From Massacre Creek to Slaughter Hill: The tracks of Mystery Road

ABSTRACT

Ivan Sen’s 2013 feature Mystery Road [dir., 2013. Sydney: Mystery Road Films] seeks to break out of the arthouse mould of most Aboriginal cinema in its calculated adaptation of two seemingly disparate Hollywood genres, film noir and the western: genres which are foregrounded in the style and marketing of the film. Aaron Pedersen in his starring role as ‘Indigenous cowboy detective’ Jay Swan strikes a delicate balance between his compromised role as agent of the state and as freewheeling hero, for his role as a detective is underpinned by the ‘treacherous’ historical legacy of the tracker. In this article, I trace the central importance of the tracker figure in a reading of Mystery Road, taking in, among other texts, Sen's 1999 film Wind [dir., 1999. Australia: Mayfan Film Productions] and Arthur Upfield's ‘Bony’ novels. The troubled status of the tracker feeds into the noirish elements of Mystery Road, which ultimately requires a new kind of hero to emerge so that retribution may be enacted for past and present wrongs. That hero is the cowboy, a part for which Pedersen has been dressed all along.

Notes on contributor

Peter Kirkpatrick is a senior lecturer in Australian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. He is widely published as a literary critic and cultural historian, and was co-editor, with Fran De Groen, of Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour (University of Queensland Press, 2009) and, with Robert Dixon, of Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia (Sydney University Press, 2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Dow, Mystery Road opened the 2013 Sydney Film Festival ‘to a packed house’, but ‘took a modest $410,000 at the box office on general national release, against its $2 million budget’ (2014, 27).

2. The last tracker, so-called, is in fact a Lama Lama man called Barry Port, who only retired from the Queensland Police in 2014 (McKillop 2014).

3. Probyn offers an extensive list of Australian films in which trackers have appeared (Probyn 2005: note 1).