In the 1970s and early ’80s, a wave of low-budget Australian cinema gained popularity with US audiences. These Ozploitation movies aimed to exploit the emerging market for salacious down-under content: sex, violence, fast cars, and cheap thrills and spills.
Wake in Fright (1971) — the first adaptation of a 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook — is the standout of the genre. The film follows John Grant, a teacher who gets on a train to Sydney at the end of the school term but somehow winds up in a desert town called Bundanyabba. He reluctantly bonds with the locals and becomes swept up in their drinking, gambling, and kangaroo-shooting culture. Needless to say, things go badly awry.
The film was released internationally as Outback and achieved remarkable success — but it initially performed quite poorly in Australia. There are apocryphal stories about cinema audiences jeering it as un-Australian. Fifty-five years later, Wake in Fright is now well and truly part of the Australian mainstream. Journalist Jacqueline Kent, who was married to Kenneth Cook, argued that “the title is now a cliché for newspaper and magazine subeditors: shorthand for the horror and danger that lurk outside Australia’s cities.”
Wake in Fright depicts maddening chaos fueled by booze, and a simmering sexual tension that erupts into violence. It’s messy and sticky: endless sweat on lobster-red skin with a coating of dust. Uncomfortable close-ups mirror the outback’s oppressive, claustrophobic heat. The rough, jokey dialogue has a blunt force to it, erasing and pushing back reality. At the core of the film is unhinged mateship: it’s all about repression and release.
Wake in Fright was filmed in the remote mining town of Broken Hill. Director Ted Kotcheff described how the locals were so desperate for human contact that every day men came up very close and challenged him to punch them in the face. The film is clearly his attempt to capture some of this deranged male loneliness.
Broken Hill is indeed one of the most isolated inland towns in Australia. Even today, a full 32 percent of people there admit they have “no one to lean on in times of trouble.” Such a context creates a deep sense of despair but also allows for lots of rules to be broken.
Broken Hill’s sense of transgressive possibility could be why it’s a popular location choice for movies about social decay. Common to Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 (1981), and Furiosa (2024) is an opening emphasis on shocking vastness. Center-framed characters look out, just above the camera, onto a barren, desolate landscape. It’s rich visual material to express the deep sense of forsakenness that people there feel.
Wake in Fright depicts this longing for connection as intertwined with an oppressive claustrophobia and an urgent need to escape. The relentless brawling speaks to this contradictory desire for connection and release.
Discussions around Wake in Fright tend to focus on its violent, deranged proletarians. John Grant becomes a locus of fear for the middle-class audience’s anxieties about what these men might do. There is a simplistic binary between the rational, thinking John, with his suitcase of books, and the bodily functions and desires that overwhelm the local simpletons. But the film climaxes with the disintegration of this boundary. Ultimately, John discards his books and gives in to the body.
Wake in Fright certainly contains an underlying class critique. But the exact object of its contempt remains opaque. The film is leery about both rural narrow-mindedness and snobbish urban hypocrisy. John Grant criticizes the Bundanyabba locals’ idiotic lack of self-awareness but is warned by a predatory local that “discontent is the luxury of the well-to-do.”
However, the film is ultimately more preoccupied with sexuality than class. An effeminate man is brought into a repressed space, and a release is brought about through violence and chaos. John discovers a freedom by sinking into that darkness, being altered by it, and returning back to the normal social order a changed man.
Films with male protagonists are often universalized or read as allegories for nationhood. Female protagonists, however, are almost never read in this way. Wake in Fright attempts something interesting on this front.
There aren’t many female characters in the film. But the young women we do see on screen are more assured in their sexuality than the passive John. John upsets gender norms: he’s clean-shaven, very attractive, and feminine. In this hypermasculine town, he is something of a stand-in for women. John becomes a vehicle to help the audience ponder what it might be like to be a woman in those spaces. Interestingly, the real horror in the end isn’t the physical violence of other men. What pushes John over the edge is that he actually concedes to sex with one of the townsmen.
More than half a century later, it’s interesting to consider Wake in Fright alongside more recent films. The documentary Hotel Coolgardie (2016) followed two female Finnish backpackers working in a mining town in Western Australia. It’s basically a Wake in Fright–style scenario from the barmaids’ perspective. Director Pete Gleeson, who did not initially set out to make a film about sexual harassment and physical violence, described how the women
appeared not to be trying to fit in as much as the patrons would have liked them to. By not really wanting to play the game, or interact the way they were expected, they kind of became this blank canvas for people to project their own simmering inner conflicts on to. The film took a whole different turn after that.
Hotel Coolgardie was later adapted by director Kitty Green into The Royal Hotel (2023). Both films examine more explicitly than Wake in Fright how isolated women might navigate and diffuse the threat of male violence.
These films are almost a twist on the zombie apocalypse genre. Zombie films can offer a radical reimagining of the social order. If you’re not benefiting from the status quo, there’s something potentially progressive about the system’s collapse. But the protagonists of Hotel Coolgardie or The Royal Hotel experience the existing social order as a zombie apocalypse. Mindless marauding men stumble out of unexpected places and attack in bustling pubs rather than abandoned cities. And you’re paid to smile at them. This is apocalypse as drudging norm, rather than thrilling liberation.
Wake in Fright’s harrowing wildness stems in part from its on-set drama. Director Ted Kotcheff clearly lost control of the reins at various points during production. The editors did a spectacular job in postproduction of bringing the audience into that madness.
The Wake in Fright production notes chart a set starting to resemble the social scenario it was trying to critique. Actor Chips Rafferty was apparently consuming thirty pints of beer a day on set and would fight crew members if they tried to trick him with nonalcoholic drinks. Repetitive, dangerous stunt work pushed sleep-deprived actors to the limits of their endurance.
The kangaroo-hunting sequence — in which John Grant is taken by the locals to shoot the animals for fun — is now infamous. The hunters were not actors and became increasingly drunk during filming. The crew ultimately orchestrated a power failure to end production on the scene. They claimed it had descended into “an orgy of killing.” It’s a telling description. In trying to capture something true about violence mixed with sexual threat, Wake in Fright flew a bit too close to the flame and replicated its own subject.
On the spectrum of glorification and critique of male violence, Wake in Fright doesn’t seem to know exactly where it sits. But the film endures precisely because it allows audiences to experience the fear of being taken to the dark side and changed forever. To mix metaphors, watching Wake in Fright is like peering through a keyhole at a car crash. You’re vulnerable peeking through, drawn to the carnage, disgusted both at yourself and what you can see. There is a strange delight in that mixture of feelings.
Wake in Fright has evolved from cult classic to national treasure in its home country. Fifty-five years after the film’s debut, Australian audiences may have finally developed a taste for seeing the ugliest parts of their national identity on screen.
Great Job Flick Ford & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
