Wake In Fright (17 page)

But the first waves of heat which rolled up at him from the blistering road and beat down from the glaring haze of the sky dried up his trance and he became once more John Grant, responsible for himself.

Which is not, he thought, such a gravely important matter as one might suppose…

…The train had started again and was rocking through the night with renewed intensity as though anxious to make up for its lapse in stopping.

The singing began again; but there had been a change of mood now, and somebody had started playing a mouth organ, and as though shyly admitting for once the west’s great burden of unhappiness, they sang:

‘But hark there’s the wail of a dingo,

Watchful and weird; I must go,

For it tolls the death knell of a stockman

From the gloom of the scrub down below.’

Grant moved his body on the seat and plucked at his sweat-sodden clothes to detach them from his skin. He wondered how long he would be able to maintain this sense of satisfaction at being able to feel anything, even minor discomfort. Not for long, he thought, probably not for much longer than it would take the hair to completely cover the scar on his head so that he would not be constantly reminded how near he had come to never feeling anything again…

…He had been very conscious of that scar while he was in the hotel earlier that day, waiting for the train that was due in an hour’s time.

He leaned on the bar with his left elbow so that he could feel the scar by resting his head on his hand. In his right hand he held a glass of beer. The babble of voices formed a cocoon of sound around him and he felt isolated, which was how he wanted to feel just then.

He was absorbed in the taste of tobacco, the feel of the glass in his hand, the prosaic wonder of the solidity of the floorboards beneath his feet.

‘I will never, never get drunk again,’ he said softly, and added, ‘Except in good company.’

He looked around at the drinking men, and the sweating barmaid in the smoky fug of the bar.

A vivid joyousness quickened in him simply at being there, alive…

…The train stopped again and Grant stepped out on to the railway siding called Tiboonda Station.

He was the only passenger to alight and he waited on the platform until the train pulled away again. As it went he could hear the fading voices of the singers, still voicing the lament of the stockman:

‘Wrap me up in my stockwhip and blanket

And bury me deep down below,

Where the dingoes and crows won’t molest me,

In the shade where the coolibahs grow.’

And soon Grant was standing alone under the stars, the train a silent line of yellow squares growing smaller.

He stood looking up, dazed and exhilarated by the brilliant, wild placidity, the riotous order of the stars.

Then he thought, almost aloud:

I can see quite clearly the ingenuity whereby a man may be made mean or great by exactly the same circumstances.

I can see quite clearly that even if he chooses meanness the things he brings about can even then be welded into a pattern of sanity for him to take advantage of if he wishes.

‘What I can’t altogether see’—he turned his eyes from the stars to the blackness of the plains and back to the stars again—’what I can’t altogether see is why I should be permitted to be alive, and to know these things…’

He picked up his suitcases and began walking towards the patch of light where he knew Charlie the publican would be waiting, his curiosity about to be excited by the scar on Grant’s forehead.

‘…But I feel that I will probably find out sometime.’

When the film version of Kenneth Cook’s novel
Wake in Fright
opened in a limited number of Australian capital-city cinemas in the autumn of 1971, it foreshadowed the revival of local filmmaking after a drought that had lasted thirty years. Australia had pioneered the production of feature films (the one-hour plus
The Story of the Kelly Gang
was made here in 1906, six years before the first American feature-length films were released) and throughout the teens of the twentieth century audiences flocked to see local films. This situation gradually changed as producers in Hollywood consolidated an international star system, which has remained in place to this day, and American distributors began to control the world’s cinemas. Australian directors such as Raymond Longford and Franklyn Barrett, and, later, Charles Chauvel and Ken G. Hall, did manage to sustain a small local industry until World War II brought it to a virtual stop. Not a complete
stop though, because some dogged battlers, like Rupert Kathner and Cecil Holmes, struggled on making very low budget Australian films, but they were faced with the insurmountable odds of blocked access to major cinemas and government and public indifference.

