At Nature’s Mercy THE CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN WESTERN
When I mentioned this project to a friend in England, he wrote: ‘I never knew Australian westerns existed!’ This led me to ponder what I understood by the term ‘western’. Certainly, the term has most commonly been associated with American films that dramatise the idea of moving westwards, a notion that is irrelevant in Australia – here, the descriptor ‘outback-bound’ would be more accurate, since Australian narratives set in similarly sparse landscapes need only to have moved inland from any direction. However, geographical direction is less germane to this study than another use of the term ‘western’: that is, the concept of Western civilisation imposing itself on a largely empty land, with little regard for the original inhabitants and their existing culture.
The American notion of ‘cowboys and Indians’, once a familiar way of referring to westerns, finds its Australian parallel in the low regard in which white European culture has historically held the age-old ways of living practised by our Indigenous population. While more recent Australian westerns have confronted this situation rather more critically than their forebears either here or in the United States have, this basic conflict accounts for the recurrence of certain narrative trends in American westerns, even in masterworks such as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).
Westerns from both nations share an iconography dominated by vast, empty landscapes, which can be threatening or awe-inspiringly beautiful – or, simply, indifferent to the possibility of human habitation. This last aspect most often makes white men’s attempts to deal with the physical world look fragile and exposed, stressing the sheer difficulty, whether practical or psychological, of setting up isolated homesteads or rough-hewn communities as bulwarks against the encompassing physical world. This world often looks stunning, but doesn’t offer much protection from the dangers of loneliness or predation. The Australian outback is particularly well suited as a location for such narratives: what more could the genre ask for than what poet Dorothea Mackellar described as ‘a land of sweeping plains’ and ‘ragged mountain ranges’? The films’ soundtracks, too, tend to be more similar than
