There is much to say about Wake in Fright, but only some of it gets said in this odd little book. The main text runs to a mere sixty-five pages, a number of them occupied by personal recollections that seem intended to establish the bona fides of the author, Tina Kaufman (best known as the long-serving editor of Filmnews). The use of autobiography to provide context for a critical response is a familiar and legitimate strategy, which Christos Tsiolkas, for example, deploys effectively in his Australian Screen Classics volume (2002) on The Devil’s Playground (1976). But Kaufman writes for the most part as a journalist and cultural historian rather than as a critic; thus it is not altogether clear what lesson we are meant to draw from her youthful memories of skipping school to go to the movies, or sharing a house with members of the experimental UBU film group.

From these unpromising beginnings, Kaufman segues into a well-informed description of the state of the Australian film and television industry in the late 1960s. She points out that this supposedly moribund period laid the groundwork for the full-blown, government-funded revival to follow. The next chapter outlines the circumstances surrounding the production of Wake in Fright, with behind-the-scenes anecdotes culled from fresh interviews with Kotcheff and from a handful of his surviving collaborators. Then comes the inspirational part of the story: how the film disappeared from circulation shortly after its initial release, and might have been lost forever but for the efforts of its editor, Anthony Buckley, who rescued the negative from probable destruction.

It is handy to have this material assembled in the one place, but much of it will be familiar to anyone who paid the slightest attention to the media coverage of Wake in Fright’s triumphant re-release in 2009. The most interesting section of the book is the final chapter, in which Kaufman gathers critical reactions that the film has elicited at different periods; one of her most intriguing rediscoveries is an enthusiastic New Yorker review by Pauline Kael, who praises Kotcheff for his ‘fair-minded’ refusal to blame male aggression on such irrelevant factors as racism, class antagonism, or the Vietnam War. More persuasive are some recent remarks by Sylvia Lawson, who reviewed the film for The Australian on its initial release and can comment with authority on the ‘massive shifts in general consciousness’ over the subsequent decades.

While almost all the writers cited here find things to admire in Wake in Fright, there are wide areas of disagreement. Is the film a realistic study of life in the outback, or an expressionist flight of fancy? Is it merely a souvenir of times gone by, or a warning just as relevant today? Is it an all-out attack on beer-swilling ocker barbarity, or (as Kotcheff maintains) a kind of backhanded tribute to the survival instinct? For some local observers, it seems to be nothing less than a revelation of the shocking ‘truth’ about Australia, a notion embraced with a masochistic fervour that the term ‘cultural cringe’ may not adequately define. A more ambitious essay might have pursued a sceptical inquiry into the ideological purposes that the film has served over the years, as either a mythical lost object or an incontestable ‘classic’.

Like most of her predecessors in the field, Kaufman pays only cursory attention to the rest of Kotcheff’s output, yet something might be gained by setting Wake in Fright alongside such ‘lowbrow’ entertainments as Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) and First Blood (1982). Blurring the much-laboured distinction between art and exploitation, the film can be seen equally as a highflown statement on the human condition and as a trashy, sensationalist shocker – even if nobody dies on screen apart from a few kangaroos. As the naïve schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) descends into abjection, he enters a nightmarish inverted world in which ‘normal’ erotic impulses are diverted into boozing and violence; homosexuality, in particular, is treated as a horror beyond representation, the logical end point of a journey toward the heart of darkness.

This vision, surely, is ripe for reassessment and critique. Perhaps out of modesty, Kaufman shies away from the task, leaving the impression that a troubling work of art has been yoked rather uncomfortably to a feel-good narrative about a missing treasure restored to its rightful place. Her unpretentious book will have its uses, especially for students. But since a second extended essay on Wake in Fright is unlikely to be published in hard copy in the near future, one can’t help feeling that an opportunity has been lost. It is too bad the task was not assigned to someone like Lawson, a writer who should be drafted – along with Meaghan Morris, John Flaus, and Bill Routt – to inspect an Australian Screen Classic forthwith.

CONTENTS: MARCH 2011