Abstract

Despite it being originally a US genre, Australian film has lovingly adopted the road movie and made it into a unique reflection of a manifold national psyche. While the road may continue as a metaphor for life itself, Australian-made road movies have tended to represent the road journey not so much as a romanticised existential personal experience, but rather as an ambivalent site of personal discovery. Films such as Mad Max and The Cars That Ate Paris offer a dystopic vision of the Australian road journey, in the process creating what Jonathan Rayner (1999), drawing upon the earlier work on Australian film of Susan Dermody and Liz Jacka, refers to as an ‘Australian gothic’. In the Australian context it seems the very real dangers of driving and the knowledge of this loom large; roadside shrines and the growing road toll all equate to a hardwiring of the road to the possibility of physical—not just existential—death, and mitigate against the realisation of freedom via the road expressed in the genre elsewhere. Thus more commonly in Australian films, ‘escape’ is either not achieved at denouement or is highly ambiguous or pyrrhic. In this paper I consider the contemporary status of the Australian road movie, with a particular focus on two contributions in the last decade to the local genre by female directors: Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 (2000) and Sue Brooks’ Japanese Story (2003). Do Australian road films still perform this ‘gothic’ role, or in this age of four-wheel drives, recognition of Indigenous custodianship of, and increasing gender awareness, are our various relationships with the non-urban, interior spaces of the continent becoming less fraught?