The high-profile ‘Australian’ films made during this period weren’t Australian productions at all. Most of them, including
The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bush Christmas, The Shiralee, Smiley, The Siege of Pinchgut
and the 1957 version of
Robbery under Arms,
were British films, often shot in studios in the UK with Australia used only for the location work; others, including
Kangaroo, On the Beach
and
The Sundowners,
were mainstream Hollywood productions made on location here. A year before the arrival of
Wake in Fright,
British director Nicolas Roeg, using American funding, had made
Walkabout
in central Australia; it wasn’t strictly speaking an Australian film and though it was originally a box-office failure its reputation gradually grew.

A couple of years after
Wake in Fright
was published in 1961, the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey, who was then based in London, took an option on the film rights. In 1963, Losey had directed Dirk Bogarde in
The Servant,
which was a critical and commercial success, and he doubtless saw another powerful role for Bogarde as John Grant, Cook’s
schoolteacher protagonist. The film was never made and the option lapsed. It was picked up eventually by NLT, an Australian television production company run by Jack Neary and Channel Nine entertainer Bobby Limb (who had, for years, produced the popular show
The Sound of Music
— nothing to do with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical) with his wife, Dawn Lake. In the era before government support for film and television production, NLT formed a partnership with the American company Group W, a division of Westinghouse Broadcasting, to make feature films in Australia.The first NLT-Group W production was the mediocre
Squeeze a Flower
(1970), an attempt to cash in on the huge success of Michael Powell’s
They’re a Weird Mob,
made four years earlier, by featuring that film’s Italian star, Walter Chiari, in a comedy set in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The film was wanly directed by American television hack Marc Daniels and was a deserved failure.
Wake in Fright
became the second NLT-Group W production.

The screenplay was the work of Jamaican-born British writer Evan Jones, who had written four Joseph Losey films
(Eva, The Damned, King and Country
and
Modesty Blaise)
and who had also, significantly, scripted
Two Gentlemen Sharing
(1969), a British film about an inter-racial gay relationship directed by a Canadian, Ted Kotcheff. Jones’
Wake in Fright
screenplay is remarkable given the fact (for which I am indebted to Tony Buckley, the editor of
Wake in Fright)
that he had never been to Australia and indeed first visited the country in the 1980s.

Kotcheff, like many other Canadians and Australians during this period, had moved to Britain to work in the film and television industry and directed his first British feature in 1962. Although he later made the first Rambo feature,
First Blood
(1982), and the popular farce
Weekend at Bernie’s
(1989), Kotcheff has never made a film as uncompromisingly excellent as
Wake in Fright.

In his forthcoming autobiography, Tony Buckley suggests that Kotcheff was profoundly affected by his first visit to Broken Hill, the western New South Wales mining city that is the real-life equivalent of Cook’s Bundanyabba. Many of the details incorporated into Jones’ screenplay (such as the atmosphere of the RSL club) were witnessed firsthand by the Canadian. It’s often the case that foreign directors who make their first film in another country will include detail that might not occur to someone local. Among the superlative films which have benefitted from a foreigner’s eye are
Sweet Smell of Success
and
Midnight Cowboy
(both made by British directors in New York) and
The Servant
(an American director in London). There are countless other examples but
Wake in Fright
is one of the best; probably no Australian director in 1971 could have filmed such a bleak vision of life in an outback city.

And there’s no doubt that Kotcheff's film paints a grim picture of the menace lurking just beneath the surface of the Yabba. The ghastly hospitality which forces the stranger to keep drinking whether he wants to or not; the sexual frustration, as depicted by Sylvia Kay (Kotcheff's ex-wife) in one of the film’s strongest scenes; the very notion that a man who would prefer to have a conversation with a woman rather than swill beer with his drunken mates (as Gary Bond’s John Grant does) must be a schoolteacher or a queer. Above all, the nightmarish kangaroo hunt, brilliantly staged by Kotcheff, photographed by Brian West and edited by Buckley. This sequence puts conventional horror films to shame, and is in addition brilliantly acted by Jack Thompson and Peter Whittle as the pair of mindless thugs who initiate the carnage.

