Simon Baker in High Ground. Image: © Madman Films
I’m sure you can visualise the final scene of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). Film lovers know it by heart; students analyse it at high school: the high-octane dramatic irony, the orchestral strings, the staccato of gunfire, the final freeze-frame of a pointless battlefield death. An elegiac drama, David Williamson’s script for Gallipoli closely and deliberately follows the line of Charles Bean, the man who, before mass media, decided on what would be mythologised in relation to Australia’s involvement in World War I. ‘[T]he official history by C.E.W. Bean… became the basis of my research and of David Williamson’s,’ said Weir in 1981. A former war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, Bean wrote six of the twelve volumes of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918—and two of those volumes concerned Gallipoli. Bean’s contribution was to write the history of World War I from an Australian perspective, which became the Australian perspective, all the while promoting the idea that Australia didn’t and couldn’t become a real nation until it had fought overseas. In this way, Bean turned the defeat of the Australians at Gallipoli—the almost boneheaded catastrophe of the dawn attack—into a victory by way of mythmaking.
Bean was long dead by the time John Howard’s prime ministership rolled round in the 1990s. But his texts were brilliantly used to inflate the Anzacs, conflate them specifically with Gallipoli (to the point where the two historical phenomena have completely merged in many people’s minds), submerge those into the idea of Australianness, and use all of the above to make a case for Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bean’s poisonous imaginary became the official version of history, which became film history. But another version exists in scholarly research. Desertion during World War I was so common that British generals wanted to change the Australian Defence Act so as to enable the spectacle of capital punishment on the front, as a deterrent to would-be AWOLs. Draft resisters, soldiers opposed to military authority, conscientious objectors who languished in jail for their resistance, and even officers who were radicalised by their experiences at war—all these figures stand in opposition to the mythical digger: a man merging with a martial tradition, a superior soldier who possesses remarkable, innate characteristics, who runs stoically over the edge of trenches toward certain death for country and kingdom.
Military history in Australia is over-documented, over-rehearsed, over-narrativised, over-mythologised. And yet negative spaces remain.
Military history in Australia is over-documented, over-rehearsed, over-narrativised, over-mythologised. And yet negative spaces remain. In recent years, a wave of films—Sweet Country (2017), The Nightingale (2018) and now, High Ground (2020) reconsider a part of this continent’s military history that has been denied: the Frontier Wars. But where are all the other Australian anti-war films?
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Across Australian film history, the same tales whir by: homages to spirit and sacrifice at Gallipoli, the Kokoda Trail, World War II. The classic war film Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford) followed this path: working-class men under the thumb of British majors during the Boer War. Despite Beresford’s artistic intentions to make a film about how everyday people can and do commit atrocities in wartime, Breaker Morant took a different path upon entering the culture, coming to form something of a blueprint for war films that cement their Australian protagonists as folk heroes who go above and beyond the call of duty.
Films in this genre depict Australians as principled, righteous, straightforward blokes who stand up to British tyranny. Blame for death and carnage is invariably placed at the foot of magisterial, incapable British generals. Some critics and historians interpret this as a progressive form of anti-British sentiment, or a sideways acknowledgement of anti-war feeling. A more dishonest lie lurks beneath: One that posits Australia as a plucky upstart, rather than a colonial power in its own right, an invader and an occupier.
Around forty films on the Anzacs have been produced with reverent, recurring fixation on the traumas of its own soldiers, without questioning why those soldiers were there in the first place—so much so that films in the war genre are, by and large, pro-Anzac films.
The new millenium has slightly diversified the Australian war genre, though not much—none resemble the overseas Resistance films that truly question the imperatives of war, nor possess the formal innovation of Christopher Nolan’s ideologically tired but structurally thrilling Dunkirk (2017), which ricocheted between three timelines set across land, air and sea. The Railway Man (2013) and Canopy (2013) pursue a sense of the intrinsic horror of war as felt by Australians. Beneath Hill 60 (2010), another Anzac film, conforms to the generic tropes of the classic war film as defined by British post-war filmmakers: honourable Allied men performing dangerous missions under fire, heroically sacrificing themselves for their leaders. Canopy and Kokoda (2006) lazily demonise Japanese ‘enemies’. The Water Diviner (2014) attempts in some way to humanise the Turkish foes. And yet a simple, nostalgic idea of ‘home’ carries its way through these films (as with the soapie William Kelly’s War), and a rote ‘based on a true story’ claim to tropily add authenticity. (There is a difference between showing some actual events and being truthful about history). This is how origin stories are turned into myth. What binds these films is their adherence to an archaic, lifeless ideology of Western militarism and officialdom—a strange, uninterrogated relationship between culture and the state.
