep or expenses … But if you are not satisfied to give me a fair deal I am quite ready to resign … I don’t think you really appreciate the work and responsibility which such a work as this entails. Apart from this I am quite happy to spend and be spent on behalf of the natives. Penhall eventually relented and offered Green £7 per week to stay on, which seems to have been acceptable. In comparison with the complexity of arrangements for Aboriginal payments, Green was the least of Penhall’s problems. When the government disbursed wages to Aboriginal actors on the set it also undertook to organise for goods such as clothes and food to be made available for sale. For example substantial arrangements were made for clothes to be available for purchase on 3 October in preparation for pay day the next day. An invoice addressed to the ‘Aborigine’s [sic] Protectorate’ from J. Craven & Co. and titled ‘Wages, Bitter Springs’ itemises the supply of twenty-seven frocks two vests at 4s. 2d. less 25 per cent discount to the film set.57 It was also clear that the Ooldea actors were not entirely free to purchase according to their
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own needs or desires. A letter from Penhall to Sergeant Kitchen at the Quorn police station identifies the government’s limits when it came to encouraging indigenous ‘purchase power’. In the letter, dated 2 November, Penhall informs the sergeant that Jack Rix had purchased a gun for an Aboriginal actor (Peter) ‘on the understanding that Peter would pay for the gun when he received his wages’. Penhall continues: ‘The Board, having decided that it is undesirable for aborigines to have firearms, and in consequence had arranged for the guns [sic] to be sold, I suggest that you return to Mr Rix the gun provided by him for Peter, who has not made any payment to Mr Rix.’58 Aboriginal labour on Bitter Springs was not simply meant to be instrumental but was associated with ideas about possessive individualism and the acquisition of behaviours of ‘ordered conduct’; in other words, the product of labour was far less important than its organisation. In withholding money from some actors, the government was attempting to ‘educate’ Aborigines about money, particularly its uses for saving and consumption.59 In the same year that Bitter Springs was testing the theory of assimilation as a move from rations to cash wages, T. H. Marshall advanced the argument that the very idea of citizenship in Australia had been historically premised on criteria that privileged wageearners. Given this history, he believed the State’s obligation was to preserve the conditions of employees and their families by protecting jobs through creation schemes or taxation measures in what Marshall called a ‘wage earners’ welfare state.60 For Marshall, the notion of civil ‘rights’ was based on an individual’s capacity to earn. The goal of assimilation was to encourage a type of cultural invisibility for Aborigines by dangling the offer of ‘citizenship’ in exchange. In making this ‘offer’, Australia could turn its back on the past and become a new classless, homogeneous, mono-cultural society. Citizenship and homogeneity were linked not just as a cultural aspiration of assimilationist policy but as an economic aspiration as well. The development of the welfare system within the period of assimilation emphasised the provision of rations as a form of payment. In shifting the perception of rations from a matter of charity to the product of a relationship of obligation, the government initiated a policy of disbursement on the basis of a logic of deprivation and exchange. To use rations as a form of payment for labour, for example,
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meant that the government had to withhold rations from the ablebodied who would not work. It’s important to remember that in 1949 rationing was still a widespread social fact in Australia, a product of post-war shortages in the supply of basic goods across the country. Petrol, for example, was available only to those who held ration cards. For non-indigenous Australians, ration cards were ‘earned’ through citizenship and citizenship was ‘earned’ through labour as a set of abstract social exchanges. For indigenous Australians, these relationships were less abstract. Rations were allocated on the basis of actual work on Bitter Springs. Nevertheless, this was a situation in which old practices and new practices existed alongside each other. Even the director of the Protectorate could see the contradictions entailed in the ration arrangements for the Aboriginal actors working on Bitter Springs. A letter from Penhall to the Deputy Director of Rationing dated 15 June 1949 requests a permit to enable him to procure thirty pounds of tea for the Ooldea actors: ‘These natives have not been provided with ration cards, and are dependent on this department for sustenance.’ It is, however, the matter of withheld wages (promised as rations) that proved to be more controversial than the cash payments made to some of the actors.
‘Food is not feed’—managed consumption Three square meals a day? Tommy, Bitter Springs
The natives are having meat three times a day—a luxury for them. Advertiser (Adelaide), 20 May 194961
Before Christmas in 1949, an exchange of letters between Green and Penhall attrempted to resolve how the monies held back from Aboriginal actors would be administered. The Protectorate suggested that they might be spent on Christmas treats. Green replied to Penhall in a letter dated 6 December 1949, using the opportunity to describe the conditions in the camp: Dear Sir, I thank you for your letter and suggestion for Christmas re using money due to the natives for work on the film Bitter Springs—64 as per list—£12 due to each.
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Two of the women are permanently at the Coast, Inyeelunga and Yinbardie who calls herself Shirley Young. Shirley Young is working somewhere about Coorabie and wrote to me asking for £2 from the £12 due to her and I have not replied because I did not have the money and she did not give any address except the post mark was Corrabie WC. That leaves 62 of 64 people—37 men and 25 women. They have not any changes of clothing having shored up with the others we would suggest that each man be sent 2 pairs of trousers and 2 shirts … Perhaps you could send a tin of meat each as we have no goats to kill this year. They died and were killed by dogs during our absence this year so that there are only about 10 goats left and I usually kill 4 goats and cut up for the people with potatoes and onion for Christmas dinner. Meat of some kind would be a great help and is a real need. Would you also send us a luxury for them 80lbs of Cake for Christmas. You could order and send any time now. Kind regards Yours faithfully Harrie E Green PS A tomahawk each for the men would also give them great delight. HEG62 Despite the correspondence between Green and Penhall, many actors believed they had not received the compensation to which they were entitled. This is especially apparent in the records of direct mail between members of the Ooldea community and the Protection Board, such as this letter from Fred Winlas, one of the Aboriginal actors who worked on Bitter Springs, to Penhall: Penong 10/2/50 Dear Sir, Will you please send my cloths [sic] up, and to the other natives up here, for the money kept back from the picture business of Quorn.
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We have no water at Penong only what Mrs Nieass gives us, and her water is getting low. Can you help us please. From Freddy Winlas Left Hand Fred63 A later letter from Harrie Green to Penhall dated 25 May 1950 (almost a year to the day after the controversial arrival at Quorn) restates the problem: Dear Sir, May I suggest that some of the money still held for the natives who acted in ‘Bitter Springs’ be used to by [sic] extra blankets for each of them besides those supplied by your department. I am sure they would greatly appreciate this.64 These lingering unresolved claims over compensation were given added impetus when the film was released in August 1950. In particular, it was the parliamentary critics of Bitter Springs who sought to directly expose the conditions experienced by the actors from Ooldea both on set and on their return and, more broadly, the unresolved and often contradictory role of rations and wages in the unfolding of assimilation policies. Their local member, Mr Riches, was especially vocal in the defence of the actors and instituted a long-running parliamentary debate that began on 8 August following the premiere of the film: Mr RICHES— … Undoubtedly the aborigines were the stars of the film and it would not have been out of place had they received the star’s salaries, running into big sums, instead of some of the other actors. Mr Christian—What did they get—tea and sugar? Mr RICHES—Tea, sugar and shelter—something they have not enjoyed since … At present they are not well fed. I know their meat ration was increased, but it is still not nearly enough to live on. Even the Aborigines Protection Board which distributes the food says they should supplement their ration by hunting; but there is nothing at Ooldea to
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hunt, and no means of supplementing their ration there. They have no employment at Ooldea. When they can be taken back to the reserves and encouraged to live in their native state that is the best thing. However with many of them that is impossible. Unfortunately they like white flour and sugar, and the decent thing is to equip them so that they can earn their clothing, sugar and white flour. To keep them in idleness is wrong.65 Earlier Riches had suggested, in yet another culinary metaphor, that ‘idleness eats into character’.66 Riches’ concern here is to test the government’s assimilatory rhetoric; he is certainly worried for the nourishment of the community but concludes by exhorting the government to enable the community to earn the means to feed and clothe themselves. It seems that the mercurial solution proposed by Bitter Springs for Aboriginal people—the sudden transformation to pastoralism—was much more difficult to arrange in practice. Riches is equally concerned with the accommodation arrangements made for the community on their return to Ooldea and presses questions on 23 June, 18 August and again on 30 August. By early November it has become obvious that Ooldea has exhausted its suitability as accommodation. Riches persists, querying the government’s commitment to finding a location, ‘so that the aborigines will have an opportunity to learn sheep husbandry and be taught to be useful citizens’. Several matters gave impetus to the government’s desire to move the Ooldea community to a new location. The stated problem was the environment’s lack of capacity to support human life (limited game and water); another catalyst was internal instability within the United Aboriginal Mission, which adminstered the facility. The second unstated problem lay in the near future: the use of this area and its surrounds for British nuclear testing. Many of the Ooldea people were accustomed to walking their traditional lands before returning to Ooldea for supplies and rations. But once the Australian Government committed to weapons testing in the Maralinga area, the Ooldea community was dispersed to Yalata, a coastal spot miles from the Tjarutja–Maralinga lands in June 1952, twelve months before tests began. The opportunity to continue to observe a traditional lifestyle (including supplementing rations with familar hunting practices) was
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denied twofold, since the community was moved to completely unfamilar ‘grey’ country (not their own red spinifex country) and since the government strictly regulated, over a thirty-year period, any return to the nuclear test sites. Many of the debates concerning the Aboriginal actors of Bitter Springs revolved around the provision or regulation of meat as a form of payment to the actors. At a rhetorical level, the film hinges on a scene of ‘meat’ rivalry (kangaroo or mutton) that is only resolved by the adoption of a managed consumption, whereby access to food— specifically mutton—is the result of a ‘negotiated’ exchange: meat for labour. In this regard, it might be pertinent to observe that up to 1936 it was still possible for Aboriginal Australians to be charged with ‘unlawful possession of meat’.67 As already noted, payment for Aboriginal labour was negotiated and exchanged between the producers and the Publicity and Tourist Bureau and disbursed by the Protectorate. Most of the uncredited Aboriginal actors in the film received a small amount of canned meat and Christmas cake at the end of the year for their energies. This apparent disparity between the claims made for Aboriginal culture in Bitter Springs and their actual treatment in the course of the making of the film was not lost on many observers: Aborigines who played in the film ‘Bitter Springs’ are begging at railway camps along the East-West line, the manageress of the Department of Civil Aviation Hostel at Forrest Western Australia (Mrs L. Clemm) says in a letter to ‘The Advertiser’. ‘It is pitiful to see these people begging for food and clothing,’ her letter adds. ‘Now the film is showing in Adelaide, perhaps it would be well for the public to give a little more thought for the aborigines.’68 Penhall’s response to these claims was published in the press: ‘People are complaining about natives begging on the line, but this is at places in WA. I have no authority to establish ration depots there.’
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Mr Penhall said he had received at varying times letters from the Ooldea Missioner (Mr Green), asking him not to send more rations because store capacity was taxed. … Mr Ralph Smart, director of ‘Bitter Springs,’ had told him he had never seen a group of men strip so uniformly in condition as the natives featured in the film. These natives had not been groomed for the occasion. They had come straight from Ooldea, where they had been provided with Government rations, he said.69 Penhall’s defensiveness indicates the sensitivities around the social experiment of wage payment that was undertaken by the government in Bitter Springs. It also shows how the film’s last-minute assertion that equal access to the means of consumption would arise from mutually productive labour was in fact not so evident in practice. These public debates show the extent to which the disbursement of rations and wages for Aborigines, their living conditions and the cinema were equally implicated discourses during this period in South Australia. These exchanges and those observations made by newspaper correspondents also show how the continued acquisition of nourishment for the Ooldea actors was not just some elaborate metaphor—a fanciful abstraction based on a neat elision between physiological and social need. The case of Bitter Springs demonstrates Rowse’s observation of assimilation: that the distribution of food was an instrumental strategy of governance, in this case by the filmmakers and, more particularly, the Protectorate of Aborigines. On the basis of her research in Central Australia, Annette Hamilton suggests that there is a completely different way of understanding the role of food in the movement of indigenous (and nonindigenous) communities: The twin principles which kept Aboriginal society functioning were the need to find food and the desire to limit effort in doing so—vital elements in a hunting and gathering economy … When the news came that the whites had abundant, if strange, food, more than they could possibly eat, this was like news of Eden—or the super water-hole, in Aboriginal terms. Hence just as they had always moved to
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the sources of food—the ripening figs, the run of witchitties, so they moved to the whites, not in order to take part in white society, not in order to experience social change, but in order to eat the food. … As an Indigenous value, reciprocity has nothing to do with relative need: … you give because it is the right thing to do.70 Rationing, on the other hand, had little to do with reciprocity. Rations purchased acquiescence (an understanding of a relationship not necessarily shared by both parties)—to a new imposed social order.71 Similarly, the government’s ‘rationing’ of the Ooldea actors to the Ealing producers was not an entirely transparent transaction, premised as it was on the expectation of a complex and ill-defined return for South Australia. As already noted in chapters 2, 3 and 4 on The Squatter’s Daughter, the attribution of ability and productivity at the source of authority (and authorship) belies an anxiety around a troubling reversal, the sense of an underlying blindness or disability, a partiality that can never be constituted comprehensively as a point of origin. And so, if there was a blindness on the part of the filmmakers; for thinking that they might themselves lie outside their representations of assimilation, for thinking that they were themselves somehow unassimilable, then their posture of indifference was never convincing to the Aboriginal people employed by them, as the next section demonstrates.
Kangaroo and cattle—a scandal of an other order One very old pioneer on the Darling said to us: ‘I sometimes think the drought came upon the squatters as a retribution for some of the wickedness that has been done.’ C. E. W. Bean72
Oh, I dreamt I shore in a shearer’s shed, and it was a dream of joy, For every one of the rouseabouts was a girl dressed up as a boy Henry Lawson, The Shearer’s Dream (1901)
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So far this story of the production of Bitter Springs has presented its Aboriginal actors as if they were passive participants in a series of institutional scandals, an impression I am anxious to redress. For the indigenous people engaged to perform in Bitter Springs there were also many grievances and unhappinesses that did not go entirely unnoticed at the time. Some sense of these complaints can be heard in comments made by Lorna Grantham, whose husband was an actor engaged to perform in Lewis Milestone’s 1952 Quorn film Kangaroo (and who, it seems, also appeared in Bitter Springs): My old man [promised husband] was in that picture on hill way to Quorn [probably the feature film Kangaroo]—he was in that picture too. My mother’s uncle there too and they was drinking water like that—kapi. He was standing with a woomera. You see him in the film. Everyone was drinking out of the trough then. The trough up there, windmill there. But another lot been go there before but they all get money. My old man speak up for the money. ‘We come a long way to make a picture. You make picture, you been taking pictures, you’ll have to give money out for everybody.’ Kangaroo was sitting down—scratching ‘em [scratching himself under the arms]. Man they doing ‘em [imitating]. Oh! That’s man’s business. Woman not supposed to watch and the kangaroo’s sitting down there scratching. Man doing it, kangaroo doing it. But they watching it in the picture now. Long time ago they not allowed to see it.73 Grantham’s reference to her promised husband’s unhappiness over his employment conditions hints at the ways in which a utopian vision of assimilation was unrecognisable to the indigenous actors appearing in Bitter Springs. It also shows how, for the Aboriginal actors, the filmmakers were implicated by the government’s strategy of graduating the replacement of rations with wages. But what is most extraordinary about this anecdote is the way Grantham actually talks about two films and, more specifically, two scenes from these two films respectively: Kangaroo and its infamous water trough scene and Bitter Springs with its equally controversial kangaroo hunting scene.
