The impetus for this chapter comes out of a particular viewing experience which we are calling ‘aftershock’. For us, this experience is associated with the unbearable weight of history embedded in the Australian landscape film of the 1990s. The landscape cinema of the 1970s established Australian film as an international genre. The ‘AFC genre’, as it was christened by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, was defined by the period film which became the flagship of an inward and backward-looking national identity through quality films like Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) and My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979). However, after a decade of official support through the Australian Film Commission, the period film was repudiated as the nation's standard-bearer during the commercially oriented 1980s, particularly after the first two Mad Max films (George Miller, 1979, 1981) reclaimed the landscape for a contemporary, outward-looking cinema. The cinematic landscape has re-emerged as a more complex figure of national identity in the 1990s, after the High Court ended the nation's sustaining myth of terra nullius.

Writing about the landscape tradition in Australian feature films of the 1970s, Ross Gibson argues that ‘the majority of Australian films have been about landscape’. They participate fully in the 200-year-old landscape tradition whereby non-Aboriginal Australia, ‘underendowed’ with myths of belonging, tried ‘to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the antipodes’.