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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Watching the film Wake in Fright nearly 40 years after its release - 1971 - brought back one good memory for me of life in the bush. Canvas water bags. Nothing like the taste of water from those bags: sweet and earthy. One hangs on the back of a door in the shambles of a mining shack occupied by Doc Tydon, the movie's supposed villain. Not that anyone in the movie drinks water. Heaven forbid. Instead they neck beer and, in the case of Doc Tydon, glug down whiskey in the legendary quantities typical of men on a weekend bender in the Outback. Typical, I should also emphasise, of men the world over who work in isolated areas under punishing conditions, although the pursuit of the Holy Grail of alcoholic oblivion in the Outback is undertaken with an inexorable determination, not so much blunting pain as getting their due. Cracking a few cold ones with your mates - legacy, birthright, entitlement.
Notes
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Includes a number of stills from the film and a copy of the preface to the script.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)
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Mistaken Heart
2009
single work
correspondence
— Appears in: The Monthly , August no. 48 2009; (p. 72)
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Mistaken Heart
2009
single work
correspondence
— Appears in: The Monthly , August no. 48 2009; (p. 72) -
‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)
- Wake in Fright 1961 single work novel
- Wake in Fright 1971 single work film/TV
- Australian Outback, Central Australia,
