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The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Surfers, sheep and sexual revolution: the film-makers who sold Australia to the world
Osaka, March 1970. Japanese crowds rush to the opening of World Expo and Australia is on show. It's all bronzed surfers, bikini-clad blondes, sheep shearers and Driza-Bones, projected from 10 giant screens in the Australian pavilion. This footage opens Australia: An Unofficial History, a new three-part documentary starting on SBS on Wednesday night. Such was the World Expo 70's success that Australia's Liberal government decided to recruit a team of film-makers with a tightly controlled remit: to create an official portrait of Australia on celluloid to sell across the globe. Agriculture, immigration, business, leisure, employment: the official footage that came out of the Commonwealth Film Unit showed a carefree, young, white – and invariably masculine, unless a bikini was required – nation. It was also instructive. Through film, Australians were effectively told by the government who they were and what they stood for. All footage was carefully screened by government bureaucrats before release. Australia: An Unofficial History, hosted by Jacki Weaver, is a three-part documentary that explores how Australians came to see their own lives reflected on the small and large screen and began hearing their own voices and stories in their living rooms and cinemas. Seventies Australia witnessed the emergence of land rights, gay rights, feminism and organised resistance against governments who sent their young men to die in foreign conflicts. But it is only after viewing long-buried archival footage from the Commonwealth Film Unit – which became Film Australia in 1972 – that viewers come to understand just how drastically the nation changed in a decade. At the same time, young baby boomers had begun co-opting their uni mates to make their own unofficial portraits of Australia. 'Film Australia was a little staid compared to the group that I'd been mixing with, who felt that film was for self expression,' says director Phillip Noyce in one of the documentary's interviews. '[Film] wasn't to teach anything. It was the opposite. It was to teach nothing. It was for sensation. 'I guess I sort of had a little bit of disdain for the people who were locked up out there in the madhouse of Film Australia,' he says. While Australia's official film-makers were recreating a Menzian utopia, Noyce – now known for such films as Newsfront, Patriot Games, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Dead Calm – and his contemporaries were pushing the boundaries of a fledgling avant-garde art form. While the Australian government was using the medium of film to woo a new wave of (white) immigrants in 1971, Noyce, as part of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op – a collective of independent young film-makers – was covering the emerging hippy scene in Australia. His coverage of the 1971 Aquarius arts festival held (surprisingly) in Canberra resulted in his first major documentary, Good Afternoon, which suggested to the world that Australia had the perfect climate for growing a plant called can-aar-bus. An uber-cool 21-year-old Noyce may have been doing the country's official film-makers a slight disservice, however. Former employees of the 1970s version of Film Australia interviewed in the documentary including Rod Freedman and Bruce Moir (the latter rose to become chief executive of the department) recall a workplace where security guards had yet to be invented. When they bundied off at 5pm, the studios became a hive of unauthorised activity with employees experimenting with the medium by 'borrowing' then state-of-the-art government issued equipment. These public servants even found a way of getting around Canberra's bureaucrats, who had the final sign-off on all scripts: make a film without any dialogue. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Archival footage from the early 1970s shows a young Jacki Weaver relaxing dreamily on her sun-drenched breezy balcony, watching her male and female laundry engaged in a rapturous dance of courtship on the clothesline. Not a word is spoken. The government's official image of Australia was fracturing before its very eyes. Then, in December 1972, everything changed. The ushering in of the Whitlam government transformed White Australia into Multicultural Australia. The government film unit's remit was drastically overhauled: no longer would they tell Australians what to think or how to behave. In reality, Australians weren't all beachgoers, they weren't all Anglo and they weren't all happy. 'I joined [the film unit] at the height of the Whitlam government, one year from its demise, but at the height of its revolutionary legislation,' Noyce tells the Guardian Australia. 'It was a time of tremendous rapid change in attitudes and the films that we made reflected that. They were made as discussion starters.' The Mike Walsh Show became the 'Oprah of its day', he says, seeking to catch the zeitgeist – warts and all. Documentaries appeared, interviewing young migrant women resisting pressure to adopt the paternalistic ways of their parents. Young men confessed to feelings of loneliness and hopelessness. An Indigenous voice emerged as the microphone was handed to First Nations leaders such as Gary Foley who, in the SBS documentary, watches footage of himself being bashed unconscious by police at the tent embassy on the lawns of Old Parliament House in 1972. Noyce's commission was to make 10-minute documentaries for high school students – 10 minutes being considered the average attention span of a teenager in 1973. One of those was a fly-on-the-wall documentary featuring 17- and 18-year-old urban boys preparing for a night out 'poofter bashing'. Noyce never expected to find himself filming in the back seat of a Holden sedan with boys cruising for prey. Two years earlier, Dennis Altman, an Australian academic and gay rights activist, had shocked viewers when he appeared on the ABC's Monday Conference show – akin to today's Q&A – and proclaimed that the heterosexual nuclear family construct was not the only possible form of human happiness. 'I'm no longer going to lead the double life most homosexuals lead,' he says in the documentary. 'I'm no longer going to pretend that I am, in fact, straight. I'm going to be in public as I am in private, and people are going to have to accept me for what I am.' Altman tells Guardian Australia that when he first left Melbourne for New York in the late 1960s, it was 'like that moment in The Wizard of Oz, where black and white becomes Technicolor'. In 1975, four years after Altman's television appearance, South Australia became the first state or territory in Australia to decriminalise homosexual activity. It would take another two decades for the last Australian state, Tasmania, to follow suit in 1997. 'Everyone thinks of the time when they were young as the golden age,' Altman says. 'I suspect many people of my generation like to think that way. But I do think that it was certainly, in terms of sexual politics, a time of extraordinary change.' At the close of the 1970s, such was the feeling of buoyancy within the gay community that even the possibility of same-sex marriage was no longer a fantastical thought. And then the 1980s were ushered in – and with it, the scourge of Aids. When the Whitlam government was dismissed in 1975, the film-making community entered paralysis. 'We didn't know if there would be a tomorrow, if this would continue, because we knew the vagaries of politics meant that at any moment it could all be taken away,' Noyce recalls. 'So we had to make use of what we were given. We had to push the boundaries while we could.' As it turned out, the Fraser government's focus was on Australia's economy, not monitoring the mores of its citizenship. But in just three years, the cultural and social floodgates had been opened too wide – it would never lock shut again. Australia: An Unofficial History premieres on SBS on 5 March at 7.30pm.
