Wake In Fright (aka
Outback) and Nicolas Roeg’s
Walkabout. Though directed by foreigners (Canadian and English, respectively), they were uniquely Australian stories that set the mold for much of what was to come.
And what came was that, by the decade’s end, such homegrown directors as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Fred Schepisi, and Philip Noyce were considered among the world’s leading emergent celluloid talents. While movies from Australia (barring the occasional international production shot there) were seldom seen abroad before 1970, by the 1980s they’d become widely exported and acclaimed.
A couple new features are very much in synch with the templates set by those two original “Australian New Wave” classics, with