Tropical Darwin on Screen: Critiquing national values using urban frontier tropes in Charlie’s Country and Last Cab to Darwin.

Authors

  • Gemma Blackwood Charles Darwin University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3661

Keywords:

Film, Cinema, Darwin, Tropical North Australia, City, Imagninary

Abstract

Australia’s northern-most tropical city of Darwin has a strong presence in the domestic and international touristic imagination as a tropical escape destination – a small city poised on the edge of outstanding natural beauty – yet in national cinematic representations Darwin is often presented as a frontier zone, whether these tropes are pivoted around culture or nature. I would like to take up this idea of the city of Darwin as special and distinctive in the national imaginary that is discernible in recent Australian cinema, an idea that I show extends to the city’s representation in theatre and literature. This paper performs a close textual reading of the city’s recent representation in two high profile Australian feature films, Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2013) and Last Cab to Darwin (Jeremy Sims, 2015). These are films that employ compassionate, humanistic themes, each maintaining a strong focus on main characters who find themselves both marginalized and neglected within the broader mechanisms of Australian society: hence each film is simultaneously performing the secondary work of critiquing Australian culture. In both films, I show how the tropical city of Darwin operates as a space of difference, but unlike the contemporary tourism marketing that simplistically brands the region as a “site of desire”, here we find two unique critiques of Australian law and society that work to show the ethical frontiers of legislation and of human sovereignty.

Author Biography

Gemma Blackwood, Charles Darwin University

Dr Gemma Blackwood is Lecturer in Communication Studies in the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Society at Charles Darwin University. Her research is focussed on visual culture analysis, with particular interest in travel writing and cinema. Recently, she co-edited the book Motion Pictures: Travel ideals in Film (2016). She is currently researching representations of the outback in cinema and literature, which includes a major project on Uluru and the way that the summit climb has been imagined in colonial and post-colonial travel writing.

References

Aveyard, K., Moran, A. & Vieth, E. (2018). Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema (2nd ed.). Lanham, USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bauman, T. (2006). Aboriginal Darwin. A Guide to exploring important sites of the past & present. Canberra, AU: Aboriginal Studies Press.

“Big-budget film puts Bowen on the map” (2007). Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from: https://www.smh.com.au/news/queensland/bigbudget-film-puts-bowen-on-the-map/2007/06/07/1181089197279.html

Blashki, S. (2014). Charlie's country. Alternative Law Journal, 39(3), 204.

Bramstedt, K. (2015). Last Cab to Darwin. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 12(4), 725-726.

Byrne, M. (2016). The Outback Within: Journeys into the Australian Interior. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Carleton, S. (2008). Darwin as the Frontier Capital: Theatrical Depictions of City Space in the North. Australasian Drama Studies, (52), 52-68.

Collins, F. & Davis, T. (2004). Australian Cinema After Mabo. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

Creed, B. (2001). Tropical Malady: Film & the Question of the Uncanny Human-Animal. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 10, 131-140. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.10.0.2011

De Heer, R. (2014). Director’s Statement: The Story of Charlie’s Country by Rolf De Heer. Charlie’s Country Australian Press Kit, Vertigo Productions, 4-15. Retrieved from: https://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/downloads/charlies_country_australian_press_kit.pdf

Dewar, M. (1997). In Search of the ‘Never-Never’: Looking for Australia in Northern Territory Writing. Darwin, AU: Northern Territory University Press.

Dolgopolov, G. (2015). Odyssey across the Outback: Jeremy Sims' 'Last Cab to Darwin'. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 186, 68-73.

Herche, V. (2017). Reassessing Indigenous Self-Determination in Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country (2014). In Baehr, E. and Schmidt-HaberKamp, B. (eds) ‘And there’ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 228-242.

Huat, C. B. (2008). Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the special issue on cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 29, 1-7.

Lea, T. (2014). Darwin. Sydney, Australia: NewSouth Books.

Downloads

Published

2018-09-04

How to Cite

Blackwood, G. (2018). Tropical Darwin on Screen: Critiquing national values using urban frontier tropes in Charlie’s Country and Last Cab to Darwin. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3661

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2018): Special Issue: Tropical Imaginaries & Living Cities

Section

Articles

License

Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.

2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.

4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.

5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.