If You Go Into The Bush You Will Die (And Other Things To Learn From Australian Film History)

It’s ANZAC day today: the national holiday where we celebrate a wartime fuck-up by getting wasted, gambling and eating biscuits bound by the delicious yet dubious matrimony of rolled oats and golden syrup. Perhaps you’ve gotten it into your head that a good way to spend your long weekend (we’re all taking Friday off, right?) would be to go ‘out there’, into the bush. It’s a wayward thought, when you consider just how terrifying our literature, cinema and history demonstrate the Australian outback to be.

For all that privileged Liberal Party caricatures (this guy) can harp on about mateship and ‘larrikinism’ while awkwardly wearing an akubra, most non-Indigenous Australians steer well clear of the interior. As one of the most urbanised nations on the planet, we cling to the coast. There’s a lot of space in the middle. No one will hear you scream.

So it’s no surprise that the stories we tell ourselves are about bad things happening to (white) people when they leave the city and go out into the bush. While Australian writers and poets established a sub-genre known as Australian Gothic back in the nineteenth century, it was our film industry that really hammered the message home. One of the stock plot lines of Australian film is of inexperienced city-dwellers finding themselves stranded in some remote and often deranged outback locale. On some occasions, delightful hi-jinks ensue and everybody winds up climbing Uluru in a party frock. On many others, it ends very badly.

When you look at what the last forty years of Australian film tells us about our landscape – and ourselves – some disturbing trends begin to emerge.

Hell Is Other People: Wake In Fright (1971)

Wake in Fright was made in 1971, and then faded into obscurity until being re-released in 2009. Australians didn’t take to the film at the time, despite the fact that it’s now considered internationally as something of a lost masterpiece.

The film follows a school teacher named John Grant (Gary Bond), posted temporarily in the outback and trying to get back to Sydney for Christmas. But Grant gets stuck in Bundanyabba (a poorly disguised Broken Hill), where he loses all his money in a game of Two-Up. And that’s when things get bad.

Everybody in Bundanyabba is covered in a thin sheen of sweat and grime, and the town itself is like a repository for all humanity’s warped tendencies, a place defined by aggressive hospitality, drunkenness and meaningless violence. It’s a place where the entreaty to “have a drink” is a threat.

As Grant drinks more and falls in with the townsfolk, the film spirals into a violent, rape-y, kangaroo-butchering Kafkaesque nightmare: every time he tries to leave – whether by hitchhiking or suicide – he ends up right back in Bundanyabba, with a beer thrust into his hand. And the entire time he is surrounded by dirty, drunken cavemen-types, insisting that their town is the best place on earth.

The implication is this: when you stick a bunch of men out in the middle of nowhere together, they use alcohol, gambling and violence as an antidote to thought, and turn any sane man mad.

The Bush Doesn’t Like You: Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

There has always been some confusion about whether the disappearance of three school girls in the Macedon Ranges was based on real life events, but it hasn’t stopped people (read: my nine –year-old self), making trips to Hanging Rock and peering around austere stone formations looking for ethereal girls in white lace dresses. For those who haven’t seen it, Picnic at Hanging Rock goes like this: it’s 1900, and a group of young ladies from Appleyard College are taken on a picnic to nearby Hanging Rock. A group of girls ascend the rock, to the eerie sounds of Romanian pan-pipes, and fall into a trance which causes them to shed their clothes and pass out on the warm stones while lizards writhe across their naked ankles. Then they disappear around a rock, and they’re never seen again.

What’s truly sinister about Picnic at Hanging Rock is that it seems like the rock has some kind of malignant agency. In its presence all the clocks stop, and the sweet, well-bred girls shed their little white gloves and their corsets. It’s like the landscape has a life of its own, hostile to its human inhabitants. And we already know Australia is a place that tries to wipe out humanity in floods and bushfires every summer. It’s also a place where the trees shed their bark rather than their leaves, and the swans are black rather than white. It’s a deeply weird place, right? It’s all a great big warning that you should stay in the city where you belong. Mess with the bush and you risk losing both your corset and your mind.

You Will Die Horribly: Wolf Creek (2005)

Wolf Creek was inspired by two notorious crimes which problematise all of Tourism Australia’s attempts to frame our country as a place where Lara Bingle is waiting on a deserted beach for you in a bikini: Ivan Milat’s backpacker murders (1989-1994), and the disappearance of Peter Falconio in the Northern Territory in 2001. It’s important to remember that writers and filmmakers didn’t just imagine Australia as a haunting and troubling place simply because they’re too yellow to shear sheep and cull kangaroos: the nineteenth century left behind a history of lost explorers and unspoken indigenous massacres, Azaria Chamberlain has never been found, and was anybody surprised when Jill Meagher, despite vanishing from Sydney Road, was eventually discovered buried on a lonely country track?

Wolf Creek draws on all these anxieties and surges out of our collective unconscious the figure of Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), in a terrifying perversion of Crocodile Dundee’s ‘this is a knife’ schtick. At first, Wolf Creek seems like it’s going to be uplifting, beginning with three kids in their early 20s frolicking on the beaches of Broome. Things go smoothly until their car mysteriously breaks down at the site of an old meteor crater, but then that lovely bloke who used to be on Play School shows up to help them fix it.

And then you watch your childhood shatter as he turns into a crazed, sexually sadistic psychopath.

What’s almost more terrifying about Wolf Creek is that the landscape itself becomes a prison without bars – nobody is there to save you as you’re butchered on an open highway in broad daylight. And because Mick is ‘at one’ with the land, so to speak, he seems to magically appear and disappear within it. That’s why, in hindsight, Ben (Nathan Phillips) looks like such a dick when he says to Mick, “the freedom, you must love it. Hanging out in nature and shit.” Wolf Creek teaches us that this is what happens when you hang out in nature too long: you’re hunted, or you become the hunter.

So What Have We Learnt?

Why do we have so many films about terrifying things happening to people when they go out into the Australian wilderness? In her 1965 book, Preoccupations In Australian Poetry, Australian poet Judith Wright points to the potential source of our unease when she talks about “the scar left by the struggle to conquer … a landscape that had survived on its own terms until the world’s late days. Its only human inhabitants had been the Aboriginals whom we dispossessed – who were bound to the land we took from them, by the indissoluble link of religion and totemic kinship – so that our intrusion on the land itself became a kind of bloodless murder, even when no actual murder took place.”

In conclusion, don’t go out into the bush. It’s just not going to end well. At best, you’ll feel anxious, and at worst you’ll be dead. Stay home, in bed, watching Game of Thrones in the warm embrace of a bottle of whiskey, where at least somebody will hear you scream.

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Madeleine Watts is a Sydney-based writer. She is a regular contributor to Concrete Playground and Broadsheet Sydney.