His own drink, of course, is perfect.The scene is from “Wake in Fright,” a film directed by Ted Kotcheff, and released in 1971. Wake in Fright is a surreal tale about a British school teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond) who pursues one journey however a momentous turn of events finds John taking another – one of alcohol enthused mate ship, ruthless gambling, shameless blood shed and obscure sexuality all amongst an extreme Australian outback setting. He alights and wonders, without asking, about the town’s name, “wasn’t yabba Aboriginal for talk?” Cook repeatedly describes the Yabba as a “dead heart”. Bundanyabba and its citizens will forever haunt its readers. Wake in Fright was published in 1961, more than 50 years ago. They were, after all, only kangaroos.Joe and Dick each took a carcass, ripped open the belly, spilled out the intestines and sawed off the hindquarters, complete with the long muscular tails.Grant had never seen anything quite so sudden. It was an adaptation of a book Wake in Fright, by Kenneth Cook, filmed as The Outback. Tempted by the thought of buying his way out of debt and the outback itself, Grant gets sucked in.When he wakes the next day, Grant has enough cash left to afford some hair of the dog, but little more than that, and must devise some new way to get to Sydney. The restored print, completed in 2009, will screen this week at New York’s Film Forum.The film follows a few days in the life of John Grant, a refined young teacher from Sydney. At some point you may have to pass through.What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. Sulphide Street, advertised with nicely odorous symbolism when Grant steps off the train, is no invention, and Kotcheff drew from his own eventful experiences in the town.

What, then, took the bullet? His stopover in the intense and insanely proud mining town of Bundanyabba is supposed to be for a night, after which he’ll fly home, to embrace the comforts of a big city, the soul-cleansing sea, and an impossibly alluring girlfriend.Alas, “the Yabba” gets its claws into him. The semi-legal details of towns like Bundanyabba are a fact of history; nevertheless, the stunning gambling and bar settings in the film double as caverns of the underworld, scenes for a metaphysical wager. His summer plans to holiday in Sydney “where nature deposited the graces she so firmly withheld from the west” are spectacularly derailed in Bundanyabba when Grant bets everything on, as Kipling put it, “one turn of pitch and toss” and, far from proving his manhood, plummets into degradation.The nightmarish tension is harder to parse. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Maybe there’s a clue in the glib existential musings that end the book.

So, imagine how terrifying the prospect was in the sixties, when our interior was so much more remote and alien.John Grant is a mild mannered teacher working in a tiny speck of a town called Tiboonda. It was also made into an excellent 1971 film, which helped re-kick start the Australian film industry in the seventies and was unavailable for decades until a copy was found in Pittsburgh shipping container labeled “For Destruction”. The “Lest we forget” is said, and all instantly resume yakking, drinking, and playing the poker machines.Given everything above, it’s not much of a surprise that “Wake in Fright” wasn’t immediately welcomed at home (it enjoys cult status now). After a bad gambling bet, a schoolteacher is marooned in a town full of crazy, drunk, violent men who threaten to make him just as crazy, drunk, and violent. Worse, Grant knew it would be gone. The cringingly urbane Grant despises the isolated land, contrasting this “apology for a town” to erotic fantasies of Sydney, temperate and cool like his rich-girl crush in tennis whites.

Cold beer makes the unseemly affable, slakes a man’s mania for violence. I know the condescending urban comportment and the no-bullshit bloke retort intimately.

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