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Grantham links the two scenes by addressing two disciplinary movements: one that incriminates the regulatory powers of the South Australian Government, the other that addresses Aboriginal rules of avoidance (such as the restrictions that apply to direct contact between particular community members or regulate access to particular ceremonies). And at another implicit level Grantham links the two distinct films and two apparently unrelated scenes within the pervasive embrace of assimilation—a theoretical notion of assimilation that bears an unspecified relationship to the animal. The scene Grantham refers to from Kangaroo features one of the most astonishing moments of racism in Australian cinema—a scene in which an unidentified indigenous community and a herd of cattle converge on the same water trough from different directions. The Aboriginal people plead with the landowner McGuire (Finlay Currie) for the opportunity to drink. The grazier initially demurs, and it is only with the intervention of his daughter Dell (Maureen O’Hara) that they are permitted to scoop water to their faces. Apparently they are so grateful for McGuire’s small mercy that they promise to make rain for him by performing a corroboree.74 This scene, were it not humiliating enough, then slowly dissolves such that the Aborigines are transmogrified into cattle lapping at the trough. This same scene is described in graphic and offensive detail in the studio’s publicity treatment: Midst dead cattle and kangaroos, frogmouth owls, butcherbirds, dingoes, curlews, kookaburrar [sic] and other denizens of the tortured plain, the party rounds up the remaining stock and heads for the ranch house. Reaching the ranch house water troughs, the party finds a tribe of warlike Aborigines drinking from them. Obviously this will tax the water supply but humanity demands that McGuire let them stay. The ugly black men start a Corroboree, or rain dance. During this Trooper Leonard calls, ostensibly to see if the blacks are causing any trouble, and overhears Matt confiding to Kathleen his discovery of leg-iron marks on Gamble …
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According to veteran film producer and screen writer Ian Jones, the water trough scene was a particularly trying one for the Ooldea actors, who had to stand barefoot for hours in temperatures that exceeded 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Jones particularly remembers them scooping water out of the cattle trough with their shields and standing in the water.75 Throughout the corroboree scene are interlarded images of the station owners sipping tea and providing a running commentary to their international guests on the event unfolding before them. They make special note of the fact that this is a ceremony that is not intended to be viewed by women. For an indigenous audience this is already obvious as the film includes a potent image of the woomera warning—to ensure there are no unintended breaches of the rule of avoidance.76 In Grantham’s account (but not remembered by Ian Jones), a major controversy ensued after Bitter Springs was indiscriminately shown to Aboriginal actors engaged to perform in the later film. Bitter Springs also includes scenes of traditional practice that were not usually intended for viewing by an entire community, a point Grantham is attempting to emphasise. This screening held significant fascination for the press, who explain the ‘excitement’ of the actors in terms of an originary experience: their first view of a cinematic representation of themselves: ‘Film lesson for natives’ Zanuckville, Wednesday—A private screening of ‘Bitter Springs’ was held at Port Augusta Town Hall last night to acquaint aborigines of their work in it for the ‘Kangaroo’ film. It was also to prepare the whole ‘Kangaroo’ company for a corroboree—to be filmed shortly, and to be one of the main ‘Kangaroo’ sequences. Half the aborigines from the Ooldea Mission shouted their heads off when they saw themselves for the first time at the screening. … There were large cheers when the aborigines first appeared on the screen, but the greatest excitement was when the Ooldea aborigines—most of whom had never seen a film before—saw themselves and their friends and relatives giant-sized before them.77
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At one point in Kangaroo, Aboriginal ‘rules of avoidance’ are discussed by the non-indigenous characters in the context of the ceremony’s representation of ‘all the delicacies of the bush’.78 Their assertion that ‘there are things about them we’ll never know’ is counterposed against a white character (Matt played by Charles Tingwell) who knows something about another character that he chooses to keep to himself. The film abounds in these duplicities. Kangaroo, for example, is deeply concerned about the possibility of incest between its two romantically inclined characters: Dell and Dennis aka Richard (Peter Lawford). An incest that only Dennis/Richard, his accomplice in fraud John Gamble (Richard Boone) and the audience knows is never possible. The narrative’s trajectory is premised on the dramatic production of knowledge about the white characters (the unveiling of secrets) and the didactic production of partial knowledges about indigenous culture (the explanation of the corroboree, for instance). In the parched world of Kangaroo, the indigenous community must also commit to another type of productivity if they want McGuire’s charity: they can drink if they make rain. As in Bitter Springs, water is a product, subject to rules of exchange and consumption. Aborigines can drink, but only if they prove to be as economically useful as cattle. And, hence, perhaps one likely interpretation of the appalling dissolve between two groups of would-be drinkers; a dissolve that is actually hinted at a little earlier when we are alerted to the presence of Aborigines by the sudden way in which the cattle stop in their tracks—as if the behaviour of one offers insight into the presence of the other. In Bitter Springs, there is also a fascination with a type of fluidity between human and animal. Like this scene from Kangaroo, the film hinges around the authority to regulate a scarce commodity: water. Wally King determines in the film’s final fleeting seconds to allow the Aborigines to drink (i.e. to stay at the Bitter Springs)—in exchange for their labour in the enterprise of growing wool. The particular episode of the film that Lorna Grantham describes occurs somewhat earlier in Bitter Springs—a scene intended to illustrate the arbitrary ‘laws of avoidance’ imposed by white settlers; that is, you can eat kangaroos but not sheep. The scene depicts a group of Aboriginal hunters stalking a kangaroo. As they approach, one of the group distracts their prey with movements and gestures that the filmmakers present as a direct
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mimicry of the animal. But before the hunters can strike, a gunshot rings out, the kangaroo falls dead and John King emerges from offscreen to claim his quarry from the stunned Karagarni. This scene proved compelling to many white viewers: ‘I have never seen anything more fascinating than the aboriginal kangaroo hunt, in which a gentleman who is presumably a professional kangaroo charmer holds the attention of the unfortunate animal while the huntsmen steal up noiselessly behind it to within spear range.’79 Film critic Reg Whitely went so far as to applaud the kangaroo’s performance: ‘Full marks to an unnamed member of the cast—a kangaroo with a gift for mimicry!’80 Michael Pate also reminisced about the power of this scene: They amazed me. I thought they were wonderful. Particularly that kangaroo hunt. You know the guy playing the other kangaroo—I was wondering whether he was a female kangaroo or a male kangaroo. But whatever he was, he was certainly seducing that one that was finally hit with a spear—or hit with a shot actually when the other people shoot him. I think the whole thing came together as a statement.81 Pate’s confusion over what he describes as a ‘seduction’ that precipitates a further confusion over gender is not as ludicrous as he makes it seem, especially if we take into account the particular placement of this scene midway in the film alongside two other events. These events are presented one after the other in quick succession: • Emma, the ‘lady in trousers’, exchanges garb and dons a dress, finally becoming a ‘woman’, in order to clinch her man (Mac). • Blackjack tries to alert his employers to the plight of the displaced local community only to be told to mind his own business. • The scene of rival kangaroo hunting between the Kings and the Karagarni. There are several possible interpretations of this sequence of events. First, white culture is shown to represent relationships around a structuring difference (man versus woman). Indigenous culture, on the other hand, represents relationships around notions of imitation and similarity. You need to become a kangaroo to catch a kangaroo.
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Second, the sequence contrasts assumptions about an apparent Aboriginal affinity with nature and women’s affinity with artifice. On the other hand, the sequential placement of these scenes could be seen to be metaphorically suggesting that Emma’s manoeuvres are somehow like a culinary operation. Can she have her man and eat him too? Are both protagonists dressed to kill? Or, alternatively, the sequence might take up the idea that becoming is always a process of deterritorialisation. Emma might get her man, but the price is really dispossession—a subjectivity discarded or covered over. Elias Canetti writes about the importance of dissimulation rather than simulation, about the layering of the one within the other in acts of camouflage. For Canetti, the assimilation described by the becoming-animal of the hunter is not about imitating (pretending to be what one is not) but about concealing what one is (although in practice these cannot be easily distinguished): Any hunter has control over himself and his weapon. But a masked hunter also controls the figure of the animal he represents; he has power over both which he exercises continuously. He is, as it were, two creatures simultaneously and keeps a firm hold on both until he has achieved his purpose. The flux of transformations of which he is capable is arrested; he stands on two sharply circumscribed sites, the one within the other. Both are clearly demarcated, but it is essential that the outer one should completely and consistently cover the inner … This duplicity is the extreme form of dissimulation [dissemble]. When the stress is on concealing what one is, rather than on pretending what one is not, the common term is dissimulation; but in practice they can generally not be separated.82 The fascination around what was believed to be an Aboriginal propensity for the theriomorphic (having the form of both human and animal) is long-standing, especially for anthropologists like Emile Durkheim.83 These sequences in Bitter Springs, however, are especially illuminating in unpacking the film’s approach to assimilation (rather than its assumptions about traditional hunting practices). It could be argued that the film suggests the Aboriginal hunters, in their capacity
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for imitation, are particularly suited to the similarly imitative demands of assimilation. In this sense, the most interesting conceptual elision in these films is not that between ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘Man’ or ‘Cattle’ and ‘Aborigines’ but between the imitative and the digestive. And herein lies the kernel of the film’s understanding of assimilation. In Bitter Springs assimilation is equally an alimentary as it is a social or political process. Assimilation is the digestion of difference. It’s incorporation. The apparent contrast and indeed conflict that these scenes identify between Aboriginal and Anglo-Saxon-Celtic cultures in Australia are underlined by a mutual relation to thirst and hunger. Assimilation is depicted as an ‘intestinal economy’.84 Mary Zournazi notes in particular that ‘narratives of food in Australia embody certain consumptive processes that swallow up foreign bodies’.85 Bitter Springs, with its narrative emphasis on culinary conflict and the overriding thirst for fluidity, resorts to a final act of digestion in order to turn itself away from the ‘problems’ or difficulties of consumption and towards the sunny productiveness of agricultural labour. What is extraordinary about both Bitter Springs and Kangaroo (particularly in the terms delineated by Grantham) is their correlative use of animals and Aborigines in a representative strategy designed to highlight a racial difference within the terms of an embracing ontological capacity for similarity. Aborigines are different from nonAborigines because they are prone to acts of ‘likeness’, in the sense that they engage in the performance of ‘likeness’. What is crucial here is the idea of ‘likeness’ and performativity as it pertains to the film’s construction of Aboriginality. In her brief remembrance of the production of Bitter Springs and Kangaroo, Lorna Grantham identifies many key issues raised by these films and their reception; questions concerning the relative ‘use-value’ of the Aboriginal actors and their exclusion from the activity of setting limits and boundaries. A substantial amount of subsequent discussion of Bitter Springs, especially in the South Australian Parliament, revolved around the idea that Aborigines did not appear to possess an adequate ability to perform a useful role for society; a ‘problem’ that its assimilation policies were expected to resolve. The final scene of Bitter Springs grants to the various acts of cultural camouflage that occur in the film a utility—a function, an
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outcome. What we see is not so much a cultural digestion (which implies a type of understanding) but a biological process—an alimentary function—a necessity that reduces us to essences and reiterates fundamental ontological distinctions at the same time. This applies for other forms of the ‘other’ as well. Think of the criminal played by Peter Lawford in Kangaroo, whose heart is in England or on the Continent but whose feet are stuck here; the ‘story of the Australian damned’ who has to be shot to be stilled. Or Emma in Bitter Springs, who needs only the suggestion of the ties of marriage to abandon her cross-dressing ways. And then there are the sheep themselves, who are almost exclusively defined in terms of their disposition to the dinner table (or the proscription against it).
