AustLit

'It’s a classic trope of Australian cinema: a foreigner comes here and discovers a wild, rugged place, replete with dangerous and surreal animals and dangerous and weird people.' (Introduction)

'Historically, when a sequel to a film was greenlit, you could rest assured this was because the first film made a tidy profit for its investors. With the advent of streaming services like Netflix, this is no longer necessarily the case. And Occupation: Rainfall shows us this.' (Introduction)

'Revenge films remain popular, in part, because they re-stage a formative aspect of human culture – the bonding of societies around communal acts of violence. As René Girard has written, scapegoating – the designation and punishment of the victim – is one of the foundational cultural moments.' (Introduction)

'The French philosopher Paul Virilio famously suggested, in recent works like The Original Accident, that the invention of every technology marks the simultaneous invention of its accident. The invention of the car invents the car crash, the invention of the ship invents the shipwreck, and so on. This is the basic idea underpinning the narrative of virtually all science-fiction literature and film – the malfunctioning of technologies designed for control – from the 19th-century novel Frankenstein to the 21st-century film Blade Runner 2049.'  (Introduction)

'Since the 1970s, some of the best horror films have been made in Australia. Something about the vastness of the continent, and its geographical remoteness from the northern and western hemispheres, lends itself to the kind of existential explorations of alienation that underpin the best examples of this genre.'  (Introduction)

'This essay begins from a simple premise: determinations of ‘Australianness’ and ‘the Australian character’ have been and continue to be inextricably linked to the fetishisation and reification of space in popular cultural manifestations of Australia. This is evident throughout white Australian cultural histories, as well as white histories of Australian culture. Perhaps this is a tautological claim in relation to any conception of nation, tied as such conceptions are to modern practices of cartography and geography. However, it is my contention that whilst notions of space play a determinant role in general vis-à-vis the configuration of nation (and national character), they play a larger role than usual in the configuration of ‘Australia’; the function of space in the conception of Australia is less modulated through competing discourses such as class, ethnicity and religion than in other national examples. This emphasis continues to privilege a mythical vision of space, with terra Australis incognita reified according to either of two dominant paradigms: the landscape is cultivated as a blank space offering the egalitarian opportunity for ‘man’ to reassess and reassert ‘his’ place in the natural order; or the landscape is cultivated as a sublime object—grand, and at times terrifying in its vastness and emptiness, a spectral antipodean environment that seems to ‘naturally’ lend itself to the gothic mode.' (Introduction)