What binds these films is their adherence to an archaic, lifeless ideology of Western militarism and officialdom—a strange, uninterrogated relationship between culture and the state.
Presented in the service of a quest for a national saga, the arguments in Australian war films—the absence of questioning, political reflection or true redemption—really matter. The Frontier Wars are at the fore of both an ideological war and the practicalities of this nation-state’s existence. ‘The cult of sacrifice in overseas war—the Anzac legend—was essential to the denial of war at home,’ writes historian Tom Griffiths—and his analysis could just as well apply to film culture as well as Australia’s political culture. For what it’s worth, Clint Eastwood does this kind of right-wing political filmmaking better—entertaining tales of extreme individualism and heroism in the face of giant authorities. In other words—Australian war films don’t present as quintessentially Australian as much as banally derivative and denialist.
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You will often hear, in attempts to defend film funding, that art is a reflective mirror to society, when in fact it can be actively used to obfuscate social truths. This country’s film history remains dominated by infantile dreams of fictional heroism, malevolently misguided interventions, an addiction to avoidance and a pathetic appeasement of the declining British empire. The past is contemporaneous. I’m like you: I didn’t live through these military commitments or the Frontier Wars, I have no memories of them, and yet I live inside that past. After all, much Western thought seeks to make the past irretrievably non-existent.
Unlike most Australian films concerning military history, High Ground is honest in a basic sense. Yolngu Boy director Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s first film in twenty years, High Ground is a serious revisionist drama about the Frontier Wars shot across Arnhem Land and Kakadu National Park. Set in the 1910–20s, it tells of the vengeful mission of a young Yolngu man called Gutjuk (Jacob Junior Nayinggul) who survives a police massacre of thirty of his kin. If I am honest, I don’t think the film is a great piece of art cinema. It doesn’t deftly strike the storytelling beats of its action-Western genre, and despite the charisma of its actors, its characters are broad silhouettes rather than specifically imagined humans. The film’s neatly fitting redemption arc doesn’t sit well, and the cumbersome machinations of its plot overwhelm its visual poetry, save for the repeated drone shots of sweeping vistas that could be sampled from a Northern Territory tourism advertisement or Lonely Planet video. I am stating these reservations because as a critic, I remain dedicated to appraising filmmaking form and craft, not just political intent.
High Ground’s achievement lies within the realm of its social impact and collaborative approach. As a truth-telling project about the history of terror and fear on this continent, the film points to both the growing settler acknowledgement of massacres, and a hunger among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander audiences to see something real on screen. Special screenings in the communities of Gunbalanya and Yirrkala confirmed the film’s resonance with the communities it serves. Overseas critics—who are simultaneously more detached from the Australian political setting and more likely than Australian critics to attend to film craft and form—were often more adverse in their reviews than local journalists.
Unlike Germany, for instance, the Australian nation-state has not even attempted to culturally or legally process its historical wrongdoings. I think, increasingly, that the best way out of the fog is for art to refuse nationalism. After all, it was the desire among federal agencies to use film to shape a popular image of Australia on screen during World War I that led to a cycle of films, heavily influenced in style by British war narratives, known as ‘patriotics.’ So successful were these censor-approved, empire-themed war films that they were credited with boosting enrolments in the armed forces, notes scholar Ben Goldsmith. Such is the long shadow of governmental imperatives in war stories—in shaping their artistic and political conservatism—here.
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We speak often today of representation—whose stories are told and by whom; who is seen and understood on screen, stage, in the galleries and on the page. In doing so, we forget to look beyond the negative spaces to that which is right in front of us. Who is being overrepresented? What is being over-documented?
