Ayten Kuyululu is a key figure in 1970s Australian cinema. But her significance within that era's celebrated 'revival' has been sidelined due to her marginalised background and identity, her then recent arrival in Australia, the limited release of the few works she did make, and the discomforting form, nature and content of the two films she completed: A Handful of Dust (1974) and The Golden Cage (1975). A Handful of Dust screened in competition at the Sydney Film Festival and The Golden Cage was the first feature to be directed by a woman in Australia since Paulette McDonagh's Two Minutes Silence (1933), but in many popular accounts of the 'new wave' it is Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) that is granted this distinction. For many, Kuyululu's two Australian films from the mid-1970s aren't merely lost, they are completely invisible and entirely unknown. This essay aims to address this lacunae in Australian film history. Building on the formative work of a scattering of scholars and critics - such as David Stratton and Sue Hardisty - it places Kuyululu's two films within and transcultural and transnational framework, while also re-examining their place within Australian film history.
This paper examines rural Queensland landscapes represented in the film Saving Mr. Banks (2013), and how these landscapes are depicted as forming an integral part of the writer P. L. Travers' childhood and upbringing. It argues that childhood experiences lived in these landscapes are transformed by Pamela Travers into central aspects of her Mary Poppins' novels. In turn, her children's books are adapted for screen by a creative team that blends Australian and North American sensibilities. Travers' fictionalised two-week visit to Los Angeles in 1961 and her collaborative work with the team at Disney are represented as re-awakening many embodied memories rooted in her Queensland childhood. These memories are represented as needing to be processed before she can navigate a revised understanding of her family of origin, her father, in particular. By the close of the film, she has arrived at an acceptance of her experiences of childhood adversity and loss.
John Bell's recent feature film The Moogai (2024) marks the entry of Aboriginal Gothic and Horror into twenty-first century mainstream Australian and international cinema. Working alongside and beyond current frameworks of Aboriginal Gothic, monster studies, and haunting, I argue that the monsters and spectres within the film can be understood as emerging from different world-systems, troubling Western conceptions of monsters and ghosts as purely metaphorical sources of fear. I also argue for an archipelagic understanding of Aboriginal Gothic texts, in which texts engage in an expansive and dynamic set of articulations which foreground the localised nature of Aboriginal relationships to place and space. Monsters borne from Country, and Ancestral ghosts, are connective and reparative, as they signal practices of care and mutual responsibility embedded in systems of Kinship, Dreaming, Lore and Law. The past and ongoing violent impingements of the colonial nation, particularly the Stolen Generations and hyperincarceration of Aboriginal people within the prison system, haunt Aboriginal life through the imminent threat of disappearance, and gaping absences of those disappeared. Within the film, Bell explores the interface of these two worlds, creating a titular monster which is both deeply tied to Bundjalung Country, and respondent to the horrors of colonialism.
Tasmania stands apart from Australia, literally and figuratively. Even its two major cities are a mere stone's throw from remote areas, and the sparsely populated state is dotted with small country towns. The state's differences to mainland Australia in weather, geography and history have contributed to a strong Gothic influence in its screen output, building on the broader Australian Gothic cinematic tradition, in which, as Rayner (2022 Australian Gothic: A Cinema of Horrors. University of Wales Press) notes, both the landscape and its people can take on monstrous forms. Viewed through a postcolonial textual analysis lens, transgressions against landscape and people are evident in a selection of Tasmanian films and television programmes. Challenging the notion of Tasmania as a pure, pristine wilderness, screen texts tackle environmental destruction, including that caused by industrial expansion, such as logging and its divisive impact on communities. Others address postcolonial horrors in their portrayal of atrocities against First Nations people and convicts, while fictional and fictionalised tales of cannibal convicts are allegorised against a wild landscape that colonial powers struggle to control. Using a thematic approach, this paper unpacks these and other on-screen reflections of monstrous trespasses against people and landscape in Tasmania.
