Writing Australian History On-screen

Writing Australian History On-screen reveals the depths in Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays convey perspectives of Australian history on screen taken from an Australian viewpoint in a way that offers insights and an understanding of the unique Australian history and sense of identity.

Writing Australian History On-screen: Television and Film Period Dramas "Down Under" reveals the depths of Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays in this book are thematically driven and take a rounded historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions. In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today. In speaking to the subject, the contributing writers show a keen awareness that addressing new areas arising from the humanities is key to learning; and hence to developing an understanding of the Australian culture, the society, and sense of the ever-unfurling flag of an Australian something that is not yet a national identity.

Chapter 1. Kings in Grass Castles: The Duracks and Screened Mythology

Andrew Howe

Chapter 2. “It’s a bastard of a place – takes a bastard to lick it”: Violence, Victimhood, and Nationalism on the Frontier in Luke’s Kingdom (1976), and Against the Wind (1978)

James Findlay

Chapter 3. Love, Lust, and Land Rights in The Naked Country (1985)

Chelsea Barnett

Chapter 4. Fisher Queens Versus the White Australia Policy: Challenging Orientalism in Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, and Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries?

Dirk Gibb

Chapter 5. “It’s the War That Didn’t Suit Me”: Miss Fisher’s Jack Robinson as Emblematic First World War Ex-Serviceman

Jessica Meyer

Chapter 6. Beyond Changi: Australians, Singapore and World War Two Films

Donna Brunero and Leong Yew

Chapyer 7. Labor History in Australian Film and Television: Sunday Too Far Away (1975), and Bastard Boys (2007)

Grace Brooks

Chapter 8. “I belong to me and no one else”: Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) Reimagines an Australian Frontier Myth

Kathryn M. Keeble and Emmett H. Redding

Chapter 9. Plus ça change…: Mainstream Representation of Post-war Migrants from They’re a Weird Mob to Ladies in Black

Wenche Ommundsen