Cirrus@Austlit

'This article frames Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) in terms of the texture of the image and its mode of acting. Through this twofold movement it elaborates on the compositional features of the image and theorizes the mode of acting as a variant of burlesque performance: acting in strobe. Through this framing, some of the unique features of Bazmark's camp aesthetic are mapped out and Catherine Martin's contribution to it is also acknowledged. Through these aesthetic strategies, Luhrmann is able to address the historical archive of Australia, and its popular memory bank in its own flexible camp epic idiom. Thereby the film is able to free itself from being enslaved to chronological articulation of time and history. Instead, it creates for itself mechanisms and devices that enable acts of storytelling that deflect the arrow of time.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article examines the depiction of Jedda's Sarah McMann and Australia's English-born Sarah Ashley. In each character there is a maternal desire that drives the plot to which responsibility for the children's fate is attributed. National assimilation policies are expressed emphatically through Sarah McMann's desires for the Aboriginal child, Jedda, and the failures of assimilation are played out in the child's tragic fate. In Australia the plot is resolved by returning the Aboriginal child, Nullah, to his grandfather. This only becomes possible because Sarah Ashley's agenda for intervening in the removal of Nullah by the state, in the hope of raising him as her own child, is realized. Within the logic of the narrative, the outsider status of the recent immigrant Sarah Ashley enables her to become a clear-sighted agent in the return of the child to his family. This article considers the significance of these two representations of the white maternal in the context of the history of child removal policies, Bringing Them Home and the National Apology.'

Source: Abstract.

'Baz Luhrmann's Australia is here considered as a lengthy meditation on the problem of national legitimacy, particularly in relation to the Stolen Generations narrative. Using psychoanalytic and structuralist frames of reference, the article analyses the film's storyline as an unfolding resolution of that problem, represented by the bastard (fatherless) status of Nullah. It also shows how the resolution occurs through the intercession of Lady Sarah Ashley and Drover as ‘godparents’, who represent Australia as a nation defined as a specific conjunction of land and law (sovereignty). The godparenting links Nullah to his maternal grandfather, King George, whose God-like status is invoked as part of the film's extensive use of Christian imagery, thus situating the redeemed and redeeming Nullah as a kind of national Messiah. The article concludes with a reflection on how Australia, as myth, is linked to the reality of Aboriginal affairs since the beginning of the assimilation era, the time in which the film is set, considering how the film symbolically portrays not only the post-1930s assimilation policy, but also the post-1970s self-determination era and the more recent turn towards neo-paternalist calls to balance Aboriginal ‘rights’ with ‘responsibilities’.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue that the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film's characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Katherine Gorge (Nitmiluk), Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past and the present.'

Source: Abstract.