The alimentary and the animal Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry … Emmanuel Levinas86
… nothing tastes better than a tender lamb. Friedrich Nietzsche87
As originary tropes, sheep are representative of both consumption and production. In Bitter Springs the consumption of sheep is a source of murderous conflict between the Karagarni and the Kings. For the white colonists, sheep should be allowed to consume without restriction. Their consumption by humans, on the other hand, must be strictly regulated (in order to preserve their productiveness). Mac defends the sheep killing Karagarni by explaining to Wally, ‘A sheep’s just another animal to them.’ Mac draws here on a deep and defining distinction between the animal and the human in terms of the assumption of the right to consume (and to regulate consumption) and the elaborate regime of ethics that sustains these assumptions. Georges Bataille, for example, defines the animal quite simply in terms of its capacity to eat indiscriminately and without remorse—it chooses other animals (including those of its own kind) for its nourishment, without moral or ethical proscription.88 Friedrich Nietzsche makes a similar point when he notes: ‘There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds that they carry off lambs.’89
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Jacques Derrida extends these observations to wonder what a speculation on the ethical dimensions of eating might reveal about humans. In this context he argues that the name ‘animal’ has been habitually constructed to signify that which may be freely put to death for the purposes of consumption. He adds that a proscription against the eating of animals (as in vegetarianism) works to prove this as well. The cultural and conceptual organisation of the consumption of animals is profoundly related to the constitution of the human. For Derrida, indifference to the animal (a thinking Nothing—rather than ambivalence—a thinking nothing of Nothing) is what configures the human. As David Clark explains it, it is the question of ‘eating’ which Derrida insists must be addressed by philosophers: ‘If we cannot not assimilate the other, and if what “we” are is irreducible to a complex spectrum of incorporation and interiorisation (of which animal sacrifice is but one example) then the need to examine the axioms by which these forms of “eating” are conducted, far from being irrelevant, becomes all the more pressing.’90 Rather than argue that the critical thinker should simply reject the consumption of meat, Derrida seeks first to identify the ‘carnophallogocentric’ discourses that inform the history of philosophy and which have had the effect of: • installing the virile figure at the determinative centre of the subject91 • disempowering those who do not match the beefy appetite of the male subject: that is vegetarians, celibates, homosexuals and some women.92 • killing animals in such a way that putting them to death is not thought of as murder.93 In this sense the Karagarni’s culinary interest in sheep might be viewed as an assertion of their humanity; and Mac’s defence of their actions an attempt to portray them as ‘only human’ after all. Of more interest in Derrida’s terms, however, are the Kings’ attempts to regulate the Karagarni’s appetites—to assert a hierarchy of meat and therefore of those who consume it. Derrida’s comments are also significant in the context of broader philosophical arguments, in particular Heidegger’s belief that animals have no relationship to death (and since they cannot die, they cannot experience the death of others and therefore cannot have remorse or mourn and so on). Heidegger is unequivocal on this:
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The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself.94 Heidegger posits an (admittedly unthought) relation between language and death at the basis of his claims that the experience of dying is an exclusively human one: ‘Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.’95 Derrida’s response to Heidegger is equally adamant: Against, or without, Heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. Although the innumerable structural differences that separate one ‘species’ from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality or bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence, to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the ‘name’ of death as such, nor by the same token, to the other as such.96 For Derrida, philosophy must fully face that fact of the everyday slaughter of animals. The animalisation of humans might well be horrific. But the animalisation of animals is first necessary to complete this rhetorical action. And how are animals animalised? According to Derrida, we eat meat with ‘carnivorous virility’: The question is no longer one of knowing if it is ‘good’ to eat the other or if the other is good to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him … The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this not that, …
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man or animal, but since one must eat on any case and since it tastes good to eat, and since there is no definition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the formulation of these questions in language still give us more food for thought? In what respect is the question, if you will, still carnivorous?97 While serving as a poor defence of meat-eating, Derrida’s theoretical take on assimilation is still worth unpacking. The point is not to agonise over whether we eat (since there is no escape from the fact of eating) but how we eat. For Derrida, eating the other is not an option but a condition of life. Derrida first considers the way animal death is de-negated in philosophy and cultural practice and then questions the ‘executions of ingestion, incorporation or introjection of the corpse … an operation as real as it is symbolic when the corpse is “animal” … a symbolic operation when the corpse is “human” ’.98 Underlying his positions is a concern for the way in which everything seems to bear a potential for assimilation (real or symbolic); a disposition to consumption that remains for the most part unthought. Derrida’s reflections on ontology are not framed exclusively by discourses of production and creativity (constant or otherwise) but are equally informed by acts of consumption (which is what distinguishes him from Deleuze and Guattari, for example). For Derrida, it is not possible to think the animal without first dealing with its consumption. How might the consuming energy of philosophy also reveal its own relationships of interiorisation? What kind of an animal is the philosopher (or the filmmaker, or their audience) and how should they eat? In Bitter Springs, considerations of both symbolic and real assimilations are located at the very heart of a drama and cultural practice centred on nourishment and survival. That this drama concludes by recasting the trope of consumption (assimilation) in an image of agricultural production and cultural reproduction is a source of confusion and disappointment for the film’s critics. Furthermore, both the performative and the digestive are collapsed together in the film by an
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overwhelming desire for social function or utility that informs both the film’s representational and production strategies in relation to indigenous assimilation. This fixation with the (socially) productive in turn dominated the critical reception extended to the Ooldea actors, who were subject to glowing reviews for their apparent ease in front of the camera—an ease that was widely interpreted as indicating a ‘lack’ of performative labour and an innate inclination for mimetic acts. The implicit argument seems to have been that, if they could act so well in films, then they could and should equally perform acts of cultural similarity as required by assimilation itself. In this regard, Bitter Springs shares many of the concerns of a much later film that dwells on the relationship between the culinary and cultural performance: Babe.99
Notes ‘Natives’ trip called “criminal”: Expert’s view’, News (Adelaide), 19 May 1949, p. 2 SRSA GRG 52/90. 2 ‘How people viewed film’, News (Adelaide), 24 June 1950. The mislabelled Aborigines Protection Board came to be known throughout a range of Aboriginal communities as the ‘Aborigines Persecution Board’. 3 South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74 (my emphasis). 4 ibid. (my emphasis). 5 South Australia, Assembly 1949, Debates, p. 137. 6 ‘Mr Playford ”sells” SA film sites’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 2 February 1949, n.p., SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. 7 ‘35 for film unit in north’, Mail (Adelaide), 2 April 1949, n.p. 8 Advertiser (Adelaide), 2 February 1949, n.p. 9 See in particular the memos included in the file SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. 10 News (Adelaide), 24 June 1950, n.p. SRSA GRG 52/90. 11 Paul Hasluck in Australia, House of Representatives 1957, Debates, vol. HR 15 [new series], p. 1226. 12 SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. 13 ‘Screen test for new Australian film’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 17 March 1949, n.p. 14 Urgent telegram, Baker to Eric Williams (South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105). This telegram had been sent hot on the heels of others from Baker and Premier Playford. 15 Ooldea was established in 1916–17 as a water source, then as a construction camp and a siding on the transcontinental railway. Ooldea Soak had previously been an important source of water for the original owners, the Wirangu people, as well as other visiting groups for whom it provided a refuge in times of drought. It was a traditional meeting place, the hub of trade routes extending as far as the Kimberleys. It was also an important ceremonial site for many communities and a scene in which creation 1
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stories were set. Before the construction of the railway, Ooldea had not held its traditional function for some decades. By the time Daisy Bates arrived in 1919, several hundred Aborigines had returned to the site, preoccupied by the passing traffic. These were mostly desert people, and those known as the Ooldea group are in reality a collection of Andagarinya, Pitjantjatjara, Gugada and Ngalia people. In 1933 the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) ran a station at Ooldea until its closure, after substantial public discussion, in 1952 (just before the advent of the Maralinga nuclear testing program). South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau handwritten note signed and dated 22 March 1949 SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. ‘To the Aborigines Protection Board’, from Penhall, 24 March 1949, SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau, 28 March 1949, SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau, 29 March 1949, SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. Letter from A. J. Baker to Minister of Immigration and signed, ‘In Cabinet App’d’, SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. ibid. South Australia Publicity and Tourist Bureau, 31 March 1949, 2.15 p.m, SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. SRSA GRG 7/24/1949/105. (Aptly named) William Whitebait, review clipping dated 12 July 1950 (BFI clippings folder for Bitter Springs). ‘The policy of assimilation seeks that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain a similar manner and standard of living to that of other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community— enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities and influenced by the same hopes and loyalties as other Australians.’ Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 3, 1962–63, p. 651. Paul Hasluck admits to having written in 1952: ‘the policy of assimilation was likely to be assisted in transferring … into suitable institutions and private homes in the southern states ”those light coloured children who have no strong family ties in the Territory”.’ Some years later he further noted: ‘Every decision to send a child south has to be a decision on what is best for the individual child concerned … We should try to ensure that no suitable child is overlooked or held back but the urging of the Administrator should not be such of a kind as to lead them to draft children in mobs like sheep.’ (Shades of Darkness, pp. 121–2.) Hasluck, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 55. The description of Elkin is from Jeremy Beckett, ‘The past in the present; the present in the past: Constructing a national Aboriginality’, in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, Jeremy Beckett (ed.), Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988, p. 204. The policy of ‘absorption’ was agreed to by all states present at the 1937 conference, with the notable exception of Queensland. The Western Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs, A. O. Neville, was a staunch proponent of the policy, arguing: ‘Are we going to
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29
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34 35 32 33
38 39 40 36 37
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have a population of 1 million blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them in our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?’ (Quoted in Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 178.) Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of the Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Canberra, 1937, p. 3, reprinted in Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989, p. 207. Clause 5, Aborigines Act Amendment Act of South Australia, 1939 (SA). Decisions of Commonwealth and State Ministers at the Native Welfare Conference, Canberra, September 1951 (National Archives of Australia, file no. B331.3). Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 3, 1962, p. 651. Hasluck, Shades of Darkness, p. 70. Rowse, White Power, White Flour, pp. 107–8. Beckett, ‘The past in the present; the present in the past: Constructing a national Aboriginality’, pp. 201–2. Rowse, White Power, White Flour, p. 3. ibid., p. 5. ibid. ibid., p. 26. Wayne in Ken G. Hall’s Squatter’s Daughter unpublished screenplay, p. 88. This dialogue was deleted for the release version of the film. Aborigines Department, 24 March 1949, SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. Penhall says in the press that £5 16s. 8d. had been paid for each passenger (Advertiser (Adelaide), 19 May 1949). ‘Railways on aborigines’ train ride’, News (Adelaide), 24 May 1949. See also ‘Railways report on Aborigines’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 25 May 1949, SRSA GRG 52/90. Australia, House of Representatives 1949, Debates (25 May 1949), p. 153. ‘Natives “not misused” ’, News (Adelaide), 12 May 1949, n.p. SRSA GRG 52/90. ibid. ‘Question still to be answered’, News (Adelaide), 23 May 1949, n.p. SRSA GRG 52/90. South Australia, Assembly 1950, Debates (23 August 1950) pp. 379–80. It is disingenuous of Playford to say that the Aborigines would be required only for one brief shot, since he would have been well aware of the studio’s intentions to use them much more substantially and that the producers of Kangaroo had gone so far as to employ anthropologist and sometime filmmaker C. P. Mountford as an Aboriginal ‘expert’. SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. Green quoted in ‘Rail claim on aborigines challenged’, News (Adelaide), 2 June 1949, n.p. SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. Letter dated 2 June 1949, SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. Advertiser (Adelaide), 19 May, p. 3.
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Handwritten letter from Green to Penhall, 28 July 1949: ‘Please send payment soon so as natives can be payed [sic] before Departing.’ 53 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/97. 54 All memos held in SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. 55 ibid. 56 Equity, April 1950, p. 12. Actor’s Equity also lobbied on behalf of other Aboriginal performers appearing in Bitter Springs and Kangaroo throughout 1950 and 1951. 57 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/97. 58 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. 59 For another example of these practices, see Barry Morris, ‘Dhan-gadi resistance to assimilation’, in Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘Settled’ Australia, Ian Keen (ed.), Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988, p. 41. 60 T. H. Marshal, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950. 61 ‘Natives help workmen build camp’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 20 May 1949, SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/74. 62 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/97. The Aborigines Protectorate did eventually forward some processed meat supplies (Imperial Camp Pie, Maxam Lunch Beef and Wham) to Ooldea in early January. 63 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/97. 64 SRSA GRG 52/1/1949/97. At the end of 1951 the department still owed £50 to the Ooldea actors. 65 South Australia, Assembly 1950, Debates (8 August 1950), pp. 218–19. 66 South Australia, Assembly 1949, Debates, p. 136. 67 See Christobel Mattingley and Ken Hampton (eds), Survival in our Own Land: ‘Aboriginal’ Experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836, ALDAA in association with Hodder & Stoughton, Adelaide, 1988, p. 129. 68 ‘Film natives begging on east-west line’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 June 1950, p. 10. 69 Quoted in News (Adelaide), 14 July 1950, n.p. 70 Annette Hamilton, ‘Blacks and Whites: The relationships of change’, Arena 30 (1972), pp. 41–2. 71 Rowse, White Power, White Flour, p. 20. 72 C. E. W. Bean, On the Wool Track, p. 47. 73 Lorna Grantham, in Women of the Centre, Adele Pring (ed.), Pascoe Publishing, Apollo Bay, Vic., 1990, p. 74. Ian Jones does not recall any unhappiness about the screening of Bitter Springs to the Ooldea Aborigines; rather he remembers an exceptionally intense delight: ‘the first dramatic shot of an Aborigine peeping around the corner and the audience just went wild seeing themselves on the screen—they just went off their heads.’ And later, ‘I’m very surprised to hear [Grantham’s] comments—to me they seemed really happy on the shoot.’ (Pers. comm.) 74 Various personnel working on Bitter Springs recall rain dances performed during the production and note the resultant record wet season (Ian Jones, Bud Tingwell—pers. comm.). Photoplayer reported these events: ‘Ealing Studios ran into the worst weather on record while making ”Eureka 52
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Stockade”. History, they thought, was not likely to repeat itself. But it did, and the unit was held up for weeks on end because of the heaviest rain for sixty years. Only the aborigines were jubilant and toasted their official rainmaker, the bearded Kawarie, who had managed to please the rain spirits.’ (Photoplayer, 19 August 1950.) Pers. comm. Later, in almost similar conditions, the crew were shooting footage of a tiger snake, which collapsed from heat exhaustion. On several occasions when I have screened this film and duly cautioned viewers about pending offensive content I have looked up to see up to half my audience leave the room. ‘Film lesson for natives’, News (Adelaide), 17 January 1951, n.p., SRSA GRG 52/90 vol. 2. In stark contrast with the government’s regulation of food for the Aboriginal actors from Ooldea, Kangaroo is remembered by white crew members for its culinary excesses. The film’s publicity material boasts of the catering, which was carried out by a renowned Californian chef with a staff of thirtyseven Australians. ‘Everyone had the highest praise for the food and for the hotel service to each of the twenty-five cabins.’ Ian Jones recalled: ‘The film was renowned for its feasts—at the Christmas cast lunch there were five turkeys left over. During the shoot there were four-course lunches in the middle of the desert—all served by a Sydney restaurateur. At any hour of the day you could get iced juice, iced tea or iced milk! All of it a deliberate waste of money.’ (Pers. comm.) ‘Down Under’ by E. G., Daily Graphic, n.d., n.p., BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder. ‘New films by Reg Whitely’ (no further details), BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder. Michael Pate interviewing Ralph Smart: Oral History, 14 August 1997, National Film and Sound Archive, ID No. AEJ000519 0328654–0003. Canetti, Crowds and Power, p. 370. See, for example, Durkheim’s speculations on indigenous Australian cultures in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by J. Ward Swan, Allen & Unwin, London, 1971. The phrase is from Maria Angel and Zoe Sofia, ‘Intenstinal economies and the aesthetics of specular orality’, Cultural Studies 10, 3 (1996), pp. 464–82. Mary Zournazi, ‘ “The Queen Victoria of bush cuisine”: Foreign incorporation and oral consumption within the nation’, Communal/Plural 4 (1994), p. 79. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 134. ibid. Bataille, Theory of Religion, p. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, Doubleday, Sydney, 1990, p. 178. David Clark, ‘On Being “The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas’ in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 176.
