Riding the New Wave: how Aussie movies won the world

West Australian

31-05-2025

When Australian New Wave movies 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, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers.
"They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says.
"It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch."
But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot.
"She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.
"I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes 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 room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs.
"It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.
"There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures."
Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds.
"Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men."
Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including 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 filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.
"I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says.
"And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'.
Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era.
"The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson.
"Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity."
The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality".
"That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.
"Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80.
As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson.
"There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time."
Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies.
"More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says.
"We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity."
The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema.
"The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll.
"And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market."
Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927".
"Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says.
While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film.
It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released.
It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office.
It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation.
It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian".
"Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen 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 man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us".