AustLit

This essay 'shows how Luhrmann's recent, controversial film provides insight into the experience of watching movies in segregated cinemas. This important essay brings together analysis of racial segregation as it is represented visually in Baz Luhrmann's Australia with the recollections of Aboriginal cinema-goers who experienced or observed segregation first-hand. In doing so, Nugent reminds us of the significance of 'non-realist' cinema images that can captivate audiences and at the same time represent the material conditions of cinema-watching.' (Source: Editor's introduction)

'Roger Hillman's essay adds a transnational dimension to representations of an historical event that has become the preeminent site of national memorialisation. In A Transnational Gallipoli?, Hillman contrasts the masculinist heroics and celebratory nationalism of Peter Weir's iconic film, Gallipoli, and Roger McDonald's 1915, with more recent novels and films produced outside Australia's borders that provide alternative forms of cultural memory. Louis de Bernières' Birds Without Wings and Tolga Örnek's documentary film Gallipoli: The Front Line Experience are significant as texts that 'situate the Gallipoli legend in a transnational rather than a national framework, while providing a fuller understanding of how cultural memory works in relation to the national imaginary'.' (Source: Editor's introduction)