You will often hear, in attempts to defend film funding, that art is a reflective mirror to society, when in fact it can be actively used to obfuscate social truths.
There’s a case that American popular cinema has too often focused on the American perspective—the invaders rather than the invaded. Yes, military stories must consider the human wreckage coming back from the line—but what about those who have been attacked? Such was the weakness of the low-lapping wave of post 9/11 films like Jarhead (2005), Towelhead (2007), Stop Loss (2008) and The Hurt Locker (2008), all of which failed to imagine how war feels for those who aren’t on the side of the West. Australia, however, failed to make any substantial films about this period at all, nor any that sit alongside the many US anti-war dramas energised by the activism of the 1970s: Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. No: in Australian film, nothing substantial has been told surrounding the Western defeat in Vietnam—the domestic anti-war resistance, the solidarity with Vietnamese people, the internationalism of the baby boomer generation who participated in the moratoria against the war, only to be absorbed into the status quo later in their lives. That part of military history has not become a part of this country’s cultural mythology in film.
While the same falsely heroic parts of military history are ritualised for the benefit of a narrow conception of Australian nationhood, little to nothing has been told on screen of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force’s seizure of Papua New Guinea in 1914 and Australia’s colonial project in that region until 1975. Likewise, the events of 1770 and 1788 are not portrayed, in Australian screen storytelling, as military events; rather, colonial stories are told as period dramas. There is no canon of anti-war films concerning the first Gulf War. There is no grand genre film about the fraudulent invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. (The closest, 2018’s Jirga by Benjamin Gilmour, is an interesting, overdue but artistically patchy work, and it hasn’t entered the cultural mythology in the same way as Australia’s militaristic Gallipoli films.) There is no great work of Australian art cinema about the Iraq War and its catastrophes.
Jirga (2018). Image: © Benjamin Gilmour / Felix Media
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Film is not the only forgetter, but I fear it is the most closely aligned with official histories. Anna Krien wrote her first novel, Act of Grace, to satisfy her own questions about the Iraq War, questions that had not been posed, let alone answered, in Australia’s literary life. ‘Why did we go there?’ she asked on the Sydney Writers Festival podcast last year.
We had politicians openly lie about weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence was exploited. That speaks to our distrust of politics, our eroded faith in truth. I wanted to read as much as I could about Iraq in non-fiction and fiction. Iraq had featured heavily in [US] literature. They tell their own stories really well. And in Australian literature, I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was our longest running war, and all the circumspect connotations were never explored in our fiction.
Compare this to Australian audiences’ embrace of American stories about the Holocaust, another genocidal crime which many remain desperate to understand.
Lately I am increasingly interested in ordinary films from overseas in which historical traumas are acknowledged—not as the central subject matter, but embedded into the background of other stories of daily life. It is easy enough to identify directors whose careers have been defined by their explorations of the viciousness of French colonialism in Africa (Claire Denis’s Chocolat, Beau Travail, White Material), the resistance to repressive colonial occupations (Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers), reflections on collaboration with Nazis (Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants and Lacombe, Lucien) and the origins of the generation who would go onto become Nazis (Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon).
We speak often today of whose stories are told by whom—but forget to look beyond the negative spaces to that which is right in front of us. Who is being overrepresented? What is being over-documented?
What is more interesting is the ways in which unremarkable films like Tom of Finland (2017), a conventionally constructed biopic, weave in an understanding of World War II’s atrocities in various subplots, costumes, art direction details and flashbacks. Almost all of Michael Haneke’s films take place in an acknowledged context of lingering historical trauma, just as Lucrecia Martel’s films in contemporary Argentina take place in the shadow of colonial takeover. And of course, Holocaust films have been made since the mid 1940s; even Hitchcock, committed to popular filmmaking, threaded in a sinister acknowledgement of Nazi impunity in Notorious as early as 1946. Films can very gently or ordinarily mine the gap of historical disasters and remember the past—if the society at large, its political and legal systems, has already begun the path to justice and recognition.