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Derrida in ‘ “Eating well,” or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida’, p. 280. 92 ibid., p. 281. 93 ibid., p. 283. 94 Heidegger, ‘The thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, p. 178. Perhaps it is possible to imagine that without Nothing, animals might become nothing—but this speculation, however tempting, exceeds Heidegger’s intention. 95 Heidegger, ‘The nature of language’, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, p. 107. 96 Derrida, in Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993, pp. 75–6. 97 Derrida, ‘ “Eating well,” or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida’, p. 282. 98 ibid. (my emphasis). 91
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Chapter 7
Rethinking (like) a sheep, acting like a ham
Many Australian people are well accustomed to think about breed, whether in animals or in plants and, for them, the meaning of ‘good stock’ covers not only appearance but performance. Paul Hasluck1
True the human actors weren’t nearly as good as the kangaroos. They lacked the artistry of the uninhibited fauna. Ken G. Hall, on Orphan of the Wilderness2
In these jittery post-millenial times, Australians are increasingly confronted by a series of overcooked nationalisms that face resolutely forwards while simultaneously glancing over the shoulder to better (ac)count backwards.3 Royalists, republicans, racists and reconciliationists alike share a widespread discomfort at our current national practice, which begs a number of tantalising possibilities. Is nationalism something ordinarily practised on Australians by Australians? By others? How might we figure nationalism as a matter for practice? Do we practise nationalism in the sense of rehearsing it—repeating it? imitating it?—grinding it into a state of naturalism such that it is performed without awkwardness? Do we always risk performing our
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nationalisms poorly, unconvincingly, didactically or disconcertingly? Who apprehends our entertainments and bestows on us their recognition? Or do we, in directing our performances towards another, effectively recognise them instead? Chris Noonan’s film Babe is the story of an unassuming pig who, through assiduous practice, overcomes the organic claims of species and attains a state of universal dis-en-genus-ness. Babe was an unquestionably ‘good performer’ for the Australian film industry, with an Oscar, more than $250 million in worldwide box office and a sequel. The film is set in a nowhere land—somewhere that looks like 1930s England and sounds like 1950s America.4 Producer George Miller has said that he would like to have added an extra end-title to the film: ‘shot entirely on location in storybook land’. The popular recognition of this ‘storybook’ place in Australia as Australia says a great deal about the way Australians take a certain pride in the adaptability of our cultural and actual landscape. So Babe is not, as the synopsis suggests, a CSIRO-funded tale of exotic cross-breeding. It is instead more concerned with the issues of value, identity and performance. Babe is a pig who learns to perform like a dog but with individual distinction and difference. In doing so he is able to legitimise his continued participation in a farmyard economy. He is a survivor in a world in which farm animals are governed more by the nature of capital and its distribution of value than by the nature that gave them life. Of course Babe’s fluid identity is premised on a sleight of hand. Babe is not so much a ‘sheep-pig’ as a ‘human-pig’—a nifty elision in which the word ‘sheep’ really masks the film’s anthropomorphic intentions. For Stuart Cunningham, Babe is essentially an identity fable for humans (not pigs). Babe, he says, tells you ‘something fundamental about what it means to be human—you come out of it feeling that it’s wonderful and awful to be a human being. There’s that deep ambivalence of feeling it’s wonderful to be who you are but knowing you’re the product of violence and hatred.’5 Elias Canetti located much of this ambivalence in the historical operations of anthropomorphism itself: ‘The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery. It is as difficult to over-estimate its strength as that of the opposite desire: to turn animals into men.’6
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In Babe, identity is an implicit narrative space forged in the hasty retreat from impending violence. The apparent fluidity that Babe effects in his quest for survival is really a type of textual capriciousness. Babe dangles precariously between interpretive possibilities: animal as man (pig as paragon) and man as animal (pig as pragmatist). The New Yorker put it somewhat more bluntly: ‘If you’re not willing to bend the rules you’re cooked … the moral of Babe after all, is: Whatever works’—a sentiment seemingly adopted by the producers, who used the movie’s characters to sell McDonald’s ‘Happy Meals’ with the unfortunate slogan ‘A little pig goes a long way’.7 Advertisements exhorted parents to ‘Buy one’ and ‘Your kids can pretend they’re Babe’. Moral mutability is easily swallowed, if not so easily digested.8 The apparent merging of identity that occurs in Babe (sheep? pig? dog? human?) is neither a conversion narrative nor a convergence fable; it is really about the benefits of pragmatic identification: a sort of elusivity where ethics are concerned. In refusing to be specific, Babe forges a larger future for himself. This idea has reappeared in some of George Miller’s comments on the film. For example, when questioned about the deliberate fudging of location, Miller loftily replied, ‘Basically I work in a world hyperculture. Babe is a work in the hyperculture.’9 Miller, like Babe, is strategically placed above matters of mere genus, favouring an all-englobing abstraction that cares little for the petty claims of identity but maintains a modicum of respect for capital.
If you can’t eat ’em—join ’em A sheep’s just another animal to them. Mac, Bitter Springs
According to its publicists, Babe is a ‘comic fable about not fitting in and the lengths to which an ordinary pig will go to find acceptance’. In fact, it is about a pig who does not actually learn to ‘fit in’, as they put it, but who garners value and identity through his ability to police the threat of conformity through a form of inter-species reciprocity. The triumphant sheep-dog trials represent a test of definition and its accompanying labour. Apologists for the film celebrate the consensus achieved between Babe and the sheep in finding a mutually satisfactory resolution at the sheep trials. But the underlying rationale is that
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Babe is there to keep the sheep ‘in line’. Babe becomes an agent—a subject and not the object of farmyard economics. The publicists continue, ‘The naïve pig struggles to find a suitable purpose, daring to become, of all things, a sheep-pig.’ Babe must prove that he is not ‘in excess’—he must find a performative function that is less and more than mere ‘ham’. With its themes of maternal loss and the ever-present threat of consumerism, Babe is as much a crisis of the edible as the Oedipal. ‘Through his courage, determination, and love, Babe shows an entire valley that only in the absence of prejudice can one be truly free to soar.’10 The linking of animated animals to the theme of flight is a familiar one. Eisenstein links animation and mobility in his sketchy ode to Walt Disney. ‘Disney’s beasts, fish and birds have the habit of stretching and shrinking. Of mocking their own form … This triumph over all fetters, over everything that binds, resounds throughout …’11 In avoiding the abattoir, Babe must not just change definition, he must be seen to be changing definition. The film asks the audience to extend tolerance towards a certain mobility of definition, but that definition remains based on what Babe is seen to do. In this sense, Babe comes close to encapsulating Judith Butler’s hypothesis that performativity scripts identity.12 But the real absence of specificity must be controlled—it is the sheep who are corralled. As Canetti suggested, the real labour that animals perform for humans is the labour of definition. Babe’s crisis of liminality and productivity is resolved through the consensual production of ordered movement and negotiated performances. Similar issues are treated somewhat differently in other Australian films, such as Strictly Ballroom, for example, or for that matter, Bitter Springs, which, like Babe, resolves its narrative crisis with an image of the performance of labour. But despite this conclusion, speculation about the ‘work’ of the Aboriginal actors in Bitter Springs dominated contemporary discussion of the film.
Performing ‘Aboriginality’ in Bitter Springs The Aboriginal actors engaged to perform in Bitter Springs attracted substantial media and parliamentary interest. The fact that more people turned out for the arrival of the Aboriginal actors in Quorn than for the film’s international stars was a news item repeated in the
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Judy Gainford (Miss Australia 1947)
Figure 89: Bitter Springs—the Adelaide premiere with Premier Sir Thomas Playford, Nonnie Piper, Prime Minister Robert Menzies and
contemporary press. The then Prime Minister, ‘Pig-Iron’ Bob Menzies, made public assessments of both the sheep and the Aborigines who appeared in the film (see figure 89). The Adelaide Advertiser reported: Mr Menzies told a press conference in Adelaide on Saturday that he thoroughly enjoyed the film ‘Bitter Springs’. The photography was superb and the moving of stock was not overdone as in ‘The Overlanders’. Mr Menzies recalled that he had seen some of the natives who worked in the film while on a political tour. He thought their work was excellent. He believed the film would be popular overseas. Its lively story had given plenty of opportunities to Tommy Trinder who was well supported by Australian artists. ‘We are inclined to condemn our own products,’ the Prime Minister added. ‘I think we can praise this one.’13 Charles Duguid set the tone for many who praised the indigenous actors in the film by suggesting: ‘Our aborigines are natural actors, and no one seeing “Bitter Springs” will deny they steal the show.’ He then contrasts his high opinion with the failure of the government to compensate the actors adequately: ‘Yet recognising the fine work they undoubtedly did has not been considered.’14 The actors might not have been recognised by government, but many contemporary reviewers of Bitter Springs were drawn to their performances. In the Daily Express, for example, the reviewer reiterates Duguid’s emphasis on the naturalness of the acting, which apparently represents the indigenous community’s ultimate triumph over the nonindigenous actors (note the evident confusion of reviewer in delineating the difference between a narrative conflict between characters and the attribution of this conflict to the actors themselves): When the natives are in action, hurling spears, throwing boomerangs, jigging around in war dances, the picture certainly has its moments. The Aborigines turn out to be natural actors with a flair for pantomime and comedy only
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exceeded by a couple of kangaroos which hop into the film from time to time. The white element seems somewhat defeated by this competition—a case, I like to think, of original hams being well and truly out-acted by the Aboriginal amateurs.15 The Daily Express reviewer’s confusion between the diegetic and non-diegetic was shared by another unnamed reviewer, who sought to resolve the narrative conflict by comparing the performances of indigenous and non-indigenous actors: These aborigines, with their frail spears, their boomerangs, and their apparent lack of self-consciousness before the camera, are the great successes of the film; whether the directors intended it or not, they are also its heroes. The director, Ralph Smart, and his scenarist seem to have made an honest effort to hold the balance between the claims of blacks and whites; but the acting of the whites is comparatively wooden and they express themselves in such halfhearted platitudes (about the rights of civilisation to march on and the rest of it) that one’s sympathy soon turns against them. Chips Rafferty, who leads them, looks good on a horse. Tommy Trinder, who very surprisingly is also among these pioneers, looks as though he would be happy to be out of the saddle and back in the music-hall. Indeed, among these settlers, it is only Gordon Jackson who shows any acting talent capable of matching that of the aborigines.16 For ‘Rick’ of Variety it is the untrained status of the actors that makes all the difference: ‘The big novelty in this film is the amazing acting turned in by a tribe of untrained aboriginals. There is something new in their tribal dances and hunting expeditions.’17 Dilys Powell, writing in London, suggests that the only reason to see Bitter Springs is the persuasion of the indigenous performers: But the real heroes of the piece are the Aborigines themselves. The film was shot in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, and over a hundred Aborigines were brought
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from a missionary station to take part. The conviction of their performances, and the historical and social interest of the problem which they are called upon to re-create, make Bitter Springs worth a visit.18 But for the most part reviewers seemed especially keen to describe the work of the actors as if no work was actually involved. Phrases like ‘natural’ and ‘unself-conscious’ appear throughout the contemporary response to the film: ‘The principal interest in this meandering picture lies in the film debut of the Australian aborigines, who prove themselves to be the most unself-conscious of actors, and except when driven to defend their livelihood, extremely endearing characters, with charming manners.’19 The review that best describes this critical position is the one published in the Bulletin, which suggests (like the government of the day, who spoke of the shoot as a ‘picnic’) that the Ooldea actors were simply on set to have a good time. ‘The aboriginals all yabber and shout, peer around trees, hide behind rocks, throw a few spears and give every evidence of taking nothing seriously and enjoying themselves immensely—as they probably did.’20 All this interest in the participation of indigenous people in Bitter Springs (and I’ve only touched the tip of a very big iceberg here) seemed to revolve around the assumption that Aborigines couldn’t ‘act’ (as a form of labour), a position argued by the director, Ralph Smart: ‘They turned out to be wonderful actors … Unlike civilised people, they are quite unself-conscious, so when asked to play a role they did it as they would naturally, without any trouble at all. The difficulties arose only when some of them began to believe they could act—the results were terrible then.’21 The assumptions underpinning this statement suggest at the very least that the filmmakers seemed happier with the idea that indigenous actors remain the objects rather than the agents of performance. If Lorna Grantham’s recollections are correct, the Aboriginal actors themselves, on the other hand, clearly understood the value of their performances in material terms; that is, as a form of labour (among others). Both the reviewers and the filmmakers share a tendency to make anonymous the individual contributions of the various Ooldea actors
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(who remain unnamed and unthanked in the film’s titles, for instance). Two indigenous actors are credited: Clyde Combo and Henry Murdoch (whose name is misspelt in the opening credits as Murdock). Many years later, Ralph Smart did concede that he had a lot of help from Clyde Combo in directing the Ooldea actors. And his interviewer Michael Pate quickly responds, ‘Oh yes, I’m sure you did and I’m sure Walter [sic] Murdoch in his own way, as being an Aborigine, probably led by example. Walter worked very hard in that film I noticed …’22
Thinking like a sheep She walks—the lady of my delight – A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep. Alice Meynell, ‘The Lady of the Lambs’23
And what is the sheep seeking? As I said before, I can’t express that in words without any precision. What the sheep seeks is the embodiment of sheep thought. Is that good? To the sheep’s thinking, of course it’s good. Haruki Murakami24
Babe’s ‘storybook’ world is one in which any element of a social structure earns its place on the basis of its ability to ‘be useful’, to be productive. It is in the ‘appearing to be performing’—that is, the labouring and the labour of performance as well as its inverse, the performance of labour—that matters. The negotiation of limits through the performative is the condition for (agri)cultural harmony. Ultimately, Babe’s ‘struggle’ for identity and recognition as a winning performer is echoed in many contemporary debates. His ‘performative dilemma’—agent or object? hock or ham?—recalls that of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. To appropriate otherness for himself (white Australians as those awaiting recognition)? Or to eliminate it (white Australians as fundamentally immanent—absorbed in self-recognition)? Or both? But what is for Babe a triumph is for Bitter Springs a tragedy. When Ralph Smart derided Aboriginal actors for thinking they could
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perform, he not only posited an originary account of indigenous identity as reflex (rather than reflexive) but also implied a larger point: that it is through fluid acts of repetition that the value of the original is expunged. Babe’s producer, George Miller, recognises this when he laughs at the accommodating attributes of the sheep he worked with: ‘The animatronics sheep were so successful that we couldn’t tell in the cutting room floor which were real sheep and which weren’t. Indeed the sheep themselves couldn’t tell. The sheep would often respond to the mechanical sheep exactly as if they were real sheep.’25 In the repetitious, fluid conformity of the sheep flock the notion of the natural or original is rendered unnecessary and therefore without value. Rather than reproduction there is simply a continuum of multiple productions each of equal significance (and which are also then, in a sense, of equal insignificance). All this focus on the virtues of the fluid is not too far from the central problem identified in Bitter Springs in which an alignment between social mobility and cultural fluidity is played out within a narrative about the perils of thirst. Thirst (a necessary but nevertheless metaphoric device in the dry setting of the Flinders Ranges) alludes to the moral desert inhabited by the Kings. Its dangers are expounded in the film at two key points: as the drovers trek fitfully towards their destination and in the film’s penultimate scene, as the Kings are denied access to the waterhole by the Karagarni. In both instances it takes the politically ambivalent Trooper Ransome to find a resolution by guiding the Kings to recognise and embrace their own capacity for pliability, an act that masks the film’s greater and more telling expectation for fluidity on the part of the Karagarni. The argument for Aboriginal assimilation in Bitter Springs is produced as an effect of discourses on natality and mutability and a faith in an inevitable and ‘natural’ social movement towards conformity and likeness. Bitter Springs exerts itself in an endeavour to produce the minimum conditions for similarity (perhaps for fear of being seen to be advocating a form of cultural miscegenation), from a narrative that otherwise outlines an overwhelming and intractable difference. This strategy stands in stark contrast to The Squatter’s Daughter in which Aboriginal people are depicted as anything but ‘fluid’ or ‘natural’, taken as they are out of their familiar environment and placed in another. Instead, The Squatter’s Daughter is especially
