The focus of this special issue of Continuum is on the international or ‘offshore’ life of Australian film and television, shifting attention away from questions of national self-image to the international reception of Australian screen media and the intercultural interactions of its production, both past and present. The volume responds to a gap in critical responses to what Ben Goldsmith has dubbed ‘the international turn’ in Australian film and television. Much of the work to date on the current wave of internationalization of Australian screen production has tended to focus on policy, industry practices and economics rather than on cultural circulations across borders. It also tends to overlook the long history of international exchange in Australian cultural production and reception. The articles in this special issue redress these omissions by developing new historical, aesthetic and cultural critical frameworks for analysing ‘offshore processing’ in the creation of Australian screen content and the intercultural interactions of its reception in Australia and internationally.
The essays have a strong dialogic connection, having been developed from papers presented by leading scholars across the fields of screen studies, cultural history, communications and cultural studies at the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television’, auspiced by Monash University in Prato, Italy, in 2012. Inspired by the symposium's distinguished guest speakers, Professor Meaghan Morris and Professor Graeme Turner, who, in their different ways, have and continue to internationalize Australian cultural studies, this event was integrated with a mini film festival highlighting transnational and cosmopolitan aspects of Australian film and television. Opening with an outdoor screening of Baz Lurhmann's Australia in the ruins of a medieval castle, dubbed in Italian to operatic effect, and illuminated in a keynote address by Professor Meaghan Morris, the festival featured work that is often sidelined in studies of Australian cinema such as genre and ozploitation film, Indigenous filmmaking, children's television, diasporic shorts, women's filmmaking and experimental film, some of which are discussed in this special issue.
Contributors have been encouraged to engage with theories of post-nationalism, transnational cinema, post-colonialism and concepts from other fields to develop new frames for understanding Australian film and television. In preference to national roots, there is an interest in transnational routes of Australian screen culture and production, such as representation of the Australian–Asian relationship, work emerging from diasporic communities, themes and stories that inherently cross national borders, such as travel, immigration and war, indigenous filmmakers’ engagement with popular genres in crossover cinema, the relationship of revisionist transnational historical scholarship on historical documentary and the different offshore readings of Australian films. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of related areas, raising new issues in transnational film and television production and its viewing contexts both contemporary and historically. Topics include Asian-Australian film, travelling television, international reception of Indigenous film and television, Australian women's transnational filmmaking, Australian historical documentary, Australian television exports, locating television in the post-broadcast era and multi-nation documentary making about global war.
The special issue opens with two articles which address general question around the international circulation of Australian television. Mark Gibson examines Australia's most successful cultural export, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, a children's television series sold in 128 countries and dubbed into 25 languages, that reached a global audience in the early 1970s of more than 300 million. The first scholarly examination of this offshore appeal, the article used the phenomena of Skippy to negotiate the larger question of Australian ‘seriousness’ within international cultural circulation.
Drawing on the ideas of US essayist and novelist David Foster Wallace to think about the ontology of television itself, Chris Healy's meditative essay decentres discussion in this area away from American and British formats to Australian travelling television. This genre, spanning the Chauvels’ Walkabout and Serventy's Nature Walkabout through The Leyland Brothers, Steve Irwin and the satirical Russell Coight, raises questions about representation, referentiality and the colonizer's gaze.
Two articles address transnationalism in Indigenous and Asian-Australia film styles and forms. Therese Davis draws on Sukhmani Khorana's conceptualization of crossover cinema to understand the ‘offshore processes’ of the Indigenous musical film The Sapphires, about an Aboriginal all-girl soul band entertaining American troops in the Vietnam War. The hit film is a case study for exploring how Indigenous filmmakers are taking a lead within the Australian screen industry in negotiating new transnational film policies, financing arrangements and markets, and reveals issues of recognition at stake for Indigenous filmmakers moving into the mainstream.
Continuing the historical mapping and theorizing of the cinematic encounters between Asia and Australia over the last century, Olivia Khoo situates Asian-Australian cinema in the broader international refugee context. She examines films directed by Australians of Asian descent, notably Mother Fish, Letters to Ali and Lucky Miles, to discuss imagination and empathy in boat and conversely ‘no-boat’ diasporic and refugee stories.
Three articles address the uses of transnational history. Belinda Smaill disturbs the idea of 1950s and 1960s Australian cinema as inward looking by examining a group of documentaries about the relationship of Australia and South and South East Asia. These films, focused on the Colombo Plan, foreign relations and Australia's image in the region, reveal what the author conceptualizes as the ‘public space of cultural production’ from which they emerge and attitudes towards white Australia, Asia and the social formation of myths and values.
Tony Moore examines the two Barry McKenzie films of the early 1970s to demonstrate the value of Australian cultural history and the concepts of ‘mobilities’ and ‘routes’ for transnational screen studies. After considering the industrial and market factors that disturb the customary national rooting of these films in the Australian film revival and local types, the article's focus is on what cultural routes do with textual origins, the cosmopolitan creative formation of writer and director, and a narrative and thematic concern with border-crossing in a time of global travel and accelerating pluralism.
Historian James Bennett examines the possibilities arising from multi-nation co-production documentary partnerships for escaping national mythologies and telling a story like the Gallipoli campaign in the transnational frame in which war actually occurs, reflecting the trend in revisionist history of the First World War. Examining two recent documentaries, Revealing Gallipoli (Wain Fimeri) and Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience (Tolga Örnek), the cultural exchange between various combatants peoples and their differing perspectives reveals the multiple and distinctive meanings of the conflict.
Finally, two articles examine the international reception of Australian film. Lisa French considers the transnational practice of Australian women filmmakers such as Jane Campion, Melanie Coombs, Jan Chapman, Jane Scott, Jill Bilcock and Catherine Martin to map their impact and ask whether the expectations and understandings of offshore audiences and critics are influenced by gender issues.
Oliver Haag draws on in-depth interviews to examine the European impact and reading of the film Samson and Delilah (2009). Focussing on France and Germany, he shows how these countries have projected different imaginings of Indigenous Australia, reflecting the historical and political contexts of each society, including French post-colonialism and German post-Nazism and new nationalism.
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