The Ozploitation Boom and the Films Australia Disowned

Every national cinema has a respectable face it shows the world and a disreputable one it keeps in the shed. Australia’s respectable face, for most of the last fifty years, has been a run of tasteful period dramas: schoolgirls vanishing on a sun-blanched rock, spirited heroines in high-collared dresses, honourable men doomed by empire. Its disreputable face has fangs. It is the outback that eats a man alive, the killer boar the size of a car, the drive-in built as a prison camp, and the wild pornographic comedies that outsold the prestige pictures at home while the critics looked at their shoes. For years the country pretended the second face was not its own. Then it turned out the shed was where the most durable work had been hiding all along.

The genre historians eventually gave the shed a name. “Ozploitation” was popularised by Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which assembled the survivors, the offcuts and a delighted Quentin Tarantino to argue that Australia’s junk cinema of the 1970s and 80s was a genuine treasury. The argument has largely won. Understanding how those films came to exist, and why their own country was ashamed of them, is a small master class in how genre cinema actually gets made.

The cringe and the disowning

Australia revived its film industry in the early 1970s on public money, and public money comes with a self-image to protect. The government funding bodies favoured what came to be called the “AFC genre” — polished, exportable, prestige-coded period pieces that would tell the world Australia was cultured. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), My Brilliant Career (1979) and Breaker Morant (1980) are the enduring flagships of that programme, and they are fine films. They were also the films the cultural establishment wanted to be seen making.

The genre pictures were the embarrassing cousins. Horror, action, and the raucous “ocker” sex comedies were dismissed as vulgar, foreign-minded and beneath the new national cinema’s dignity, even as some of them vastly outperformed the respectable titles at the domestic box office. This was the “cultural cringe” in action — the reflexive conviction that anything homegrown and popular must be lesser. Critics disowned the films, funding bodies were faintly ashamed of them, and the official story of Australian cinema quietly wrote them out. The audiences kept turning up anyway, which is usually where the real history is.

The genre that best captured the tension was the “ocker” sex comedy. Tim Burstall’s Alvin Purple (1973), a broad farce about a young man irresistible to women, was one of the biggest domestic hits of the entire revival, outdrawing the prestige dramas at the till. The establishment was mortified that this — leering, cheap and enormously popular — was what Australians actually paid to see, and the mortification only deepened the disowning. A national cinema that has to be subsidised into existence is acutely sensitive about being caught making the vulgar stuff that turns a profit on its own.

A tax break becomes a genre

The engine of the boom was not artistic ambition. It was Division 10BA of the tax code. Introduced in 1981, the scheme offered investors a 150 per cent tax deduction on money put into Australian films, plus tax-free treatment on a slice of the returns. The effect was immediate and slightly deranged: film production became a tax shelter, and money that had no interest whatsoever in cinema came flooding into it, chasing a write-off.

That flood funded a glut, and glut is the natural weather of genre cinema. When capital arrives faster than good scripts, producers make the films that sell — cheap, fast, high-concept, exportable to drive-ins and video shelves around the world. The 10BA years produced a wave of horror, action and thrillers whose commercial logic exactly mirrored the American exploitation model, right down to who was funding it and why. A tax accountant’s incentive built a body of work now studied for its craft. The same recurring machinery — cheap capital chasing an underserved appetite — drove the American blaxploitation cycle a decade earlier, and it is the direct heir of the older tradition of Poverty Row, where cheapness was the whole point.

Wake in Fright: the film that named the dread

The keystone predates the boom and towers over it. Wake in Fright (1971), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff from Kenneth Cook’s novel, follows a mild schoolteacher stranded in a remote mining town who is slowly stripped of every civilised restraint by heat, alcohol, gambling and relentless outback hospitality. It is one of the most genuinely disturbing films ever made in the country, and it contains a real kangaroo hunt so brutal it remains hard to watch and was controversial on release.

Wake in Fright did something the AFC dramas would not: it looked at the Australian landscape and found horror rather than heritage. The sun is not beautiful here; it is an interrogation lamp. Mateship is not warmth; it is a trap with no exit. The craft is precise — the editing tightens like a noose, the light bleaches the men into ghosts of themselves — and the whole thing plays as a waking nightmare that happens to be set among ordinary blokes being friendly. The film was so unloved at home that its negatives were nearly lost for good; a print was rescued and restored, and it screened at Cannes in 2009, decades after its first Cannes berth in 1971. A country that disowned a film had to be reminded by the French that it was a masterpiece. That is the Ozploitation story in miniature.

The artisans of the drive-in

The boom’s most celebrated craftsman is Brian Trenchard-Smith, a director who made exactly the kind of picture the establishment despised and made it with genuine flair. The Man from Hong Kong (1975), Turkey Shoot (1982), Dead-End Drive-In (1986) and the improbably charming BMX Bandits (1983), which handed a teenage Nicole Kidman one of her first roles, are ingenious, kinetic and utterly unpretentious. Trenchard-Smith understood stunt work, pace and the value of a good practical set-piece, and Tarantino’s advocacy for him in Not Quite Hollywood helped rehabilitate a whole reputation.

He was not alone. Richard Franklin made the Hitchcockian trucker thriller Roadgames (1981) with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, and the killer-telekinetic shocker Patrick (1978). Russell Mulcahy turned a giant feral pig into operatic dread in Razorback (1984) before going on to Highlander. Colin Eggleston made the eco-horror Long Weekend (1978), in which nature itself turns on a careless couple. And George Miller’s Mad Max (1979), made for very little money on real roads with real risk, became one of the most influential action films ever produced anywhere — the Ozploitation picture that conquered the world so completely that people forgot it belonged to the disreputable family at all. What separated Miller from a hundred other cheap-thrill merchants was pure craft under constraint: he cut his car chases with an editor’s precision, staged real vehicles at real speed because he could not afford to fake them, and turned scarcity into a lean, punishing style the entire genre would spend decades imitating. The poverty is visible on screen and the film is stronger for it, because the limitation forced invention.

From disowned to acclaimed

The tax scheme was eventually wound back, the boom subsided, and the survivors scattered into international careers. What is striking, looking back, is how thoroughly the disowned tradition fed the respectable one. Peter Weir directed the demented genre picture The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) before he made Picnic at Hanging Rock; the same instincts for menace under a placid surface run through both. The darkness Wake in Fright found in the Australian landscape resurfaces, cleaned up and Oscar-nominated, in a film like Animal Kingdom (2010), David Michôd’s cold study of a Melbourne crime family — prestige cinema drawing directly on the vein of national dread the genre films opened first. Jacki Weaver’s Oscar-nominated matriarch in that film is a monster the AFC dramas of the 1970s would never have dared to sketch, and she stands on ground the disreputable pictures cleared.

That is the pattern worth keeping. The films a culture is embarrassed by are frequently the ones telling the truth it would rather not export. Australia spent thirty years pretending its genre cinema was an aberration, and the genre cinema spent thirty years quietly supplying the country’s most honest images of itself: the heat, the drink, the violence idling under the barbecue. The shed, it turns out, was the good room all along. The house just could not admit it until a documentary and a Frenchman’s film archive forced the issue. The lesson travels: wherever a film culture keeps a locked shed, that is the first place a curious viewer should go looking.