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concerned with manufacturing the minimum conditions for difference (perhaps for fear of being seen to be advocating a form of narrative incest), out of a narrative that otherwise advocates the benefits of an overwhelming sameness. The problem The Squatter’s Daughter sets out to resolve at the formal level is how to contain the evident pleasures of excessive (ec-static) production: an over-production that exceeds any direct relationship to consumption. The problem Bitter Springs must resolve at the formal level is how to convert a final moment of cultural consumption (expressed in an image of Aboriginal assimilation) into a moment of national (re)production. The larger point, despite these distinctions between the two films, is that both Bitter Springs and The Squatter’s Daughter (like George Miller’s uncertain sheep) imbricate acts of representation and reproduction—such that the ‘problem of origins’ in these films is always a problem of the mimetic. The representational challenge for these films is to describe the (being of ) animal as animal. Sheep as sheep. In representing the possibilities for animal being these films destabilise the conventions of their own representations—pointing to the limits of figurability and exceeding a simple communicative function. Although sheep are no doubt used for effect in an emblematic way in Australian cinema, they also have other meanings than their meaning as other or ‘something else’. Instead we might consider these sheep as the image of the origin reanimated, reawakened. The sheep films are, then, generally interested in the meaningfulness of narratives of origins. As narratives, the Australian sheep films tell repeating and interacting versions of a story that seems to present itself as a character’s or even a nation’s search for their own (hi)story and the opportunity to tell and propel and project that story (again and again). The opportunity to represent. The opportunity to repeat. The opportunity to reproduce. Throughout these films, the Australian cinema’s births and rebirths can be traced through a repeated image that itself conveys incessant reproduction, an animal image that bears the sense of the fabric of the film image itself—as a place of infinite reproduction. But these films are not simply foundation stories—stories that posit beginnings (mythic, utopian or otherwise). The repeated presence of sheep in these films hints instead at anxieties and misgivings: of uncertain or unknown origins and upset classifications. The sheep films mean their landscapes to be strange
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Edens. In this sense, the sheep films are implicitly and fully concerned with questions about knowledge and its organisation; as well as a formal concern with origins, they have a philosophical and theoretical preoccupation with it. As part of their investigation into the ‘problem of origins’ the sheep films point to the impossibility of comprehensiveness where knowledge is concerned. In their formal structures they undertake a process of supplementation in which they do not necessarily attempt to renounce the nation (or totality) but rather reinscribe it. The sheep films represent ‘representation’ in terms of their supplementary figures (sheep), which both simultaneously invoke and work against historical totalities. If the sheep films can be situated as part of a nationalising project they offer a complex and often paradoxical position in relation to it. The sheep films give us some insight into the ways in which thinking animal might lead to nothing, rather than an impossible fullness. Fred Zinneman, a director with some experience of Australian sheep from his days working on The Sundowners (1960), was adamant about the value of the sheep film for rethinking thought itself: ‘… I learned that not only must a director have empathy with his actors: when directing sheep he must have empathy with them as well; he must learn to think like a sheep.’26
Notes Hasluck, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 51. Ken G. Hall, in Taylor, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, p. 84. 3 In an essay on Australian identity, Bill Routt suggests it is not so much our own shoulder that we strain to look over but rather another’s. For Routt, national identity is an implicit space created through the point of view of others. See William D. Routt, ‘Are you a fish? Are you a snake?’ 4 A practice not uncommon in the early Australian cinema and more recently apparent as the industry enjoyed high levels of ‘runaway’ Hollywood film production. 5 Kris Houghton, ‘This little piggy … hit it rich’, Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 1 October 1996, p. 3. 6 Canetti, Crowds and Power, p. 384. 7 Terrence Rafferty, ‘Pet sounds: The not-just-for-kids ”Babe” and the return of Brian Wilson’, New Yorker, 4 September 1995, p. 100. The article goes on to berate audiences who think they are somehow immune to the charms of Babe: ‘If you only go to movies that are specifically designed for you and other members of your social class (or demographic category), you’re not 1 2
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8 9
10 11
12
13
14
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 15 16
24
25
26
as intelligent as you think you are: to a studio executive, you’re dinner.’ (pp.100–1.) Howard Rosenberg, ‘Babe’s Mac attack’, West Australian, 11 July 1996, p. 3. George Miller, Sydney Film Festival Forum for 40,000 Years of Dreaming, June 1997 (attended by author). The film later underwent a name change to White Fella’s Dreaming. Universal Pictures, Babe: Production Information, University City, 1995, n.p. Sergei Eisenstein, in Eisenstein on Disney, Jay Leyda (ed.), Methuen, London, 1986, p. 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1999. ‘PM enjoyed Bitter Springs’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 June 1950, p. 10. In the Adelaide Mail, Menzies was more succinct, averring, ‘We did not see enough of Tommy Trinder. The sheep travelled at a rate of knots, but that was only a minor blemish.’ 24 June 1950, n.p., SRSA GRG 52/90. ‘About those grass skirts’, Mail (Adelaide), 9 July 1950, n.p. Duguid is also quoted as being ‘more than surprised to find the world is to learn that Australia’s tribal aborigines run round in grass skirts’. SRSA GRG 52/90 vol. 2. ‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Express, 7 July 1950, n.p. 8 July 1950, no attribution, n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder). ‘Rick’, ‘Bitter Springs’, Variety, 12 July 1950, p. 6. ‘Bitter Springs’, In Britain Today, October 1950, p. 35. ‘Bitter Springs’, News Chronicle, 8 July 1950, n.p. ‘Bitter Springs’, Bulletin, 6 September 1950, p. 35. Ealing Studios publicity brochure for Bitter Springs. Ralph Smart interviewed by Michael Pate. In Little Book of Sheep: An Amazing and Diverting Collection of Sheep to Amuse and Delight, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993. Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989, p. 190. George Miller, quoted in an interview with Scott Murray, ‘Life lessons: Babe the gallant sheep-pig’, Cinema Papers 107 (December 1995), p. 53. Fred Zinneman, An Autobiography, Bloomsbury, London, 1992, p. 183.
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Coda
Junuh had discovered—as Bagger put it—how to stop thinking without falling asleep. The Legend of Bagger Vance (Robert Redford, 2000)
As recent accounts would have it, sheep and the cinema are antipathetic in Australia. Since the end of 2003 a curious distinction has been drawn between the interests of Australian sheep and the future of the national cinema in the context of a public debate about the benefits of a free trade agreement between Australia and the USA. Filmmakers have lined up against farmers, claiming that the fortunes of agriculture should not be favoured at the expense of film culture. Email campaigns urged members of the film and television industries to lobby politicians. One email titled ‘Urgent—Free Trade Campaign—What Can I Do?’ summarised some of the key messages that it recommended recipients deliver to government and the media. The email started unequivocally: ‘Culture should not be seen as trade in cars or sheep. It is about a nation’s cultural identity.’1 Not surprisingly, then, the curious distinction between sheep and cinema continued to circulate in news reports. The ABC quoted writer and director Jan Sardi at length on the Australian government’s plans: ‘As far as they are concerned it is all about sheep,’ he said. He continued by suggesting that the distinction between the world of
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sheep and the world of entertainment is underlined by a larger disparity between sheep and people: ‘We have good ambassadors in the film world and the entertainment world. I don’t see the live sheep export trade doing as much for Australia as our actors, our filmmakers and all our wonderfully talented people.’2 Industry concern reached its most vocal at the annual AFI Awards in late 2003. Sue Brooks, winner of Best Director for the film Japanese Story (which, despite the title, is an Australian story) chose to comment on the issue after accepting her award: ‘Like everybody else has been saying tonight, it’s an honour to be able to tell Australian stories. But it’s also important that our cultural identity is intact and we can’t just trade that off for a few lamb chops.’3 This commentary over free trade proposes an understanding of national culture that rests on the primacy of discourses of production rather than consumption. The key questions presented to the public centre on which producers (film or sheep) will be better off under the terms of the agreement. Relatively little public debate has occurred on the matter of the benefits to consumers, for example. Similar debates have also drawn on the dangers of an over-investment in sheep. When Australia forged Closer Economic Relations (CER) with New Zealand in 1998, film industry lobbyists warned us (somewhat forgetfully) that our cinemas and televisions would soon be overrun by sheep. Spokesman for Project True Blue, actor Gary Sweet posited this eventuality as anti-Australian: ‘The countryside will become hillsides full of sheep … The landscapes will change, the accents will change. It will no longer be an Australian thing, a purely Australian thing.’4 In their exhortation to focus on the needs of the local production industry, film industry lobbyists inadvertently invoke an image of national consumption (our own). But the unwavering concentration on the shape of film production in these debates means that the matter of consumption has always already been erased. The current perceived enmity between sheep and the survival of the national cinema in Australia hints at a broader theoretical deficit. What is needed now, more than ever, is a concerted theory of ‘consumption’ (in terms of assimilation, blending, synthesis, invisibility, expenditure, anti-production and so on) that also addresses or exposes the ontological arguments at the heart of the national cinema as premised on the coincidence of production and consumption; on
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both differences and similarities. It might well be that in thinking (nothing of, rather than, Nothing of ) sheep, the claims of self-presence made by the national cinema might be more readily recognised for their impossibility.
Notes Email correspondence received by the author 13 November 2003. Subject: Urgent—Free trade campaign—What can I do?? 2 ‘Film, TV industry concerned over free trade talks’ (Friday, 21 November 2003) http://abc.net.au/victoria/news/200311/s994454.htm (accessed 12 December 2005). Here Sardi refers to a contemporary issue that vied for news headlines: the rejection at sea of a shipload of live sheep originally destined for sale in the Middle East. 3 Gerard Henderson, ‘The trouble with our stories’, Age, 25 November 2003, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/24/1069522534829.html (accessed 23 November 2005). In response to the awards broadcast, Noel Campbell, chairman of the dairy company Bonlac, said it was disappointing to hear Australia’s actors talking about not trading culture ‘for a few lamb chops’; in Philip Hopkins, ‘Dairy boss takes shot at TV, film industry’, Age, Business, 27 November 2003, p. 3. 4 Gary Sweet cited in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Australian Local Content in Television’, 7.30 Report (30 March 1998). 1
Coda
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One morning I woke up and the sheep was gone. It was then I understood what it meant to be ‘sheepless’. Sheer hell. The sheep goes away leaving only an idea. But without the sheep there is no expelling that idea. That is what it is to be ‘sheepless’. Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
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Filmography
7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 March 1998. Adieu Monde (or Pierre and Claire’s Story), Sandra Kogut, 1997. L’Australie, Jean-Jacques Andrien, 1989. Babe, Chris Noonan, 1995. Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925. Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze, 1999. The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock, 1963. Bitter Springs, Ralph Smart, 1950. The Breaking of the Drought, Franklyn Barrett, 1920. City Beneath the Sea, Budd Boetticher, 1954. Crocodile Dundee, Peter Faiman, 1986. Dad and Dave Come to Town, Ken G. Hall, 1938. Dad Rudd MP, Ken G Hall,1939. A Damsel in Distresss, George Stevens, 1937. Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, 1997. Diggers in Blighty, Pat Hanna, 1933. The Dish, Rob Sitch, 2000. The Exploits of the Emden, Ken G. Hall, 1928. 40,000 Years of Dreaming, George Miller, 1996. Funny Things Happen Downunder, Joe McCormick, 1965. A Girl of the Bush, Franklyn Barrett, 1921.
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The Golden Fleece, Pathe newsreel item, 1935. The Hayseeds, Beaumont Smith, 1933. Heritage, Charles Chauvel, 1935. His Royal Highness, F. W. Thring, 1932. Japanese Story, Sue Brooks, 2003. Jedda, Charles and Elsa Chauvel, 1955. The Joan of Arc of Loos, George Willoughby, 1916. Just Wool, Pathe newsreel item, 1933. Kangaroo, Lewis Milestone, 1952. Ken G. Hall Interviewed by Graham Shirley, George Miller and Phillip Noyce, Mark Sanders, 1983. Ken G Hall: This is Your Life, episode 3/023, Ron Way, 23 June 1977. The Lamb, Christy Cabanne, 1915. The Lamb of God, Costa Botes, 1985. Lassie Come Home, Fred M Wilcox; 1943. The Legend of Bagger Vance, Robert Redford, 2000. Let George Do It, Ken G. Hall, 1938. Lovers and Luggers, Ken G. Hall, 1937. The Man from Kangaroo, Wilfred Lucas, 1920. Mr Chedworth Steps Out, Ken G. Hall, 1939. A Nation is Built, Frank Hurley, 1938. No Worries, David Elfick, 1993. Nine Days of One Year, Mikhail Romm, 1961. Nirvana Street Murder, Aleksi Vellis, 1990. On Our Selection, Ken G. Hall, 1932. On the Run, Pathe newsreel item, 1934. Owd Bob, Robert Stevenson, 1938. Peter and Pavla, Milos Forman, 1964. Sense and Sensibility, Ang Lee, 1995. The Sentimental Bloke, F. W. Thring, 1932. Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Bryan Forbes, 1964. The Silence of Dean Maitland, Ken G. Hall, 1934. Smithy, Ken G. Hall, 1946. The Squatter’s Daughter, Lewin Fitzhamon, 1906. The Squatter’s Daughter, Bert Bailey, 1910. The Squatter’s Daughter, Ken G. Hall, 1933. The Stain, Frank Powell, 1914. Strike Me Lucky, Ken G. Hall, 1934.
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Filmography
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Sunday Too Far Away, Ken Hannam, 1975. Sundowners, Fred Zinneman, 1960. Thoroughbred, Ken G. Hall, 1936. Waltzing Matilda, Pat Hanna, 1933. Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, Stanley Kwan, 1996.
Filmography
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References
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Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, Cameron & Tayleur, London, 1977. Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1988–91. Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1992. Bates, Daisy, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia, John Murray, London, 1938. Baudrillard, Jean, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, St Martins Press, 1990, New York. Baxter, John, The Australian Cinema, Pacific Books, Sydney, 1970. Bean, C. E. W., On the Wool Track, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1985. Beckett, Jeremy, ‘The past in the present; the present in the past: Constructing a national Aboriginality’, in Jeremy Beckett (ed.), Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988. Beischer, N. and E. Mackay, Obstetrics and the Newborn: An Illustrated Textbook, W. B. Saunders, Sydney, 1986. Bennington, Geoffrey, ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990. Berger, John, About Looking, Vintage Books, New York, 1991. Bertrand, Ina (ed.), Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, NSW University Press, Kensington, NSW, 1989. Bordwell, David, ‘Jump cuts and blind spots’, Wide Angle, 6:1 (1984), pp. 4–11. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001. Bridges, Hilda, The Squatter’s Daughter, NSW Bookstall, Sydney, 1922. Brisbane, Katherine (ed.), Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991. British-Australasian Talking Pictures Ltd, Trade Follows Film, Sydney, 28 June 1933. Brophy, Philip, ‘Cinesonics: Dinosaur sounds’, Real Time/On Screen, 35 (February/March 2000), p. 18. Bureau, The, Only for Sheep, WEA Records, 1981. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1999.
