australia – the film

I am busy eating my breakfast rather late in the afternoon due to my vampire-like existence and wondering if any serious health effects can arise from eating very slightly fermented hummus on very slightly mouldy bread. Its what I eat for breakfast every day and being a creature of habit I do so regardless of expiry dates and that sort of fiddlefaddle. Actually it's delicious and I may be imagining it. (the faint taste of mould I mean, not the entire fact that I am eating – that would just be too too bizzare!) One thing I am not imagining is Hugh Jackman, in spite of the obvious expectations of the makers of Australia starring himself and Nicole Kidman and his reputationn as the sexiest man in the two universes etc etc. I know that he- like my breakfast - probably does exist – it's just that I am not a big fan of the Arnold Schwarzenegger principle of human mutation. I found it slightly aesthetically orf-putting if u kno what I mean – the kind of excessive body-building that made Hugh Jackman perfect for the role of (let me get my google out in case I get this wrong)..... Wolverine.... may just have ruined (a teeny itty bit) the proportions of what was probably, to start with, a very finely proportioned machine. Although, on the subject of getting the google out, I still fully appreciated the tantalising glimpse of groin one gets in the soaping down scene, as long as they just focussed on that and not on his overly-developed torso and chest. (my husband heard someone on the radio admit that they had believed “googling” was the frontal equivalent of mooning, tee-hee – how sweet.)

Ahem, to change the subject rather abrupt-like.... I loved that film – it was that sweet mixture of happy and sad that had me laughing and crying the whole way thru. The burlesque Mr Jackman (a mixture of burly and grotesque) said that the real star of the movie was the landscape of North Australia. I agree that the red-gold desert and smokey-blue hills are incredibly beautiful, but I think that the landscape should get the award of best supporting actor, I mean actress... Mama Earth and all that. The real star of that show is the young unknown Brandon Walters who plays Nullah, a half-aboriginal boy whose white father is the villain of the piece and the arch-enemy of the boy. His acting and narrating is so full of life, so charming and so utterly convincing, because he doesn't just act - he becomes the character he plays. Nicole Kidman is pretty good too – I really enjoy her even more when she isn't swanning around looking gorgeous, which she does very well in a lot of other films. Her character, Lady Sarah, is plain, awkward, gawky, pale, stuck-up, funny and very loveable. I don't want to give away any details of the plot, so I will just say that what I love most in a good movie, besides really relaxed, natural and convincing acting is subtle natural colours and superb light quality. In a country like Australia where the sun beats down mercilessly and there is little water-vapour in the air, things can easily look washed out and over-exposed. By some magic, using colour filters & what not I imagine, they have intensified the reddy-goldy-browns of the Australian landscape and the vivid turquoise of the sea & sky. Every shot is magical, perfectly composed. I'm going on a bit here I know – being an artist and a highly visual person, so hope I am not being boring. Let me just say it looks damn good and is a pleasure to view. I think it really deserved at least an Oscar nomination for best picture. Perhaps more so than Benjamin Button which one critic described as “every boring second of Brad Pitt's life played backwards.” Perhaps the story-like quality of Australia, and the fact that it's simply not American, told against it. It is a film that is celebratorily anti-racist.

I grew up in South Africa and one of the little incidents in the film reminded me of something in my childhood. There is a scene in the bar where the drover played by Hugh Jackman insists that the barman serve his aboriginal friend. He grudgingly agrees but gets out a tin cup instead of a glass. When I was growing up, my parents were pretty liberal for white South Africans and didn't support Apartheid, but they still had these creamy-white enamelled tin cups (mugs I suppose) for the black ladies to drink out of who did our housework, identical to the one in the film. We weren't allowed to drink out of them, and the “maids” obviously weren't allowed to drink out of our glasses and use our china. Once when I was alone in the kitchen I just decided to drink out of one of their enamel mugs, I don't know why, I just really wanted to, but I felt guilty, like I was doing something really bad. It's really sick that I grew up in a society that puts those kind of ideas into children's minds. Once I saw a little black child being attacked and bitten by a dog, he was screaming and crying and the dog was chasing him, I started running to try to help him. One of these self-righteous South-African women, who no doubt considered herself a “good-christian” and was a pillar of society, grabbed me and stopped me, telling me we don't help “those kind” of people. Pretty shameful stuff.

In the movie the drover is made an outcast by white society because he married an aboriginal woman. She died of T.B., because they refused to treat any black people in hospital. My mother, incidentally is Australian so I really have a great deal of the shameful racism of the past on both sides. I never ever hated black people, I grew up loving them as my fellow human beings and always have. There is this rumour in my family that we have aboriginal blood. I really really want it to be true and would be very proud of having that blood. Because the genes are recessive, all aboriginal traits disappear in about 4 generations, so I guess it could be true in spite of us all being very fair-skinned. This was the basis of the Australians taking mixed blood aboriginal children away from their mothers and trying to “breed the black out of them” as the guy says in the movie. It makes me so sad to think of all those kids being taken away from their mums. Rabbit Proof Fence is another film which deals with that stuff, a pretty good film, but the thing about Australia is that it has a real feel-good factor throughout, which you don't usually get in films that deal with atrocities and human rights abuses.

I find it interesting that the two paternal figures in Nullah's life – his aboriginal grandfather “King George” and his greedy, murderous white father are diametrically opposed. The father tries to destroy, and ultimately end, his life - and represents the forces of capitalist gain & greed, the intellectual notions behind white supremacy. The other, the grandfather, represents the “dark” forces of magic, ritual, dreamsong, the intensely harmonious relationship that the aboriginal people had with nature before that was taken away from them. I think that maybe there is an underlying picture of human nature here – the conflict between thought and feeling in many of us. And the conflict between our need to earn money, the pressures of consumerism and the way this threatens to destroy the inner part of us, our feelings and intuitions and dreams, so often shrouded in the darkness of the unconscious. The way we repress our feelings. The way we lose contact with nature. I think "Australia" is a a very positive affirmation of feelings, dreams nature and the part of everyone that is connected to nature.