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Opened Jun 20, 2025 by Arlene Denny@arlenedenny123
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Riding the new Age: how Aussie Movies won The World


When Australian New Wave films burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far Away, a renowned tale about male culture and commitment in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first success of Australia's golden age of movie theater however Americans were specifically bewildered by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers.

"They acknowledged that Sunday was an excellent movie but they didn't comprehend it," he states.

"It was pretty incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you may too have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more inviting of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the partner of an Adelaide vehicle dealership who 'd sold Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes beloved, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that turns up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the huge screening space, "the entire audience just went bananas, definitely crazy, and we got a big sale to France", Carroll chuckles.

"It's the language of the bush," describes legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who represented the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.

"There's a wonderful sociability revealed because film. Sunday states something far more extensive about the Australian character than a number of other movies that analyzed our triumphes and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a journal, it was simply how people behaved - I remember, since as a teen, I was in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my profession and in my memory; I 'd dealt with that wool press, I 'd chosen up that wool. I understood how hard it was ... it was the world of working guys."

Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave motion pictures, consisting of Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.

Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was shot at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.

"I grew up on a sheep residential or commercial property so I discovered how to class wool. My was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to discover a shearing shed, I knew precisely where they were," he states.

"And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I existed when the director stated, 'I do not know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'.

Thompson and Carroll just recently went to Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the period.

"The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," states Thompson.

"Tale after tale crucial to our understanding of ourselves was told and funded by that entity."

The New York Times described Australian New age as "recording a moment of liberty and abundance that was over almost before we understood it" and "having a vigor, a love of open space and a propensity for abrupt violence and languorous sexuality".

"That's me," states Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.

"Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80.

As a young star, it resembled "riding the crest of a wave, it was spectacular", states Thompson.

"There was certainly a very concentrated vitality, an unique appeal, unlike anything else at the time."

Carroll, who likewise produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, states the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies.

"More than 220 movies, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you check out the titles, it's just shocking," he says.

"We never had another period like that, with the originality and the creativity."

The SAFC's 2nd feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, ended up being an icon of Australian movie theater.

"The great thing that took place after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans comprehended it," says Carroll.

"And then Breaker Morant occurred and they clicked with it and it had big outcomes, and after that the 2nd Mad Max was a huge hit. So those three films were key to opening the American market."

Thompson keeps in mind that Australia made the world's very first feature-length narrative motion picture, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian movie industry in the silent era up to 1927".

"Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here had the ability to control the Australian movie market, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian movie theater," he states.

While Sunday Too Far Away was New age's very first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is commonly concerned as the era's opening movie.

It was Thompson's very first motion picture and the last for experienced character star Chips Rafferty, who passed away of a heart attack before it was launched.

It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but had a hard time at the Australian ticket office.

It's the story of an instructor waylaid in a mining town where a gaming spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he takes part in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to ethical destruction.

It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson remembers, "and individuals were saying 'that's not us', regardless of the reality the book was composed by an Australian".

"Because when we were seen on screen (formerly), we were viewed as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says.

During an early Australian screening, when a male stood, pointed at the screen and opposed "that's not us!", Thompson notoriously screamed back "take a seat, mate. It is us".
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Reference: arlenedenny123/housingbuddy#4