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Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, Seabury Press, New York, 1978. Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996. Chandler, Bruce, ‘A Hall of doubtful fame or “The most successful of our filmmakers” ’, Film Digest, 6 (December 1965), pp. 3–7. Chauvel, Charles and Elsa Chauvel, Walkabout, W. H. Allen, London, 1959. Clarke, David, ‘On being “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany” ’ in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (eds), Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, Routledge, New York, 1997, pp. 165–98. Davenport, Michael, ‘Bitter Springs’, Quorn Mercury, 27 July 1950, p. 1. Decisions of Commonwealth and State Ministers at the Native Welfare Conference, Canberra, September 1951. Dehn, Paul, ‘Bitter Springs’, Sunday Chronicle, n.d., n.p. [located in the British Film Institute’s Bitter Springs clippings folder]. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983. —— Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986. —— A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. Derrida, Jacques, ‘On reading Heidegger: An outline of remarks to the Essex Colloquium’, Research in Phenomenology, 17 (1987), pp. 171–88. —— Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1989. —— ‘ “Eating well,” or the calculation of the subject: An interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Elisabeth Weber (ed), Points…interview 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al, Stanford University Press, Standord, 1995, pp. 255–87. —— Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. —— ‘The animal that therefore I am (More to follow)’, Critical Inquiry
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28 (Winter 2002), pp. 369–418. Dick, Philip K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Harper Collins, London, 1996. Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J. Ward Swan, Allen & Unwin, London, 1971. Edmondson, Ray et al., ‘Mail’, Filmnews, 6:9 (September 1976), p. 2. Evans, Kevin, ‘Letter to the editor’, Film Digest, 4 (October 1965), p. 17. Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, standard edn, vol. 4, Hogarth Press, London, 1953. Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Hall, Ken G. and Bob Dexter, The Squatter’s Daughter, unpublished screenplay, 1933, National Film and Sound Archive ID No. 355591. —— untitled response, Bulletin, 25 October 1933, p. 18. —— ‘Why is there no Australian film industry?’, Masque, no. 2 (November–December 1967), p. 24. —— ‘A matter of fact’, Cinema Papers, March–April 1975, p. 46. —— Australian Film: The Inside Story, Summit Books, Melbourne, 1980. Hall, Ken G. and Michael Thornhill, ‘The Australian film industry observed: Ken G. Hall and Michael Thornhill present divergent views’, Masque, 1:5 (May/June 1968), pp. 4–11. Hamilton, Annette, ‘Blacks and Whites: the relationships of change’, Arena 30 (1972), pp. 34–48. Harris, Mike, ‘Nostalgia takes a hand’, Australian (magazine), March 1976, p. 31. Hasluck, Paul, ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, in Native Welfare in Australia: Speeches and Addresses, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1953, pp. 40–59. —— ‘From protection to welfare’ in Native Welfare in Australia, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1953, pp. 30–9. —— ‘The future of the Australian Aborigines’, in Dawn 8:1 (1959), pp. 11–15.
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—— Shades of Darkness: Aboriginal Affairs 1925–1965, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988. Hawkesworth, Alfred, Australasian Sheep and Wool: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise: From Paddock to Loom; From Shearing Shed to Textile Factory, 6th edn, William Brooks & Co., Sydney, 1930. Hearne, Joanna, ‘ “The cross-heart people”: Race and inheritance in the silent western’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 30:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 181–96. Heath, Stephen, ‘Questions of Cinema, Macmillan, London, 1981, pp. 176–93. Heidegger, Martin, ‘The nature of language’ in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, Harper & Row, New York, 1971. —— ‘The origin of the work of art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, pp. 17–87. —— ‘The thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, pp. 174–82. —— ‘Letter on humanism’ in Basic Writings, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, David Farrell Krell (ed.), Harper, San Francisco, 1993. —— Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000. —— Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stamburgh, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002. Henderson, Gerard, ‘The trouble with our stories’, Age, 25 November 2003, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/24/ 1069522534829.html (accessed 28 October 2005). Hickling-Hudson, Anne, ‘White constructions of black identity in Australian films about Aborigines’, Literature Film Quarterly, 18:4, 1990, pp. 263–74. Holmes, Cecil, ‘The film in Australia’, Meanjin, 13:2 (1954), p. 189. Hopkins, Philip, ‘Dairy boss takes shot at TV, film industry’, Age, Business, 27 November 2003, p. 3. Howarth, Jocelyn, ‘How I came to star in Australian films’, Film Reporter, 1 June 1933, p. 17. Iampolski, Mikhail, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans. Harsha Ram, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998. Jackson, Henshaw, Broken Fleece, William Brooks, Sydney, 1910.
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Jarman, Derek, Modern Nature, Vintage, London, 1991. Jayamanne, Laleen, ‘ “Love me tender, love me true, never let me go”: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’ in Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and its Double: Cross Cultural Mimesis, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001, pp. 3–12. Keen, Ian (ed.), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘Settled’ Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988. Kemp, Philip, ‘On the slide: Harry Watt and Ealing’s Australian venture’ in Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton (eds), Second Take: Australian Filmmakers Talk, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999. Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1983. King, J. Clifford, Bitter Springs: The Story of the Film, Convoy Publications, London, 1950. Kisch, Egon, Australian Landfall, Martin Secker & Warburg, London, 1937. Kovacs, George, ‘Heidegger in dialogue with Herder: Crossing the language of metaphysics toward Be-ing-historical language’, Heidegger Studies, 17 (2001), pp. 45–63. Lash, John, Twins and the Double, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993. Lawson, Sylvia, ‘Towards decolonisation: Film history in Australia’, in Susan Dermody, John Docker and Drusilla Modjeska (eds), Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends, Kibble Books, Malmsbury, Vic., 1982, pp. 18–32. —— ‘Not for the likes of us’, in Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), An Australian Film Reader, Penguin, Ringwood, 1989, pp. 150–65. Levinas, Emmanuel, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1988. —— ‘As if consenting to horror’, trans. Paula Wissig, Critical Inquiry, 15 (Winter 1989) pp. 485–8. —— ‘The name of a dog, or natural rights’, in Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, Athlone Press, London, 1990. —— Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1996. Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990.
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—— The Story of the Lynx, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. Leahy, James, ‘Notes on the Navajo films’, Film Form, 1:2 (1977) pp. 76–100. Levi-Strauss, Claude, Totemism, Beacon Press, Boston, 1963. Leyda, Jay (ed.), Eisenstein on Disney, Methuen, London, 1986. Lingis, Alphonso, Excesses: Eros and Culture, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983. Lippit, Akira Mizuta, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000. —— ‘The death of an animal’, Film Quarterly, 56:1 (Fall 2002), pp. 9– 22. Lomayesva, Frederick K., ‘Indian identity and degree of Indian blood’, Red Ink, 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 33–6. MacKenzie, Harold M., The Squatter’s Daughter—An Australian Romance, Pater & Knoydon, Melbourne, 1890. Madison, Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, Scribners, New York, 1916. Maher, E. J., The Squatter’s Bairn, Rebman, London, 1910. Marshal T. H., Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950. Mattingley, Christobel and Ken Hampton (eds), Survival in our Own Land: ‘Aboriginal’ Experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836, ALDAA in association with Hodder & Stoughton, Adelaide, 1988. McGregor, Russell, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997. Meares, Norman, ‘Bitter Springs’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 11 July, 1950, p. 3. Melaun, Charles, The Squatter’s Daughter, NSW Bookstall Company, Sydney, 1933. Meynell, Alice, ‘The Lady of the Lambs’, in Little Book of Sheep: An Amazing and Diverting Collection of Sheep to Amuse and Delight, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993. Michaels, Eric, Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary, EmPress, Rose Bay, NSW, 1990. Molloy, Bruce, Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930–1960, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1990.
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More, Thomas, Utopia, Penguin, London, 1976. Morris, Meaghan, ‘Beyond assimilation: Aboriginality, media history and public memory’, Aedon, 4:1 (1997), pp. 12–26. Mudie, Peter (ed.), Ubu Films 1965–1970: Sydney Underground Movies, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1997. Murakami, Haruki, A Wild Sheep Chase, Penguin, Ringwood, 1989. Murray, Scott, ‘Life lessons: Babe the gallant sheep-pig’, Cinema Papers, 107 (December 1995) pp. 6–10. Naficy, Hamid, ‘Framing exile: From homeland to homepage’ in Home Exile Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, Routledge, New York, 1999, pp. 1–13. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993. Nietzsche, Freidrich, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, Doubleday, Sydney, 1990. Norden, Martin F., The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994. O’Regan, Tom, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996. Perry, George, Forever Ealing: A Celebration of the Great British Film Studio, Pavilion Press, London, 1981. Pike, Andrew, ‘The history of an Australian film production company: Cinesound, 1932–1970’, MA dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1972. Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper, Australian Film: 1900–1977, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Pring, Adele (ed.), Women of the Centre, Pascoe Publishing, Apollo Bay, Vic., 1990. Quinnell, Ken, ‘Ken G. Hall’, Sydney Cinema Journal, 3 (Winter 1967), pp. 27–8. —— ‘An evening of overall vileness’, Filmnews, 6:8 (August 1976), p. 5. Rafferty, Terrence, ‘Pet sounds: The not-just-for-kids “Babe” and the return of Brian Wilson’, New Yorker, 4 September 1995, pp. 99–101. Reynolds, Henry, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989. ‘Rick’, ‘Squatter’s Daughter (Australian made)’, Variety, 31 October 1933, p. 17.
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—— ‘Bitter Springs’, Variety, 12 July 1950, p. 6. Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Random House, New York, 1982, p. 329. Rosenberg, Howard, ‘Babe’s Mac attack’, West Australian, 11 July 1996, p. 3. Routt, William D., ‘The fairest child of the Motherland: Colonialism and family in Australian films of the 1920s and 1930s’, in The Australian Screen, Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989, pp. 28–52. —— ‘Are you a fish? Are you a snake? An obvious lecture and some notes on The Last Wave’, Continuum, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994), pp. 215–31. —— ‘On the expression of colonialism in early Australian film: Charles Chauvel and naïve cinema’, in Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), An Australian Film Reader, Currency Press, Sydney, 1985, pp. 55–71. —— ‘Who dances when terror strikes?’, Post Colonial Studies 6:1, April 2003, pp. 91–105. Rowse, Tim, White Power, White Flour: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Salt, Barry, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edn, Starword, London, 1992. Schwarz, Hillel, The Culture of the Copy, Zone Books, New York, 1996. Serres, Michel, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995. Seymour, Alan, ‘Thoughts on theatre’, Masque (March/April 1968), pp. 24–5. Sheehan, Thomas, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, New York Review of Books, 35:10 (16 June 1988), pp. 38–47. Shirley, Graham and Bryan Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency Press, Sydney, 1983. Shirley, Graham and Bill Shepherd, ‘Bill Shepherd: Pioneer Australian film editor’, Cinema Papers (December 1974), pp. 296–302. Siomopoulos, Anna, ‘ “I didn’t know anyone could be so unselfish”: Liberal empathy, the welfare state and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas’, Cinema Journal, 38:4, Summer 1999, pp. 3–23. Slessor, Ken, ‘Telling the truth about “Squatter’s Daughter”—When
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critics must be cruel to be kind’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 5. Sobchack, Vivian, ‘ “Surge and splendor”: A phenomenology of the Hollywood historical epic’ in B. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995, pp. 280–307. Sorenson, Edward Sylvester, The Squatter’s Ward, Hurst & Blacket, London, 1908. South Australia, Assembly 1949, Debates. —— Assembly 1950, Debates. Sutton, Ian, for the Australian Screen Council (2005), ‘Discussion paper’, http://www.australianscreencouncil.org/about.html, accessed 9 September 2005. Taylor, Mark C., Tears, State University of New York Press, New York, 1990. Taylor, Philip, ‘Interview with Ken G. Hall’, Cinema Papers (January 1974), pp. 71–91. Theweliet, Karl, Male Fantasies vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. Thoms, Albie, ‘Ken Hall’ in An Australian Film Reader, Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds), Currency Press, Sydney, 1985, pp. 48–54. Tulloch, John, Legends of the Screen: The Australian Narrative Cinema 1919–1929, Currency Press and Australian Film Institute, Sydney, 1981. —— Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982. Tyler, Carole-Anne, ‘Passing: Narcissism, identity and difference’, Differences 6:2+3 (1994), pp. 212–48. Verhoeven, Deb, ‘Sheep’s clothing: A dress in some Australian films’ in Ken Berryman (ed.), Screening the Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1995, pp. 151–8. —— ‘The film I would like to make: In search of a cinema’ in James Sabine (ed.), A Century of Australian Cinema, Reed Books, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 130–53. —— ‘Fragments: French sheep and early melodrama’, in Jane Warren, Colin Nettelbeck and Wallace Kirsop (eds), Australian and French Connections: A Century of Cinema, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 93–104.
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—— ‘(pre) facing the nation’, in Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films, Deb Verhoeven (ed.), Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 1–13. —— ‘Thinking like a sheep, acting like a ham: Performance in Australian cinema’, Artlink, 17:3 (1997), pp. 43–6. —— ‘When familiarity breeds: Ken G. Hall, disability and national cinema’ in Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Cinema, Deb Verhoeven (ed.), Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 51–67. von Herder, Johann Gottfried, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. Williams, Margaret, Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929, Oxford University Press, London, 1983. Wood, David, ‘Comment ne pas mange—Deconstruction and humanism’ in H. Peter Steeves (ed.), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life, State University of New York Press, New York, 1999. Worth, Sol and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1972. Zinneman, Fred, An Autobiography, Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Zizek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. Zournazi, Mary, ‘ “The Queen Victoria of bush cuisine”: Foreign incorporation and oral consumption within the nation’, Communal/Plural, 4, 1994, pp. 79–89.
Unattributed reviews and newspaper items ‘The weary silence on the lambs’, Age, 14 July 1999, p. 1. The Squatter’s Daughter ‘Australian success: The Squatter’s Daughter’, Argus, 23 October 1933, p. 5. ‘BEF will roadshow The Squatter’s Daughter’, Everyone’s, 4 October 1933, n.p. ‘Cinesound’s dramatic success’, Sun News-Pictorial, Monday, 23 October 1933, p. 10.
302
References
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‘The censor speaks’, Everyone’s, 18 April 1934, p. 1. ‘Down under’, Picturegoer, 18 August 1934, p. 25. ‘Ken Hall tribute edition’, Film Weekly, 3:34 (26 August 1971). ‘Knacks or knaves’, Bulletin, 4 October 1933, p. 18. ‘Miss Jocelyn Howarth’, Mercury, 20 October 1933, p. 10. ‘Shadow shows’, Bulletin, 4 October 1933, p. 18. ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Smith’s Weekly, 7 October 1933, p. 6. ‘The Squatter’s Daughter’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 1933, p. 3. ‘ “The Squatter’s Daughter” at Sydney Civic’, Film Weekly, 5 October 1933, p. 22. ‘ “Talkie” studio. The producer at work. Heat of the arc lights’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1933, n.p. Bitter Springs ‘About those grass skirts’, Mail (Adelaide), 9 July 1950, n.p. ‘Bitter Springs’, Bulletin, 6 September 1950, p. 35. ‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Express, 7 July 1950, n.p. ‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Worker, 8 July 1950, n.p. (BFI Bitter Springs clippings folder). ‘Bitter Springs’, Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1950, n.p. ‘Bitter Springs’, Film Weekly, 74:1253 (26 October 1950), p. 16. ‘Bitter Springs’, In Britain Today, October 1950, p. 35. ‘Bitter Springs’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 17:199 (August 1950), p. 113. ‘Bitter Springs’, News of the World, 9 July 1950. ‘Bitter Springs’, Sunday Chronicle, 9 July 1950, n.p. ‘Bitter Springs’, Sunday Herald, 27 August 1950, p. 5. ‘Bitter Springs: A new kind of Indian threatens the old stockade’, Daily Herald, 7 July 1950, n.p. ‘Film Lesson for Natives’, News (Adelaide), 17 January 1951, n.p. ‘Friends were tried’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 23 June 1950, n.p. ‘Labor seeks Aboriginal MHR’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 15 June 1950, n.p. ‘Natives help workmen build camp’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 20 May 1949, n.p. ‘Natives “not misused”’, News (Adelaide), 12 May 1949, n.p. SRSA GRG 52/90. ‘Natives’ trip called “criminal”: Expert’s view’, News (Adelaide), 19 May 1949, p. 2.
