'The picture is an exceedingly interesting one right from the opening scene, where Constable Fitzpatrick arrives with a warrant for the arrest of Dan Kelly, then to the police camp, which is captured by the Kellys, the sticking-up of Younghusband's station, robbing the bank at Euroa, destroying the railway line, and finally to the capture of Ned Kelly in his suit of armour.'
[Source: 'The Story of the Kelly Gang', The Register, 29 December 1906, p.4.]
'Australian cinema has travelled a varied trajectory since its initial development in the late 19th century. The cinema reflected the developing social and cultural tropes of its time, as the concept of a distinct Australian identity began to form. But it is clear that a colonial history of Australian film focuses very clearly and emphatically along lines of class and gender. Rose Lucas notes that there is a “cluster of dominant, recognisable images in our cinema” which consists of the bushman, the ocker, the ‘mate’, and the ‘battler’, a series of male coded tropes which are stubbornly pervasive within this national cinema. These archetypes have trained a concentrated gaze upon masculinity in Australian cinema, but there has been little space in this cultural landscape for the development of archetypical women in Australia’s cultural history with very few valued traits that are specifically coded female. This resolutely masculine perspective seems to have shaped the nation and the national cinema, and Lucas’s observation highlights the key archetypes as embodied as masculine. But these archetypes, long the sole domain of masculine representation, also have historically encompassed female experiences. In this paper we identify the need to broaden such a framework, and by taking the most Australian and most masculine of forms – the larrikin – we argue that the larrikin girl has been hiding in plain sight across Australian film history.' (Introduction)
This analysis of The Story of the Kelly Gang, Thunderbolt, and The Squatter's Daughter considers early Australian films in the light of American cowboy films, arguing that 'it is the contention of this paper that these relations are the result of certain cultural coincidences between Australia and the Western United States rather than the outcome of direct influence of the one upon the other. Viewed in this light, “the American cinema par excellence” can perhaps be more reasonably understood as the epitome of a global cinema – not an original myth of nationhood, but a story of no-place retold everywhere and at all times, even in terra nullius itself.'
