'Investigates how the critical uptake of genre-based cinema has been incorporated into
the cultural and industrial rubric of Australian national cinema. The thesis offers, in
part, a revaluation of theoretically under-emphasized texts (as well as texts that have
been the subject of much higher levels of scrutiny), in order to establish recurrent
threads within Australian cinema. In doing this, the thesis offers new and original
knowledge in the form of developing a perspective for a revised critical and
theoretical analysis of genre cinema within Australian cinema, challenging the
presumption of the kinds of texts that can be seen as articulating the nation. The
groups of films examined herein form nodes through which a network of important
and divergent ideas about nation, national identity and social organization come
together in the form of narrative and thematic undercurrents.'