Bond is extremely effective as the wretched Grant, sinking ever deeper into a sweaty, alcoholic haze, as is Donald Pleasence as the confronting Doc. But the film’s greatest performance is that of Chips Rafferty, who had played a major role both as actor and producer in Australian cinema since Charles Chauvel cast him in
Forty Thousand Horsemen
in 1941. In his final film (he died in May 1971, just five weeks after
the film’s first press preview), Rafferty—who was born in Broken Hill—portrays the local police chief with tremendous subtlety, exuding mateship in the finest Australian tradition while hinting at the sinister side to his quietly overbearing character. He had never given a performance of such depth before this; which, again, is a tribute to Kotcheff's skills as a director.

Wake in Fright
is beautifully made; West’s cinematography allows us to feel the heat of this claustrophobic community with its incongruous Christmas decorations, and on every level the film succeeds in its vision of a hermetic world as seen through the horrified eyes of an outsider.That it received mixed reviews on its release is really no surprise, nor is it surprising that it was not a box-office success (except in France, where it played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival). But over the years its reputation has grown, and its re-release and first appearance on DVD should bring it a host of new admirers.

In the years following the release of
Wake in Fright,
government support for the Australian film industry became a fact of life and a new wave of local movies emerged:
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Breaker Morant, Newsfront, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, My Brilliant Career
and many others. In this impressive company,
Wake in Fright
stands tall.

For reading group notes visit
textclassics.com.au

The Commandant

Jessica Anderson

Introduced by Carmen Callil

Homesickness

Murray Bail

Introduced by Peter Conrad

Sydney Bridge Upside Down

David Ballantyne

Introduced by Kate De Goldi

A Difficult Young Man

Martin Boyd

Introduced by Sonya Hartnett

The Australian Ugliness

Robin Boyd

Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas

The Even More Complete

Book of Australian Verse

John Clarke

Introduced by John Clarke

Diary of a Bad Year

JM Coetzee

Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy

Wake in Fright

Kenneth Cook

Introduced by Peter Temple

The Dying Trade

Peter Corris

Introduced by Charles Waterstreet

They’re a Weird Mob

Nino Culotta

Introduced by Jacinta Tynan

Careful, He Might Hear You

Sumner Locke Elliott

Introduced by Robyn Nevin

Terra Australis

Matthew Flinders

Introduced by Tim Flannery

My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin

Introduced by Jennifer Byrne

Cosmo Cosmolino

Helen Garner

Introduced by Ramona Koval

Dark Places

Kate Grenville

Introduced by Louise Adler

The Watch Tower

Elizabeth Harrower

Introduced by Joan London

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus Hume

Introduced by Simon Caterson

The Glass Canoe

David Ireland

Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell

The Jerilderie Letter

Ned Kelly

Introduced by Alex McDermott

Bring Larks and Heroes

Thomas Keneally

Introduced by Geordie Williamson

Strine

Afferbeck Lauder

Introduced by John Clarke

Stiff

Shane Maloney

Introduced by Lindsay Tanner

The Middle Parts of Fortune

Frederic Manning

Introduced by Simon Caterson

The Scarecrow

Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Introduced by Craig Sherborne

The Dig Tree

Sarah Murgatroyd

Introduced by Geoffrey Blainey

The Plains

Gerald Murnane

Introduced by Wayne Macauley

The Fortunes of
Richard Mahony

Henry Handel Richardson

Introduced by Peter Craven

The Women in Black

Madeleine St John

Introduced by Bruce Beresford

An Iron Rose

Peter Temple

Introduced by Les Carlyon

1788

Watkin Tench

Introduced by Tim Flannery