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Beyond film, Australian institutions, museums, calendars and resources remain mesmerically seized on the Anzacs, Gallipoli and the Kokoda Trail. The Australian War Memorial—which does not recognise the Frontier Wars—has received $500 million to rebuild a wing called Anzac Hall constructed just this century, even as the National Archives pitifully resort to crowdfunding.
I’ve been thinking, lately, of how different film history would appear if military stories were told truthfully. Think of the massacre map researched by Dr Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle, pointing to the intact oral histories out there, waiting to be recorded, narrativised and proffered to the culture.
Think of a film about the tens of thousands of Australian soldiers who deserted and went AWOL during World War I, speaking to the many who resisted war in any way possible. (Did Charles Bean—who compared the Anzacs to Greek gods—not see these deserters in action on his trip to Turkey, or did he just look away?)
Think of a courtroom war drama about the almost 28,000 prosecutions launched against these objectors to compulsory military service. Think of the work of historians Peter Stanley and Jon Piccini, as well as documentation of the Victorian Ex-Servicemen’s Protest Committee and the Ex Soldiers’ Human Rights Association of Australia, who posed a huge problem for the conservative Returned and Service League from the 1960s onwards.
Is Australian cinema also going to pretend that the Afghanistan war crimes, so recently exposed, in which members of the ADF allegedly murdered thirty-nine civilians, didn’t happen?
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I’m writing this to try to imagine something in the culture that right now seems far away. ‘We need images in cinema that are fresh,’ says Werner Herzog in his film To the End of the World… and Then a Little Bit Further. ‘Civilisations that don’t find an adequate language or images—they must become extinct like dinosaurs.’
‘Why is there so much fear of taking individual responsibility for larger-scale problems?’ asked Lucrecia Martel, decades later, on another continent. ‘I don’t understand that. I believe that’s really the evil of our times, it’s the main problem of our times.’
‘How can cinema help the Vietnamese people win their liberation?’ asked Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, in 1972, in their film Letter to Jane. Evidently, there are questions that filmmakers have been asking for decades that are still not being asked in Australia.
Films can very gently or ordinarily mine the gap of historical disasters and remember the past—if the society at large, its political and legal systems, has already begun the path to justice and recognition.
Watching High Ground, I kept thinking: if we believe that the Frontier Wars were indeed wars, why don’t we make films about them in the war genre rather than miming Western shoot-em-ups? War films in this country have never represented—positively or negatively—warfare on the soil of this very landmass. High Ground’s iconography, revenge narrative and visual emphasis on the wide horizon and the vastness of the Australian continent—seen by the British as for the taking—hews it closely to the Western genre, which, despite its malleability, still refers so closely to the specific landscapes and history of the USA, that country’s radical individualism, Indigenous treaties and personal enterprise. I am unconvinced that the Australian Western genre has developed its own meaningful sensibility, beyond taking its broad, principal points from American Westerns, which remain much more rich and innovative in their use of film form. Colonialism differed in its practices and manifestations everywhere; the forms of its artistic exploration should surely attend to that specificity. Could we consider imagining a cinematic grammar for this continent’s wildly variant ecologies and history?
Within the realm of American cinema, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) is a frontier film that completely leaves the Western genre behind for a more intimate mode. Even in its square 4:3 format, it refuses to participate in the visual mythmaking of a horizontal frame: the idea of a boundless west for the taking. The film is not at all about an intricate plot line; rather, it captures the drifting lives in an unregulated free market, on a continent pushed forcefully just over the cusp of modernity. This feeling of being there is key to cinema that tells the truth and marks history through sites of disappearance.
There are other ways, beyond the action genre, to think about war in filmmaking. Lilith (USA, 1964) and The Master (USA, 2012) are among a branch of films that explore what happens after war: when servicemen return, changed and rootless, to homes that no longer feel like home. Likewise, spy thrillers can be softly subversive ways of questioning government imperatives in relation to foreign policy and secrecy.
No history can be resurrected. We’ll always be dealing with the ghostly stories on the massacre map. We’ll always be dealing with the words of British artist John Akomfrah on the difficulties of bringing history—buried, sullied—to cinema: ‘If uncovering the truth is impossible, then make an impossible film.’
