by Jamie Graham
No one does bleak and nasty quite like the Aussies. The Boys, Wolf Creek, Animal Kingdom, Snowtown, Hounds Of Love, Killing Ground… They’re enough to make the Mad Max movies seem like a Sunday picnic in Regent’s Park, George Miller trimming away the real, sick-making violence as surely as those triangular sarnies are shorn of crusts.
Premiering to rave reactions at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, Wake In Fright is the granddaddy of Australia’s savage cinema, a sweat-stained, booze-soaked, forcefully toxic masterpiece that glowers at the vanguard of both the Ozploitation and Australian New Wave movements. Nick Cave called it “the best and most terrifying film about Australian existence.” New Wave luminaries Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, and Peter Weir credit it with demonstrating the chord, but after decades of gathering dust it needed a national cinema to appeal on the international stage.
Strange, then, that Wake In Fright is directed by a Canadian (Ted Kotcheff, who went on to make First Blood), scripted by a Jamaican (Evan Jones, adapting Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel), and stars two Englishmen (Gary Bond and Donald Pleasence). Perhaps it needed outsiders to view askew the rugged white-male individualist myth? “That’s not us!” cried an audience member when the film opened in Sydney and flopped. “It’s us,” replied Kotcheff, widening the aperture of his lens to illuminate universal machismo.
Wake In Fright — or Outback, as it was originally titled in the US and UK — opens in the outback town of Tiboonda, as middle-class schoolteacher John Grant (Bond) catches a train into the mining town of Bundanyabba. He’s to stay one night before boarding a plane to Sydney. “The Yabba,” says a cab driver, is “the best place in Australia… a friendly place”, and soon John is accepting a drink from an aggressively chummy copper, Jock (Chips Rafferty). Then another drink. And another, until he’s smashed and broke, having gambled his home savings.
The next morning, he’s taken in by Doc Tydon (Pleasence), an eccentric expat doctor who’s been barred from practicing in Sydney and now surviving in this remote hellhole by playing saviour to hunts of kangaroo and bread. “What do you do?” asks Grant. “I drink,” replies Doc, and so begins an monumental piss-up that lasts for several days and culminates in a horrific kangaroo hunt. Kotcheff, a vegetarian, accompanied a team of licensed hunters on a nighttime expedition to capture the spotlights-and-splatter footage.
Marsupial entrails aside, overt violence is absent from Wake In Fright. But like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), another bloodless-but-brutal masterpiece that trades in blistering sunlight, forbidding landscapes and male aggression spiked by isolation and deprivation, Kotcheff’s film is unremittingly tense. Filmed in January 1970 in the mining town of Broken Hill, home to three men for every woman, Wake In Fright is shot in scorching reds, yellows, and oranges, its celluloid emulsified in sweat. Visiting miners, meanwhile, amused themselves at Ajax Film Services in the Sydney suburb of North Ryde by shooting hundreds of flies through holes in the corrugated-iron walls of Doc’s shack as he drinks, tussles and, it’s suggested, has shit-faced sex with John.
By way of research, Kotcheff stayed in Broken Hill before the shoot, the locals plying him with beer and pleading for fights. “I realised they just wanted contact,” the director later recalled of their desire to hit and be hit. Kotcheff poured it all into the movie — no other film so captures that extraordinary camaraderie, all booze and banter, as blokes who are usually unable to express their feelings for fear of revealing weaknesses get plastered and emotional. Taciturn even. “Put me concentrate on the drinking,” Kotcheff remembers Rafferty instructing him on set, and the famous Aussie character actor, who died shortly before the film’s release, reportedly lubricated his performance by downing beer in every take, totalling up to 30 pints a day.
Over the course of just five days, Grant comes undone, his lustrous blond locks tousled, his cream suit crumpled and soiled, and his educated exterior cracked open to reveal the primitive man within — lying, cheating, fucking, killing. The films of the Australian New Wave thrummed with vitality, fuelled by nature, violence and sexuality. Wake In Fright has them on tap, and is perhaps soaked in the blood of Australia’s colonial history. Is it just coincidence that Grant speaks with the clipped tones of an English gentleman, and that he desires to visit the green and pleasant land? As Peter Weir’s New Wave classic Picnic At Hanging Rock showed us, the Australian countryside is no place for etiquette. There, the landscape swallowed people whole; here, it chews up Grant and spits him out.
Only existing in censored, degraded prints after its master negative went missing, Wake In Fright was for decades labelled Australia’s great lost film, until its editor, Anthony Buckley, located the original film and sound elements in CBS’ Pittsburgh archives. Digitally remastered, this queasy nightmare of a movie returned to Cannes in 2009. Martin Scorsese was a key figure behind its restoration — he’d been a vocal fan since attending the original premiere in 1971, two years before Mean Streets announced him as a major voice in New Hollywood.
“A deeply — and I mean deeply — unsettling and disturbing movie,” is how Scorsese described it, saying it left him “speechless”. The menfolk of The Yabba would raise a glass or 20 to that. “Come and have a drink, mate,” says one. “C’mon, the beer’s real good here,” offers another. And they won’t take no for an answer. “What’s the matter with you people?” rages Grant. “You burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child, that’s alright! Not have a flaming bloody drink with you… that’s the end of the bloody world!”
Empire, February 2025