References
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‘PM enjoyed Bitter Springs’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 June 1950, p. 10. ‘Rail claim on aborigines challenged’, News (Adelaide), 2 June 1949, n.p. ‘Railways on aborigines’ train ride’, News (Adelaide), 24 May 1949, n.p. ‘Railways report on Aborigines’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 25 May 1949, n.p. ‘Question still to be answered’, News (Adelaide), 23 May 1949, n.p. ‘Tommy Trinder led new life here’, News (Adelaide), 31 August 1949, n.p.
304
References
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Index
Note: Page references followed by f indicate a figure, and page references followed by n indicate a note on that page Aboriginal land rights, 192–200, 222n Aboriginal people acting in Bitter Springs, 227–31 apologies not made to, 213 begging, 252–3 and cash economy, 239 contrived representation of cooperation, 190–3 as depicted in The Squatter’s Daughter, 170–7 as depicted in Bitter Springs, 197–8 ‘drift to the whites’, 214 ‘dying race’, 214 in grass skirts, 284n ‘half-caste’ and ‘half-and-half’ racial notions, 224 Hasluck on advancing welfare of, 201–2 hunting, 258–9 imitate animal form, 260–1 impact of contact with Europeans, 186 implications of assimilation policies
indigenous culture erased, 212 lack of agency or choice, 201, 215 ‘likeness’, 261 movement, 213–14 protectionism, 201, 202, 208–9 racist stereotypes, 198 rations, 238–9, 247–8, 254 removal of children, 267n remuneration for acting, 233–4 role in society questioned, 261 role of food in communities, 253–4 rules of avoidance, 256–8 space provided in white Australia, 187 sympathy and paternalism, 199–200, 201 traditional and non-traditional communities, 203–4 treatment as pets, 193 Trinder’s comments on, 218 ‘underutilisation’ of the land, 195–6 ‘walkabouts’, 213–14 ‘within but not of the white
Index
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community’, 223 wool production involvement depicted, 189 see also assimilation policies Aborigines Protection Board, 226, 227, 229, 232, 236, 253, 266n, 269n absorption policy, 267–8 Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity Association of Australia, 243 Adair, John, 37–9 Adams, Phillip, 89 AFI Awards, 286 American film industry, 147 Anderson, William, 156, 161 animality Bataille on, 22 difference without distinction, 29 imagining outside language, 32 representation of, 15 animals consumption and production themes, 262–3 death of, 36–7, 263–4 demonic, 34 eating of, 263–5 imagery, 42 lack of language, 24, 29 multiple, 34 mutually creative relationship with cinema, 36 as ‘other’, 23 ontological categories, 28–9 originary role, 37 pets, 34–6 philosophical considerations, 23 poverty as paradoxical condition, 26 representation in cinema, 37 slaughter of, 264 symbolic, 34 in theatre performances, 159–60 thinking ability, 22 unfathomable and familiar, 23 wordless, 24–5 animot (plurality of animals), 31 anthropomorphism, 273 assimilation, 235–8, 267n
306
alternative to protection, 201, 202, 208–9 and citizenship for Aboriginal people, 247 development as system of governance, 238 food and drink as bases of, 261 form of charity, 203 historical stage to cultural homogeneity, 214 implications for Aboriginal people, 204 links to migration, 216 theme of Bitter Springs, 182, 184–6, 193, 201, 202–7, 238 vision of, 207 and welfare system, 247–8 Aubron, Hervé, 37 Australia confusion of Australian/British Commonwealth, 71 images of, 63 landscape ‘big … clean … overpowering’, 81n ‘sunburned land’, 61 Australian cinema defining qualities, 145n imitation of American culture, 96 nationalism, 124–5 ‘whitefella’s Dreaming’, 2–3 Australian cultural identity, 286 Australian film industry analogy with wool industry, 15 ‘commonwealth’ classicism, 149 corrective quarantine proposed, 94 cultural anxiety of, 95 enmity between sheep and cinema, 285–6 investment in, 63 national consumption, 286 partiality of, 94–5 L’Australie (Jean-Jacques Andrien), 4 Babe (Chris Noonan), 4, 7–9 advertising slogans, 274 anthropomorphism, 273 audiences for, 283–4
Index
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authorship of, 16n comic fable, 274–5 crisis of liminality and productivity, 275 identity of character, 115, 274 issues of value, identity, performance, 273 labour of performance, 280 narrative, 7–9 plot, 273 ‘storybook land’ location, 273, 280 theme of flight, 275 Bailey, Bert, 156–8 The Squatter’s Daughter (stage play, with Edmund Duggan), 149 Baker, A. J., 229, 231 Baker, Steve, ‘Fear of the familiar’, 35 Balcon, Michael, 220 basic wage claim, 243–4 Bataille, Georges, 22, 23, 262 Bates, Daisy, The Passing of the Aborigines, 214 Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein), 87 Baxter, John, 5, 140 Bean, C. E. W. on drought and squatters, 254 On the Wool Track, 11 Beckett, Jeremy, 238 becoming-animal, 32–3 Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze), 6–7 Being, dimensions of, 25–6 Berger, John, ‘Why look at animals?’, 35 Bert Bailey Dramatic Company, 156 The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock), 33, 43 birthrate in Australia, 58 Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart), 4, 181–225 Aboriginal actors see themselves at film screening, 257–8, 269n Aboriginal actors, 227–34, 275, 277–9 accommodation of Aboriginal actors, 240, 243 Adelaide premiere, 276f
agreement about location and filming conditions, 231–2 alternate endings, 191, 221–2n analysis of, 14 announcement about production, 219–20 assimilation depiction ‘absurd’, 190 binaries unsettled, 200 British characters and sympathy with Aboriginal people, 216, 217–18 change of heart, 207–12 characters, 182 Blackjack, 208, 210 Emma, 262 ‘Mother’, 210 Trooper Ransome, 187–8, 210, 281 Wally King, 207–8 charity to Aboriginal people, 199–200 clothes for Aboriginal actors, 246–7 consumption of sheep, 262 costs of production, 234–5 creative and cultural compromises, 220–1 criticised by Quorn residents, 191 critics’ comments, 191–2 cultural distance, 213 cuts to film, 220, 225n Dehn’s review of, 198–9 filming difficulties, 183–4, 219, 240–8 final scene criticised, 181, 190–3, 199, 200, 205, 206–7, 209–12, 216–19, 223n firearms, 247 Flinders Ranges location discussed, 230, 278 food for white film crew members, 270n frame captures/enlargements And all they see is sheep, 188f high points and low points of view, 204f a moving ‘conclusion’, 209f
Index
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‘Out they go—the whole lot of ’em’, 187f ‘getting there’, 213 grievances of Aboriginal people, 255–6 images of Aboriginal people, 185 images of sheep, 185 intention, 183 Karagarni people, 187, 194, 196, 197–8, 201 land and productivity issues, 195 on land rights and other rights, 194, 195 locations discussed, 228–9 meat provided to Aboriginal actors, 252, 269 minimum conditions for similarity, 281 moral desert inhabited by Kings, 281 national reproducibility, 196 novelisation, 191 parliamentarian defends actors’ conditions, 250–14 partial subjectivities, 45 payment for Aboriginal actors, 243–6, 248–50, 252–3, 269n, 277–8 perils of thirst, 281 plot, 182, 235 point of view strategies, 205–6 political clumsiness of conclusion, 211 problem of origins, 181 Queensland location discussed, 229, 231 rain dances (or corroborees) performed or reported, 256, 257, 258, 269n rations for Aboriginal actors, 244, 247–8, 250–1, 254, 269n representation and reproduction, 282 rules of avoidance contravened, 257–8 scandals over treatment of Aboriginal people, 183
308
script changes, 229 sheep growing and nation building, 1–2 South Australian government involvement, 226–30 ‘staying there’, 213 themes assimilation, 182, 184–6, 193, 201, 202–7, 238 banishment of Aboriginal people, 188 known and unknown, 186 land acquisition, 186 ‘likenesses’ between rival groups, 195 ‘nothingness’, 186–7 production and consumption, 206 space, 187 transport of Aboriginal actors, 240–2, 268n Trinder, Tommy, 217–19 uncertainty of film’s purpose, 196–7 water as scarce commodity, 213, 258 weather during filming, 269–70n western not family melodrama, 200–1 wool production image, 189 bleating, 27 Boonoke Station, 142 ‘borrow film’, 39–40 The Breaking of the Drought (Franklyn Barrett), 4 Bridges, Hilda M., 165–6 British Commonwealth, 71 British Pathe, see Pathe newsreel titles Brooks, Sue, 286 Burley, Cyril, 241 Campbell, Noel, 287n censorship, 91–3, 94 Chandler, Bruce, 89, 128–9 changelings, 155–6 charity, 199–200, 203
Index
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Chauvel School of Scenario Writing, 141–2n Chauvel, Charles, 81n, 140n, 141n Chauvel, Elsa, 81n, 140n Chifley, Ben, 203–4, 223 cinema alignment with animal, 37 consumption discourse missing, 5 and genesis of nation, 3 ontological nature of, 3 originary role, 37 Cinesound Studios dependence on Hall, 90 English recutting of films, 145n newsreels, 65, 81n show business philosophy, 65, 80n significance in Australian industry, 83 citizenship, 247 City Beneath the Sea (Budd Boetticher), 87 Civic Theatre (Sydney), Australianonly programs, 52 Closer Economic Relations (CER) with New Zealand, 286 Combo, Clyde, 280 comedic burlesque, 93 continuity, 128, 130, 145n Cooper, Ross, 191–2 Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman), 81n Cross, George, 158 Dad and Dave Come to Town (Ken G. Hall), 131, 140n Dalkeith Station (near Cassilis), 142n Dad Rudd MP (Ken G. Hall), 140n decapitation, 67 decision-making, 47n Dehn, Paul, 198–9 Deleuze, Gilles, 32–6 delirium, 66 demonic animals, 34 derivativeness, 85–6 Derrida, Jacques on ‘the animal’, 23–30 animot (plurality of animals), 31
critique of Heidegger’s conceptualisation of animal, 28 ethics of eating, 263–5 Dexter, Bob ‘Gayne’, 167 Diggers in Blighty (Pat Hanna), 92 disability tropes, 90–1, 92–3, 94, 96, 99–100, 137–8, 142n The Dish (Rob Sitch), 40 Dolly (cloned sheep), 13 Down Under, see The Squatter’s Daughter Duff, Al, 139n Duggan, Edmund, 156–7, 161 The Squatter’s Daughter (stage play, with Bert Bailey), 149 Duggan, Eugenie, 156 Duguid, Charles, 207–11, 224n, 241–2, 277, 284n Ealing Studios and production of Bitter Springs, 192, 219, 222n, 225n, 226–30, 239, 242 earning capacity, 247 eating, 262–6 Eaton, Mr, 230 editing style, 129 Edmondson, Ray, 86 Eisenstein, Sergei, 87, 141n Elkin, A. P., 236, 267n empire relations, 54 Everyone’s (trade journal), 92–3 The Exploits of the Emden (Ken G. Hall), 87 fabrication and reproducibility, 4 The Fair Musterer (painting, Hilda Rix-Nicholas), 153f family tropes in early Australian cinema, 54 femininity and passivity, 103–5 film anti-Hollywood language, 85 ‘diseased’, 93–4 follows trade, 63 primary industries as subject matter, 63 search for identity as theme, 38
Index
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309
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search for origins, 38, 55 see also Australian cinema; Australian film industry film criticism, 92, 162–3 film history, 15–16 film theory Americanisation, 169 intertextuality, 168–9 relationship of text to culture, 168 ‘source concealment’, 168–70 filmic technique, 128–30 ‘artistic’, 140 continuity, 128 editing style, 129 jump cut, 129, 145n lap dissolves, 134–5 180-degree rule, 129, 145n realism, 130–1 stylistic flourishes, 129 thirty-degree rule, 129, 145n wipes, 76–7, 78–9, 128, 130, 131, 135–6 filmmaking teaching of, 37–8 value questioned, 38–9 verisimilitude, 64–5 fleece, 76f, 78 flock allegorical image of plenitude and prosperity, 42 as a multiple, 22 foreign popular culture, 85 Foucault, Michel, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 66–7 40,000 Years of Dreaming (George Miller), 2–3, 8–9 name change to White Fella’s Dreaming, 284n free trade agreement with USA, 285 Funny Things Happen Downunder (Joe McCormick), 4, 221n Gainford, Judy, 276f A Girl of the Bush, 4, 62 Jim Keane as pioneer cripple, 110 frame enlargements and other images
310
Bidgee, 106f daily dissolve, 132f the fall of Wayne, 113f Jimmy and Zeinah ‘blood calls to blood’, 109f Lorna works while Oswald shirks, 103f the shearing shed with the heroine at centre-stage, 101f unknown origins, 155f Waratah supercomb, 133f where there’s smoke …, 133f Lorna as heroine, 101 parts the fleece, 77f passivity and activity, 102–5 reproductivity, 110 works while Oswald shirks, 103f work on sheep station, 101–2 mise en scène, 103–4 Oswald as moral cripple, 110 shearing shed, 101f unknown origins, 155f verisimilitude and melodrama, 104 wealth shots, 102 woman’s sexuality, 102 ‘good to think’, 35–6 Goonoo Goonoo (station), 64–5 Grantham, Lorna, 255, 258, 261, 279 Green, Harrie, 243, 244–6, 248–9 Griggs, Ian, 86 Guattari, Felix, 32–6 Hall, Ken G., 140 on Aboriginal actors, 272 Academy Award, 82 American influence on films, 54, 83, 85, 86, 87–8, 130, 147–8, 168 camera technique, 84 comments on own success, 89–90 counter-classicism, 148 creative content of films, 90 criticism and contempt by film historians and custodians, 83–4, 127, 138, 147–8 on critics, 89 defended by film historians, 86–7
Index
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derivativeness, 85–6 directing role, 127 export success lacking, 83 father’s comments on, 56 Film Weekly feature on, 82–3 films Dad and Dave Come to Town, 131, 140n Dad Rudd MP, 140n The Exploits of the Emden, 87 Let George Do It, 89, 139n, 140n Lovers and Luggers, 87, 137 Mr Chedworth Steps Out, 139–40n On Our Selection, 92, 97–8, 140n, 162–3 The Silence of Dean Maitland, 131 Strike Me Lucky, 140n Thoroughbred, 142n Vengeance of the Deep, 87 see also The Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall) ‘Hall Historical Program’ at Sydney Film Festival (1965), 140n imitative ability, 95 intertextuality, 168 lack of artistry, 84–5 nationalism, 81n on originality, 82, 147 popular success in Australia, 83, 88 on process of filming sheep, 43–4 prominence in Australian cinema, 79m, 82–3, 139 retrospective, 89–91 screenings, 139–40n sound as novelty in films, 174 spatial freedom, 66 The Squatter’s Daughter, 43–4, 49–180 unrecognised by film awards, 83 wipe technique, 131 see also The Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall) Hamilton, Annette, 253–4 Hanna, Pat Diggers in Blighty, 92
