Monthly Archives: March 2019

Honours

Thursday 28 March

This morning I presented my Precursor assessment to the Writing as Researchers lab, in which we were to take a “slice” of our research question and interrogate it with regard to one of the lab’s themes (praxis | risk | resistance | obligation | ethics).

I decided to explore the character archetype of the Bloke through the lens of political resistance and national identity.

Much of Australia’s national identity — or “national character” as Russell Ward called it in his influential 1958 account — corresponds to the Bloke archetype, and is defined in terms of its resistance to the social norms of the city-dweller.

Ward posits that the Australian national character was forged by two things: our convict past (which accounts for the swearing, independence and suspicion of authority) and the landscape (which accounts for the physical toughness, as well as a pervasive insecurity that has been explored in media throughout our history).

The Bloke has been portrayed in cinema for at least 100 years, going back to Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Filmmakers have explored the various dimensions, expressions and limitations of the character in the time since, but resistance has remained a consistently important attribute.

One Night the Moon (2001, directed by Indigenous woman filmmaker Rachel Perkins) is a particularly interesting example as it both deeply critiques the character archetype while also giving a pretty classical, accurate portrayal. Perkins explores the negative side of the resistance that is usually cast as a positive.

Zooming out, much of Australian cinema (and, even further out, Australian culture at large) is defined by its resistance — to the British empire, to American cultural influence.

But there are some very obvious problems with the Bloke archetype as the standard expression of Australian national identity — namely, that it is a very narrow, specific character that increasingly doesn’t actually exist in society in great numbers.

And the Bloke archetype itself has so many inherently negative attributes associated with it that it could be argued that it bears some small responsibility for current social and political problems.

Although this exercise was a bit of a distraction from my main research topic, resistance seems to be central to much of Australia’s national identity (and therefore much of Australian cinema), so it’s something I will need to continue researching.

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Honours

Friday 22 March

(White) Australian identity is always uncomfortable, under perceived threat. Permanently displaced. It’s not our land, but we have to live on it, so we try to conquer it. First the Outback. Then the suburbs. It’s all someone else’s land.

I should also explore how limited the idea of national identity expressed in these films is. How much do they embrace non-white, non-working-class, non-suburban, non-cisgendered, non-heteronormative Australia? Not at all, is my estimation. What does that say about our formulation of national identity — and who gets to decide on that formulation?

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Honours

Friday 22 March

Well, it was bound to happen. I knew I’d struggle to keep up this journaling practice.

Now in addition to feeling like I’m drowning in my own inadequacy, I feel bad that I haven’t done something as simple — and yet, according to all of our readings so far, absolutely crucial — as journalling.

Anyway, putting that aside…

This last couple of weeks have been spent collecting as much material as I possibly can.

I discovered an academic at Charles Sturt University who has written on Australianness, bloke-ness, and suburbia — her name is Kristina Gotschall, and since her biography says that she plays the ukulele I’m going to assume she knows my aunty, who also works at CSU. Small world.

Anyway, after reading Gotschall’s work my thinking around my research topic splintered off into three areas in Australian cinema:

  1. Masculinity / blokeness
  2. The family unit
  3. Suburbia

This is the rough order in which I came upon these topics as potential research areas — and I think with each step I’ve come closer and closer to discovering what I’m really interested in, and what speaks to me most directly. Families and suburbia are interesting to me because of my own personal background.

For now I’m proceeding on the assumption that my research topic will be, broadly, the use and function of suburbia in Australian cinema, with a particular focus on the “suburban grotesque” films such as Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989), Muriel’s Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994), The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) and The King is Dead! (Rolf de Heer, 2012).

I have to say the prospect of closely studying Muriel’s Wedding or The Castle has 13-year-old me extremely excited.

I’m not sure when I first heard the term “suburban grotesque”, but I have always assumed that it was a legitimate — if perhaps not widely known — descriptor of those slightly cartoonish 90s Australian films set in the suburbs. But in discussing it with others, including my supervisor, I was surprised to learn that perhaps it’s not as much of a “thing” as I assumed.

There’s a reference in a 2004 article in The Age to “film critic Adrian Martin calls the ‘suburban grotesque’ in Australian cinema”, but I’ve never been able to find a record of Martin ever actually using the term. Alexia suggested I just email the man himself and ask, which seemed a preposterous notion to me to begin with, but I was convinced that he wouldn’t mind — and so I did. Within an hour he’d responded with a breakdown of his own personal history with the term, as well as other terms in which people have described this movement. He said that while he didn’t coin the term himself, he pointed me in the direction of who he thinks did: Karl Quinn, then an undergrad and later to be The Age film critic. So many new threads to unpick.

Related terms: suburban gothic, suburban surreal.

 

This weekend will be spent polishing my research question and deciding what the hell I’m going to do for my Writing as Researchers precursor. Anxiety.

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Honours

Tuesday 19 March

Something I want to keep in mind is to continue my regular viewing practice. I need to stay plugged in. I have to watch as many new-to-me films as I possibly can, even though university work is currently completely overwhelming me.

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Honours

Wednesday 6 March

My first research journal. Not sure this will last, but I’m going to give it a go.

I hope that journaling will help me in a few ways:

  • By keeping me engaged in my research practice from week to week, so I don’t have to do the cognitive work of picking things up after a long break if there are any gaps in my time spent researching.
  • By helping me think through and clarify my thoughts by having to write them down. “You don’t know something until you can teach it.” (Einstein, allegedly — though probably not.)
  • By allowing me to go back over my notes and “re-trace the steps” of my thinking, if I ever want to understand how I came to a particular understanding or want to go back and change my process.

As it’s only Week 1 I haven’t got much to report, though I have found one interesting idea. In Utopia for Realists (Rutger Bregman), in the chapter about Universal Basic Income, Bregman quotes Bertrand Russell about utopia:

“Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change,” the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. Elsewhere he continued, “It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

Could ideas of utopian society be a framework in which to analyse the family unit in Australian cinema?

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