DREAMING OF THE DEVIL

Based on Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel, Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) takes its title from ‘an old curse’: ‘May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright’ (Cook 1971 [1961]: 3). These words appear as an epigraph on the book's title page, but the book could just as readily have drawn its inspiration from the first words of Hunter S. Thompson's contemporaneous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ (2005 [1971]: n.p.). Kotcheff's film tells the story of a city-educated schoolteacher, John Grant, who becomes stranded in the outback town of Bundanyabba (the ‘Yabba’) on his way home to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. What follows is a lost weekend of drinking, cruelty and violence during which time Grant is confronted with beastly aspects of his own character, hitherto concealed from him. Now recognised as a film that ‘prepared the way for [the] mix of hyperrealism, excessive masculinity, ambiguous sexuality, and misogyny [that is] so insistently present in subsequent Australian cinema’ (O’Regan 1996: 57), Wake in Fright achieved some critical recognition but little commercial success upon its original release. Writing in industry-centred Melbourne-based magazine Lumiere, Barry Lowe observed: ‘Wake in Fright [has] caused the biggest furore (if you discount the carry-on which surrounded Mick Jagger as the choice to play Ned Kelly) … by portraying Australians as an ugly, boozing lot’ (Lowe 1974: 4–5). As Scott Murray noted decades later (at the time of film's 2009 restoration and re-release), this type of response needs to be contextualised as part of the ‘cultural war’ that surrounded international companies and filmmakers who used Australia as an ‘exotic’ location but failed, in their often pastoral visions of the continent, to adequately engage with nationalist themes and the local industry: ‘in this atmosphere of resignation and despair, it was not surprising that Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) was eviscerated … Canadian Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright … was written off as a brutal and dishonest picture of outback Australia, while Brit Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout was cruelly undervalued and dismissed as an aimless travelogue’ (Murray 2009: A23).