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jacki Weaver: ‘What am I secretly good at? I pick up other people's dogs' poos'
You're hosting the series Australia: An Unofficial History, which includes government tourism films from the 1970s. How would you sell Australia to the world now? When people ask me, having lived in Los Angeles for 14 years, how is Australia superior to America, I say, 'No guns, free medical, affordable education.' What's the oldest thing you own, and why do you still have it? I've got a cane chair that was given to me for my second birthday. I have it in my sitting room, it's got a little cushion on it and it's really sweet and very tiny. I'm very small – I'm less than five feet tall, and I'm 48 kilos – so I can still sit in this little chair, and I do! I mean, probably I shouldn't have sat in it when I was pregnant, I could have broken it. But it survived. I'm 77 and a half, so it's 75 years old. That's pretty impressive. What's your favourite place to visit in the world? New York City – I just love it. I've been at least 40 times, and I've stayed in at least 30 different hotels. I first visited there in 1972 and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, and for a time I used to go to New York every year. I love how you can walk everywhere. I love how if you really work out your timetable carefully, you can see 10 shows a week: three matinees – on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday – as well as evening shows. And there are great bars. I'm a bit of a barfly – I like to sit in fabulous bars and listen to other people. I love all the gay bars down on eighth and ninth avenue. And then there's the museums, the libraries, the parks – I think it's the greatest city in the world. What's the best lesson you learned from someone you've worked with? I'm not a tantrum thrower, but I remember very early on all the senior actresses and actors saying to me: try not to ever lose your temper, either in a rehearsal room for a play or on set for a TV show or a film, because it only makes you feel worse and it upsets everyone else. You have a storied romantic history – you once said you'd effectively had nine husbands if you counted serious relationships. What's your top bit of relationship advice? Kindness. I remember Germaine Greer saying – and she's always been a great hero of mine, because of The Female Eunuch – that the most overrated virtue is kindness. But I think it's the most important virtue, because it influences all the others. My ex-lovers and ex-husbands might disagree, but I've always tried to be kind in a relationship. If you had to fight a famous person, who would it be, how would you fight them and who would win? I'm a lover, not a fighter. I wouldn't fight anyone. First of all, I'm so tiny I don't think I could beat anyone in a fight unless I took a machete or an AK-47. I used to have a bit of a tongue when I was younger [so] I'd like to think I could demolish someone with words. But the people that are dislikable enough to want to fight, they're usually stupid. So no matter what witticisms you've managed to come up with, they'd probably go right over their heads. Do you have anyone in mind? I don't want to get political, but probably politicians. There's a few politicians that I don't like. What are you secretly really good at? I don't know, picking up dog poo? I wear gloves, and I'm very neat at it. I live in an apartment block in West Hollywood that has a dog park and the rules are that you pick up your own dog's poo, but a lot of people don't – it's very annoying – and so I do pick up other people's dogs' poos. Which is rather like changing another person's child's nappy, isn't it? I think I've got a very tidy mind – I'm a little obsessive compulsive – and I'm married to someone who I love dearly, but he is intrinsically untidy, so I think I'm good at being quietly subversive, going around tidying up. What's been your most cringe-worthy run-in with a celebrity? I don't know that it's cringe-worthy, but it's slightly embarrassing. There's a very exclusive club [in LA] called San Vicente Bungalows; I'm a member, and I took a friend of mine there for lunch. And this place has rules: you're not allowed to take photos of people, and if you don't know someone, you're not allowed to go up to them and speak to them. We were having lunch, and this young man with a baseball cap on backwards and sunglasses, who had been with a group of noisy boys, came up and said, 'I just want to say that I really love your work. I'm a huge fan.' And I said, 'Oh, thanks very much' – thinking: I thought you weren't supposed to come and talk to people you didn't know. And when he went away, my friend said, 'You don't know who that was, do you?' And I said, 'I've got no idea.' It was Leonardo DiCaprio. I've always been a fan, ever since Gilbert Grape, so I was really annoyed with myself for not recognising him – I would have said, 'Oh my God, Leo, thank you!' Which word do you hate most? I hate when fashion people say, 'Oh, your eyes just pop.' Actually I was reading something about the inauguration in the paper today and somebody was saying there were colours that really 'popped'. What do you mean popped? How stupid. I don't like 'reach out' either. People say, 'I'll reach out to your people.' Fuck off! Give me a call or a text. Do you have a party trick? I'm not very good at parties, believe it or not. I'm a card-carrying introvert, and my husband is too. I love extroverts – I find them fantastic to be with, because you don't have to do any work. But when we have to go to parties, my husband and I always find a corner and sit down and talk to each other. Which annoys my manager, who's like, 'Get out there and circulate.' Sometimes I force myself to say, 'I think you're fantastic,' but usually I'm too shy. That's my trick. Australia: An Unofficial History premieres Wednesday 5 March on SBS and SBS On Demand