Waltzing Matilda, 92 Hannaberry, Mr P. J., 241 Hasluck, Paul Aboriginal people ‘mid-way’ culturally, 204–5 on assimilation of Aboriginal people, 208, 223n, 224n, 235–7, 267n on cultural movement of Aboriginal people, 214–15 ‘From protection to welfare’, 201–2 on future of Aboriginal people, 207 on ‘good stock’, Shades of Darkness (memoirs), 208 social harmony, 210–11 on ‘throwing of coins’ to Aboriginal people, 230 The Hayseeds (Beaumont Smith), 92, 130–1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24 Heidegger, Martin on ‘the animal’, 23–30 animals’ relationship to world, 25 animals’ relationship to death, 263–4 binary opposition between animal and human, 29 Dasein concept, 24–6, 44n discourse on the animal, 28 on human ‘being’, 45n ontological difference, 24 ontotheological thinking, 24 self-reflection, 28 view of a ‘world’, 29 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 45n Hicking-Hudson, Anne, 192 ‘high breeding’, 120 His Royal Highness (F. W. Thring), 92 Hitchcock, Alfred, The Birds, 33, 43 Hollywood film industry, 147–8, 283n homesteads, deserted, 11–12 Howard government, Aboriginal policy, 184–5 Howarth, Jocelyn, 58–9, 60 human as spectator, 44n as thinking animal, 45n
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 311
311
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human identity, outer limits established, 23 human language, 26–7 humanism, 24, 100 humanist notions of subjectivity, 24 Hurley, Frank, and filming of The Squatter’s Daughter, 65 Iampolski, Mikael, 125, 168–9, 170 imagery of flocks, 42 inbreeding, 97 incest, 142n insomnia, 20–1 intertextuality, 168–9 intoxication, 61 Jackson, Gordon, 278 Jackson, Henshaw, 54 James, Vera, 104, 143n Japanese Story (Sue Brooks), 286 Joan of Arc, 142 The Joan of Arc of Loos (George Willoughby), 142n Johnson, Mr (federal Minister for the Interior), 241 Jones, Barry, 89 Jones, Ian, 269n, 270n jump cut, 129, 145n Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone), 255–7, 258, 262, 268n kangaroo hunting, 258–60 Kemp, Philip, 222 Kisch, Egon, 10–11 ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, 80–1n language animals’ lack of, 24 and becoming-animal, 32–3 human and animal distinguished, 26–7 limitations in speaking of animal world, 30–1 operations and understanding, 30 language development, 27 lap dissolves, 134–5
312
Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox), 107 Lawson, Henry, The Shearer’s Dream, 254 Lawson, Sylvia, 54, 82 Let George Do It (Ken G. Hall), 89, 139n, 140n Levinas, Emmanuel, 20–1, 23 Levi-Strauss, Claude ‘animals are good to think’, 35–6 on originary myths, 69 The Story of the Lynx, 120–1 on twin-ness, 120 Lingis, Alphonso, Excesses: Eros and Culture, 60 Lippit, Akira, 23, 36–7 live sheep export trade, 286, 287n Longford, Raymond, 140n Lovers and Luggers (Ken G. Hall), 87, 137 Lyons, Joseph, 51–2 Mabo case, 194 Macarthur, John, 10–11 man as shepherd of Being, 25 The Man from Kangaroo (Wilfred Lucas), 221n The Man from Out Back (stage play by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan – ‘Albert Edmunds’), 160 Maralinga weapons testing area, 251 Marshall, T. H., 247 McIntosh, M., 226 McMaster, Fred (later Sir Frederick), 64 Melaun, Charles, The Squatter’s Daughter (novelisation), 124 Menzies, Robert, 276f, 277, 284n metaphysics, on beings, 23 Michaels, Eric, 96 Miller, George, Babe, 16n, 273, 274 see also 40,000 Years of Dreaming modernity and maternity, 58–60 Molloy, Bruce, 192 Morris, Meaghan, 184–5 Mountford, C. P., 268
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 312
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Mr Chedworth Steps Out (Ken G. Hall), 139–40n multiple animals, 34 multiple identification, 201 Murdoch, Henry, 245, 280 muteness, 119 Nancy, Jean Luc, 55 National Film and Sound Archive, 140 national identity, 283n, 285 national origins, quest for, 3–4 national representation, 14 nationalism, 272–3 nationhood, 203 Navajo filmmakers, 37–40, 47n Nepa Bunna Station, 230 Neville, A. O., 267–8 new chums, 179n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 262 Nirvana Street Murder, 47 No Worries, 4 Noonan, Chris, 16n Norden, Martin, 94 180-degree rule, 129, 145n On Our Selection (Ken G. Hall), 92, 97–8, 140n, 162–3 ontotheological tradition of Western philosophy, 23 Ooldea mission and Aboriginal people, 231, 232–3, 245, 251–2, 266–7n, 269n O’Regan, Tom, Australian National Cinema, 15–16n O’Reilly, Walter Creswell, 53, 91–7, 141n originary myths, 69 originary thinking, 5–7, 14–15 outback settlers, portrayed as ‘ultrasimple minded and mentally childish’, 92–3 Owd Bob (Robert Stevenson), 107 ‘passing’, discourses in assimilationist rhetoric, 215–16 Pate, Michael, 184
Pathe newsreel titles, 81n patriotism linked to mobs of sheep, 62–3 Penhall, W. R., 236, 246–9 Perry, David, 140 pets, 34–6 philosophical animal, reassessment of, 30 philosophy on ‘the animal’, 23 Pike, Andrew, 86, 87, 191–2 Piper, Nonnie, 276f Playford, Sir Thomas, 228, 229, 242–3, 268n, 276f postage stamps, 10–11 poverty and wealth, 26 Powell, Dilys, 278–9 Project True Blue, 286 Proteus (god of the sea), 21–2 Quinnell, Ken, 86, 127–8 Quorn (South Australia), 191, 229 racial theory of blood quantum, 223 racism, 256 Rafferty, Chips, 220, 278 rationing, 247–8, 254 realism, 169–70 repetition expunges the original, 281 reproduction, 59, 96–100 Riches, Mr (SA parliamentarian), 228, 250–1 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 44–5 Rix, Jack, 222n, 231, 247 Routt, William D. on Australian identity, 283n on contemporary ideas about nationalism, 41 on defining qualities of Australian cinema, 145n on exogamy, 97–8 on familial and colonial relations, 54 on simplicity and innocence of naïve cinema, 128 social critique replaced by radical religion, 80n
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 313
313
9/3/06 2:01:04 PM
Rowse, Tim, White Flour, White Power, 237, 238 Salt, Barry, 134 Salvation Army, 83 sameness and twins, 24, 121 Sardi, Jan, 285, 287n self-expression, 59–60 The Sentimental Bloke (F. W. Thring), 92 Serres, Michel, 21–2 Seymour, Alan, 85–6 sheep Bean study, 11–13 condition of their absence, 12 conformity, 13 counting, 66 culinary interest in, 263 excess and lack of, 13–14 identity enquiry, 9 and insomnia, 20 lack character, 12 materiality of, 43 mobs linked to patriotism, 62–3 nation’s originators, 11 national representation, 42 naturalised and nationalised, 10 no relationship with death, 263–4 repeated motif of Australian cinema, 19 representation of national abundance and anonymity, 4 and sleep, 20 sheep-dog films, 107 sheep films anxieties and misgivings indicated, 282–3 common motifs, 4 complicated ‘national’ genealogy, 41 critique of ‘national’ vision, 2 meaningfulness of narratives of origins, 282 national industry in other countries, 41 national reflex, 41–2 problem of representation, 14
314
question of origins, 55, 283 sheep station, labour involved, 102 Shepherd, Bill, 128, 145n Shirley, Graham, 86 The Silence of Dean Maitland (Ken G. Hall), 131 ‘simple-mindedness’, 92–3 Siomopoulos, Anna, 201 Slessor, Ken, 94, 162–3 Smart, Ralph, 183, 194, 218–19, 278, 279 see also Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart) Smith, Beaumont, 131, 139 The Hayseeds, 92, 130–1 social mobility, 214–15 solar systems, 60–1 South Australia as film location, 227–9 promotion via filming, 233–4 South Australian government and filming of Bitter Springs, 226–30, 243 space, 71 special effects in theatre, 160 The Squatter’s Bairn (novel – 1910), 155, 156 The Squatter’s Daughter (English film – 1906), 155 The Squatter’s Daughter (film by Ken G. Hall – 1933), 4, 45n Aboriginal boundary-riders, 175 Aboriginal gumleaf band, 78, 78f, 170, 174–6 Aboriginal characters minimised, 170–7 Americanism criticised, 169 analysis of, 14 ‘animal movement’, 67–8 assessed against textual forebears, 161–2 ‘blood calling to blood’, 109 British release as Down Under, 53 bushfire, 133f, 134, 136, 163 censor’s comments, 92–3 characters
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 314
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Barky, 76f, 78, 107, 114, 118–19, 123–4, 125–6 Bidgee, 105–7, 106f, 108, 143n Clive, 111–12, 114 lack of universality, 100 Jebal Zim, 114 Jimmy, 105–11, 143n Joan, 100–1, 105 Tom, 122 Wayne, 107, 117–23 Zeinah, 108–10, 109f, 114, 143 circular movement, narrative preoccupation with, 75 comparisons with Hollywood productions, 147–8, 161–2 conclusion (‘sending wool to the world’), 56–7, 57f confusion between lover and brother, 108 critical acclaim, 53 critics’ comments, 94, 147–9, 162–3 dialogue ‘redundant and excessive’, 137 disability, 93, 94, 96, 99–100, 137–8, 142n dog as proxy for owner, 107 ensemble of sheep, 75 existential crisis posited, 55–6 fecundity of image, 71, 75 figuration of identity, 76 frame captures/enlargements Barky parts the fleece, 76f the gumleaf band, 78f Ken G. Hall directs, 88f Lorna parts the fleece, 77f opening sequence, 72–4f sheep in danger, 164f Wayne and Joan ‘sending wool to the world’, 57f Genesis references to Jacob and Esau, 123, 126 Hall as director, 88f, 127 Howarth’s views on, 58–62 largeness and excess, 61–2 labour to transform stage-play into screenplay, 167 literary origins of, 167–8
lobby card, 49f masculinity, 143 measured against international standards, 148 minimum conditions for difference, 281–2 mob cultivation, 62 muteness and hidden truths, 119 mystery of generation, 58 name for dog suggests indigeneity, 107 narrative criticised, 53 opening sequence (vast mob of sheep), 52, 63–5, 66, 68–9, 72–4f, 75–6, 105, 127, 136 overacting accusations, 158 partialising of characters, 100–1, 105–6, 119, 143n patriotism premised on purity, 67 perils of production, 164 plot summary, 50 preamble by Lyons, 51–2, 71 pre-publicity, 149 presence/absence of sheep/ parents, 70–1 process of filming sheep, 43–4 publicity cards for, 91n publicity for Australia abroad, 53 repetitions and doublings, 79 reviews on first release, 148 sheep in danger, 164f sheep station as Australian Eden, 116 sheep’s parentage dubious, 112 solar economy, 61 stage play predecessor to film, 98 structural elaboration, 70 suppressed (ab)original history, 116 themes breeding, 98 changelings, 111 conception and childbirth, 54–5 crossed lines and crossbreeding, 98, 111 disability, 90–1, 98, 99–100, 107–8
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 315
315
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maternity or modernity, 57–8 mistaken identity, 115 nationalist discourses, 49, 52, 55, 124–5 nomadism, 112 Oedipal narrative resolution, 99 origins and identity uncertain, 49, 55–6, 70, 78, 111–12, 122 representation and reproduction, 282 resemblance, 123 sheep growing and nation building, 1–2 this world and another, 62 twins and doubling, 98, 120–2, 144n visibility and blindness, 123–4, 124–6 twin sheep stations, 122 value of knowledge contingent, 114 verisimilitude, 163–4, 169–70 Waratah supercomb, 133f wipes, 78–9, 130, 132–2f, 134–6 The Squatter’s Daughter (film – 1910), 157–8 The Squatter’s Daughter (novelisation by Charles Melaun), 124, 127, 164–5, 171–2, 176 The Squatter’s Daughter (novelisation by Hilda M. Bridges), 165–6, 165f Aboriginal characters, 172–3 Miss Spriggins (English governess), 166 The Squatter’s Daughter (painting, George W. Lambert), 152f The Squatter’s Daughter (silent film) precursor to Hall’s film, 149 The Squatter’s Daughter (stage play by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan – ‘Albert Edmunds’) Aboriginal characters, 171–2 authors’ royalties, 178n characters, 156–7 ‘dream of realism’, 160–1 The Land of the Wattle (alternate title), 149
316
miscegenation, 173 Miss Spriggins, 173–4 Nulla Nulla character, 171 outback ambiance, 160 plot line and origin, 149–51, 156 precursor to Hall’s film, 149 success, 158–61 textual lineage, 165, 177–8n verisimilitude, 160–1 The Squatter’s Daughter – an Australian Romance (novel, Harold MacKenzie), 154–5 The Squatter’s Ward (1908 novel), 155–6 Strike Me Lucky (Ken G. Hall), 140n stylistic flourishes, 129 Sunday Too Far Away, 4 The Sundowners, 4, 115, 283 ‘swarming’, 67 Sweet, Gary, 286 Sydney Film Festival (1965), ‘Hall Historical Program’, 140n symbolic animals, 34 systems of reason, 60–1 Taylor, Philip, 84, 128 terra nullius, 196 Theweleit, Klaus, 66 thirty-degree rule, 129, 145n Thoms, Albie criticism of Hall, 83–4, 86 fear of import, 95 Ubu Films, 140 Thornhill, Michael, 85 Thoroughbred (Ken G. Hall), 142n Thring, F. W. His Royal Highness, 92 The Sentimental Bloke, 92 Tingwell, Charles ‘Bud’, 222n, 225n Trinder, Tommy, 217–19, 225n, 278 Tulloch, John, 85, 130, 139, 143n 22nd Sydney Film Festival, 139–40 twins, 98, 120–2, 144n Ubu Films, 140 United Aboriginal Mission, 251, 267n
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 316
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Vengeance of the Deep (Ken G. Hall), 87 verisimilitude, 159, 160–1 virtues of the fluid, 281 Waltzing Matilda (Pat Hanna), 92 wealth and poverty, 26 Whitely, Reg, 259 Wik case, 194 Williams, Eric ‘Bungy’, 184, 229, 234 Williams, Margaret, 159, 179 Wilpena Pound as filming location, 233 wipes, 76–7, 78–9, 128, 130, 131, 135–6 Wirangu Aboriginal people, 266n women modernity and maternity, 58–60 passivity and activity, 103 power, 143n
sexuality, 102 textual power, 104 wool industry Aboriginal people involved in production, 189 analogy with film industry, 15n annual production, 102 importance to Commonwealth, 63 size of, 64 world sense of, 25 Worth, Sol, 37–9 Yalata, Ooldea Aboriginal people moved to, 251–2 Yazzie, Sam, 38–9 Zinneman, Fred, 283 Zizek, Slavoj, 43
Index
Sheep and the Aust .indd 317
317
9/3/06 2:01:05 PM
