The evolution of Australian cinema in 50 essential films

Homegrown Cinema ★★★★½
SBS on Demand

The first Australian film I saw in a cinema was Storm Boy in 1976. I was five years old and the rugged coastline combined with the tender bond between a lonely child and an orphaned pelican looked almost otherworldly to someone growing up in a small town in rural Victoria. I couldn’t comprehend at the time, but Henri Safran’s movie was doing exactly what a homegrown cinema should: showing me a part of the nation I had no knowledge of.

Storm Boy was a commercial hit, one of many that fell under the eclectic banner of the Australian New Wave. But ever since that movement announced that filmmaking in Australia had come of age, there’s also been a fear that Australia was about to lose our cinematic capacity. For as long as I’ve watched Australian films the industry has apparently been at death’s door. There’s been funding crises, hand-wringing about connecting with audiences, and arguments about absent stars.

Yet whatever the mechanism and whoever was the driving force, Australian movies have kept appearing. Now SBS On Demand have grouped together Storm Boy and 49 other Australian features onto one page, presenting them as a primer on Australian cinema.

It’s impossible to sum up this country’s cinematic history in 50 films – that’s a good thing – but what this package does, classics and oddballs alike, is give us a sense of breadth and depth. Sampling this selection is like finding a new path.

There are numerous ways of walking that path. Chronology is the obvious one, but where that tactic really strikes sparks is when you bend the decades together to link two movies from different eras. You could watch the 1978 psychological thriller Lost Weekend, about a couple played by John Hargreaves and Briony Behets, whose dynamic is so poisonous that it infects the landscape on a camping weekend, and follow it with 2015’s Strangerland, where Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes play parents whose teenage children go missing in a remote mining town. The landscape menacingly looms over both stories, but in different ways.

Another way to reshape time is to track actors. Kidman delivers a bewildered, brittle hurt performance in Strangerland, but it’s a form of time travel to also watch her in 1983’s BMX Bandits, a pedal-powered teenage action-comedy about a group of Sydney high schoolers who foil a group of bank robbers, where a 16-year-old Kidman delivers a plucky turn. Then you can reverse the trend with Ben Mendelsohn as a hopeful teen out for revenge on Steve Bisley’s shonky car dealer in 1990’s delightful The Big Steal, then a sociopath in thongs in the riveting 2010 crime drama Animal Kingdom.